The Odyssey Book vs. Movie Version
In our world of advanced technology, we love to watch movies more than we love to read. Sitting in front of a flat-screen TV while eating popcorn and drinking soda would sound much more appealing than reading a book by the fire at night while drinking a frappucino from Starbucks. Now, producers and directors would take successful and famous stories and adapt it into a movie. Sometimes, they would succeed, with examples being the Harry Potter series, which received mainly positive reviews from both critics and the audience. However, most of the time these people would unknowingly butcher the book based movie by taking out many important characters and events, with good examples being The Lightning Thief and Eragon. Then another example of a butchered book, or epic in this case, is The Odyssey, written by Homer. It tells the story of a king named Odysseus who is cursed by the Olympian gods to wander the land for 10 years and be unable to return to his beloved city called Ithaca. During his 10 years of wander, he lands on the island of the Cyclopes and unwittingly dooms most of his men to a fearsome Cyclops named Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon. In my opinion, I believe that the book version of Book IX in The Odyssey is better than the movie version. Every time we watch a movie based on a book we read, we expect it to be just as good as the book. In the movie version of Book IX in The Odyssey, Polyphemus eats only two men (technically we don’t see Antiphous get eaten, but it is implied that he is), contradicting the storyline which says that he ate six men before Odysseus could form a plan to escape. Next, Polyphemus does not look as intimidating as we thought him to be. Instead of seeing a shaggy giant at least 100 feet tall, the audience sees a hairless tall man with only one eye who can eat only one man before falling asleep. Then, we expected to see Odysseus taunting and angering Polyphemus with many insults and taunts, yet we see and hear only one taunt.