The 1997 TV film The Odyssey is based on the epic poem of the same name, and attempts to adapt the story into the medium of video. The film is effective in the way it portrays the text of The Odyssey. The movie adequately conveys the emotion in the events of the movie, but leaves out minor details. None of these details are vital, so a viewer who hasn’t read the text wouldn’t notice anything, but for someone who has read the text, the changes are a bit off-putting. However, most of these subtractions are not enough to derail the movie, as it still captures the main ideas of The Odyssey. The film’s many changes from the text effectively translate the story from text to screen, with some exceptions. The inclusion of the olive tree in the beginning …show more content…
It doesn’t make sense to include a scene with the olive tree at the beginning if its significance, one of the biggest points in the story, is removed. The movie has Penelope not questioning whether or not it’s Odysseus and just fainting from shock before hugging him. This ignores Penelope’s character development of becoming weary of trickery in favor of a sappy romantic ending for the audience. Another major textual change is how Melanthe is killed. In the text, the women who betrayed Odysseus are tortured before being hung, but the movie shows her dying in a much more dramatic way. In the movie, as the killing begins, Eurymakhos yells for Melanthe to open the doors so he can escape, and as she’s opening the door, Odysseus shoots an arrow going all the way through him and Melanthe, and they die skewered together. This gives her death poetic justice, in that she died because she betrayed Odysseus. If she hadn’t have opened the door, Eurymakhos would have been skewered against the door, but because she opened the door for him, she became vulnerable and was killed for her disloyalty. A third change from the text is Poseidon’s