Stuart Heritage Reassesses 1997 Hallmark Odyssey After Joyce Carol Oates Sparks Revival
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jul 27
Stuart Heritage Reassesses 1997 Hallmark Odyssey After Joyce Carol Oates Sparks Revival
2 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jul 27
Summary
Joyce Carol Oates’s enthusiastic tweets about the 1997 Hallmark Channel adaptation have pushed the two-part Odyssey back into circulation, prompting Stuart Heritage to revisit it against Christopher Nolan’s newer film.
Heritage says the 4-hour miniseries still stands out for its scale and cast — including Armand Assante, Greta Scacchi, Christopher Lee and Isabella Rossellini — but now looks unmistakably like 1990s television.
He argues the production’s biggest weakness is its handling of the gods, singling out Hermes’s green-screen flights and other effects as so awkward they help explain why Nolan largely stripped deities from his version.
That reassessment cuts against Oates’s praise for the Hallmark film’s Circe scene, Hades sequence and broader scope, and also against many 1997 reviews that dismissed it as clumsy, comic-bookish or outright awful.
Heritage’s verdict is that the older adaptation remains a strange, ambitious curiosity with more room for Homer than Nolan’s film, but far less intensity, spectacle and staying power.