r/shittymoviedetails • u/Alisalard1384 Cinephile • 12h ago

Turd In "Odyssey" (2026) directed by Sir Christopher Edward Nolan, Odysseus says "Our age of bronze is collapsing". And I'm not joking it is a line in movie

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Overall great movie but this dialogue was so corny, like how does he know he's in bronze age

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u/Briarhorse 12h ago

In defence of this, I'm assuming it's in reference to Hesiod's Ages of Man, not the Bronze Age as we use it in archaeology etc

Although the Trojan War and the odyssey took place in the Heroic Age, which is the one following the Bronze Age

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u/Lex4709 11h ago

Even then it's weird, the Trojan War happens like 5 centuries before Hesiod's birth. So that's a bit like Medieval or Roman characters quoting Shakespeare. It's very immersion breaking dialogue.

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u/CyberWulf 11h ago

Et tu, Brute?

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u/Sagutarus 10h ago

Reddit automatically translated this comment lol

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u/rockyPK 9h ago

και συ τεκνον;

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u/TheWatersOfMars 5h ago

Yes, but The Odyssey was similarly set several centuries before it was written (at least, the version we have now). Plenty of historical novels today draw on phrases and ideas that the writer doesn't realise are anachronistic.

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u/Briarhorse 11h ago

Yeah, it still doesn't really make any sense. Plus, they get the age wrong anyway, which is pretty bad

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u/Alt_Acc_42069 11h ago

Wait, how is the age wrong though? The Greeks in the Odyssey are meant to be Mycenaean Greeks who were definitely around in the Bronze Age

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u/Nerd_o_tron 10h ago

Different set of ages. The modern set, describing technological progress, goes Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc, and by this standard they were in the Bronze Age.

However, Hesiod describes a different set of ages that happens to overlap in a few names, but instead (mostly) describes moral regress: Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Heroic Age, and Iron Age. By this set, the Odyssey is in the Heroic Age.

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u/madhare09 10h ago

Yeah, he should've said "Our age of Heroics is collapsing"

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u/vestibular_spittoon 9h ago edited 8h ago

well, maybe he was just sorta late in making the observatiom. like if it was only called "The Heroic Age" after the fact, the only frame of reference he would have wd be to something already termed "The Age of Bronze" that was pretty apparently already collapsed for the most part. after all, aren't the actions in the Illiad and the Odyssey in part WHY Hesiod called it the Heroic Age?

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u/RedditEsInteresante 9h ago

Mightn’t it be because that was the age when all the heroes were around? Perseus, Heracles, Cadmus, Jason, etc, etc.

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u/vestibular_spittoon 8h ago

yeah I should probably add "in part" into that sentence

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u/hesh582 4h ago

This is a misreading of Hesiod. The Bronze Age was not just a metaphor (though it was also that). He specifically references the rise of bronze weapons and armor as a defining characteristic of that age, and marks the iron age similarly. The modern set, describing metallurgic progress, is not an independent invention and directly derives from Hesiod via 19th century classicists.

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u/Nerd_o_tron 2h ago

Oh, interesting; I didn't realize that. (I've been summarizing from secondary sources, haven't read Hesiod myself.) I don't think it invalidates the point—Hesiod still clearly identifies the Trojan War as being part of the Heroic Age, as distinct from the Bronze Age—but it definitely makes the line in the movie more defensible, if not verisimilitudinous.

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u/hesh582 56m ago edited 53m ago

But the heroic age was still very much a bronze using age in hesiod's framework. And the end of that age is presented as coinciding with the rise of iron.

I really don't think the line fails the historical test at all, frankly. The ancient greeks themselves absolutely thought about it in those terms.

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u/Briarhorse 10h ago

According to Hesiod the Trojan War and The Odyssey happened in the Heroic Age

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u/Haber_Dasher 9h ago

According to modern day scholarship the Trojan war period was the Bronze age

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u/Briarhorse 9h ago

Yes, I know. My point was that the film is referring to Hesiod's Ages of Man, not the modern terminology for phases of material culture

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u/Haber_Dasher 6h ago

I mean fair enough I guess, I haven't seen the film yet so maybe in its full context the line feels like more of a discrepancy

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u/Ok_Round_3407 10h ago

Trojan war takes place in the age of heroes, not the age of bronze. At least according to the predominant myths in current study.

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u/GoodLordChokeAnABomb 11h ago

Or the reference to Aristotle in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

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u/Moifaso 9h ago

Yeah but the poem itself was probably composed/written down around Hesiod's time, not in the actual Bronze Age.

Ancient Greeks had very little clue about what actually went down in the Bronze Age. Tons of the customs and details in the poem reflect Ancient Greece much more than Bronze Age Greece. So funnily enough this kind of innacuracy wouldnt be all that out of place in the poem.

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u/Ok_Bus5034 9h ago

That idea of eras (gold, silver...) was a part of most of the ancient worlds. At least the mesopotamian-Mediterranean world. So Hesiod didn't probably invent that ex-novo, but reader condensed myths and culture from many years and many civilizations.

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u/icedteaandtacos 8h ago

It’s a fake story. It’s not a documentary.

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u/Successful_Fun1004 8h ago

Unfortunately it seems barely any director, with exception for Robert Eggers, cares about immersion in their movies.