11 Answers2025-07-08
Has anyone noticed the element of “nostos” or “homecoming” in films? Like in the “Odyssey” where all the characters search for home in different ways. Searchers is a western about an old veteran searching for his niece, but in the end he cannot return home. Finding Nemo is a story about a father searching for his son all over the ocean. It’s a nostos story for kids too.
The ‘Iliad’ is about ‘kleos’ or glory. Films such as ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’ look at the ‘glory’ of war through the eyes of young men searching for it, hoping to find it or to even survive. So rather than watch all of the movies about the actual Trojan War, you can look at films that are thematic cousins to ‘The Iliad’. The setting of Troy is not really that important in the poems of Homer. The specific stories he wrote about expressed a deeper human experience than just a couple of specific wars.
12 Answers2026-01-14
Man, I wish 'Replay' had a movie adaptation! Ken Grimwood's novel is such a mind-bending gem—it’s about a guy who keeps reliving his life over and over, each time trying to fix things. The book’s got this existential depth mixed with thriller vibes, and I always thought it’d make a killer film. Imagine the montages of different eras, the emotional rollercoaster of failed do-overs, and that haunting ending. But nope, no movie yet. Hollywood’s sleeping on it, though I could totally see someone like Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve crushing it. Maybe one day? Until then, the book’s a must-read for anyone who loves time loops with soul.
Funny thing is, 'Replay' feels like it inspired a ton of stuff—'Groundhog Day,' 'Russian Doll,' even 'The Midnight Library'—but nothing’s quite nailed that mix of desperation and wonder Grimwood did. The closest we got was maybe 'Source Code,' but even that’s more action-y. If you’re craving that 'what if I could redo my life?' itch, grab the book and mourn the adaptation that never was.
3 Answers2026-05-26
Movies about a Fae King? Not really. Some movies include the Tuatha Dé Danann, the mythic rulers of Celtic legend, in their stories. The Secret of Kells includes several of them, as fae adjacent characters. Another movie with a fae ruler is Hellboy II: The Golden Army. In this film Nuada, an elven prince, is a silver-tongued fae ruler who wants war. In Thor: The Dark World the dark elf Malekith tries to rule the world with cold, otherworldly tyranny.
In fact, there aren’t any definitive films about a single Fae King, largely because their wild and often unpredictable stories would not map easily onto a linear plot structure. Legendary Fae are extremely mercurial characters and perhaps cinema developers are fearful of the audiences’ inability to deal with them.
11 Answers2025-12-24
It’s probably for the best that there is no movie adaptation. If there were, the book’s famously ambiguous ending would be resolved one way. The whole debates over the plot, characters’ motives, and final line would be brought to a close and thrown into concrete. It’s half the fun of the book in the first place. The problems of the plot, the book’s biggest virtues, are left unsolved. Some questions are better left unanswered. It’s these very ambiguities which are the book’s most intriguing quality, and that’s been preserved by the lack of an adaptation. Movies are by their nature resolving. They offer closure where none was necessary.
9 Answers2025-07-20
Old practical effects from that ‘Clash of the Titans’ scene. Fall was done with wires, set against a painted backdrop. It looks ghastly today but so much credit is due to the people who made it. Trying to convey a myth to the screen before the advent of CGI was never going to be an easy thing to do. I suspect these days it would be churned out as some highly polished CGI sequence, all soulless and without any of the hand-made imperfections that somehow seemed to add character to the antiquated, rough attempts to translate myth to the screen.
7 Answers2025-05-19
I wonder if the anthro dragon design is a problem for the film. They’re not standard Western dragons or Eastern dragons. They’re bipedal with quite expressive faces and their wings function as additional arms at times. I think this look would be difficult to animate in a believable animal-like manner and achieve sufficient ferocity whilst still being expressive. It may be that test footage did not look quite right and therefore needed reworking and thus extra time.
There are countless other behind-the-scenes decisions that go into deciding whether or not to make a movie, and it’s all mostly a series of intricately interconnected choices regarding a movie’s design, tone, and technology. Perhaps one of the largest decisions made was that the core visual style for the film just wasn’t working, and therefore the entire production of the film stalled. This concept art could give a lot of insight into why the film has yet to be released.
12 Answers2026-07-29
Failures. There was a 1985 film The Warrior and the Princess or something like that? It’s been so long since I saw this film that I have not been able to remember the name of it. It was made on a low budget, badly dubbed, and focused on a muscleman hero who I believe was called Ajax in the film. These sort of B-movies are a sort of graveyard of Iliad-inspired failures. As cultural artifacts they are fascinating because they reveal that this story has been in the commercial psyche all along and has just been waiting to be exploited. Watching these films today shows how failed they were at attempting to bring the Iliad to the screen. Without the poetry, complex characters and tragedy of the original, all that is left is a simple revenge movie set in leather skirts. They serve as a contrast to the truly failed attempts at making these sorts of films that actually tried to make something of the material.
9 Answers2025-06-19
And what if the best way to realize this story was as a stage play? Minimal set, focus on the actors and the words, the boxes could be made of cardboard and paper. The changes of time could be indicated by a change of lighting and costumes. The intimate and philosophical character of the dialogue would in a theater be highlighted in all its aspects. The audience could even be given a small box or a piece of string when they arrive, and so become part of the play.
Every story doesn’t need to be a big film. Some stories will thrive in a much smaller, more imaginative space. The ideas in Passage can be had directly by an audience in a theater, without resorting to the paraphernalia of spectacle normally used in film to ease the burden of dialogue-heavy stories. The play could have a great off-Broadway run or even a run in London’s West End, and then later a more adventurous film version made of it. Sometimes scaling down is the best way to do justice to a story.
8 Answers2025-06-29
The idea of constant search for an adaptation belittles the medium itself. A book is more than a blueprint for a movie. It is a complete medium of entertainment in itself. The unique prose and unique pacing and unique inner thoughts of a novel is its medium. And that is art in itself. So asking ‘when is the movie going to come?’ is actually devaluing the novel as a medium of entertainment. It reduces the novel to being an incomplete medium until it is adapted to another medium. This way of thinking is perpetuated by a very visual culture. But that doesn’t mean that we have to think that way too. ‘Theo of Golden’ is a complete work of art as a novel series. And it doesn’t need a movie adaptation to be validated. It stands on its own merit and is measured by the amount of joy it brings to its readers and the community it has created. Let’s celebrate the fact that ‘Theo of Golden’ is a great book.
3 Answers2026-05-28
I’ve seen no movie adaptation of “21xx” and hope that 21xx is on the cusp of cult status. The movie could have such a great aesthetic to it (i.e. cybernetic body parts, etc. in a holographic world of advertisements. The wet rainy dark alleys are all here too). I wonder who could adapt 21xx to the big screen, possibly Denis Villeneuve (for his darker deconstructions) or the Wachowskis (to further mind-bend the movie). I hope Hollywood is aware of this soon so that some human can write an adaptation before the AI algorithm does.