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‘The Odyssey’: Everybody Using American Accents Is Definitely a Choice
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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As opposed to what? Should they all learn ancient Greek?
The article is kinda confused, people don't have a big issue with the accents, it's more that the things they say sound modern. Tom Holland saying "My dad's coming home" is weird, but shouting "LET'S GOOOOOO!!!" when leading an army completely took me out.
Go full Mel Gibson!
Wait, wait... no definitely not. Don't ever go full Mel Gibson.
Don't tell me what to do sugartits.
As opposed to at last speaking with some prose, this is based on a poem after all. Matt Daemon yelling "Let's goooo!" into battle is just silly.
Was Damon using his Boston accent in the movie? "This camel is wicked smahhhht"
"I don't like those apples, Will! What're we gonna do?!"
It's hunting season!
Well that's just like, your opinion, man.
Passion of the Christ had entered the chat
That’s a special case because it got all the religious people to watch it.
Apocalypto is a better case for a non-English big budget movie.
Mel Gibson is a great filmmaker even if he’s a bigoted trash heap of a human.
Apocalypto is actually what I want to use, but could not remember the spelling and all my searches brought up passion.
It was mentioned in the article.
its funny mel gibson, jim cavaziel made a series of the movie, i think it streams on some platforms. i think its called the chosen, ive been seeing that pop up in my feed like 1-2 years ago,
I wouldn't mind them hiring some kind of historian/linguist to train actors to speak in what an ancient Greek accent might have sounded like if they were speaking modern day English.
I don't remember the name of the movie, but I remember a similar concept with a historical film about the USA's founding.
We have no idea what ancient Greek sounded like, just as we have no idea how Latin is supposed to be pronounced. We only have written texts of that era, no audio recordings.
Anyone who claims to know what something "might have sounded like" is just making things up.
Not true. We can do a lot of linguistic analysis to get an idea of pronunciation: comparison with descendant and related languages, looking at poetry which carries extra information about pronunciation due to rhyme and metre.
That works when you go a few centuries back, but we're talking millennia here.
Wikipedia has a survey on the topic.
The further back you go, the less certain you can be, but the techniques are still applicable.
Of course we have some ideas about it, and of course there is a scientific method to generate those ideas. However, it's still a boat-load of assumptions, things that seem likely, and the best choices out of some very unstraightforward interpretations. Even the article you linked is full of those caveats. It's an educated guess, and while that's a lot better than having nothing to go on at all, it's still a guess.
I was taught both ancient Greek and Latin in school. While we were taught a certain pronunciation, it was immediately made clear that there were other pronunciations out there that were just as valid, and that other people who learned the same languages might pronounce things very differently. The pronunciation we used was seen as plausible at the very least, but we were warned that there was simply no way to be sure. As a result any plausible pronunciation was basically ruled as "correct".
If you go back to usage in a movie, there's certainly a method to use it in an internally consistent way. Pick one of the most-used pronunciations currently taught in schools, or just go with a modern Greek pronunciation (the alphabet is still largely the same) and make sure that everyone in the movie uses that pronunciation. But there's no way to be sure that that is historically correct in any way.
Well, you've gone from "we have no idea" to "we have some ideas" so I think my aim is achieved :)
Cheers.
Ideas are not knowledge. My central point was that we don't know.
Either we're using different words to describe the same thing, or you're downplaying the utility of linguistic techniques for producing a realistic work of fiction, and at this point I don't care to work out which. See ya.
That’s not true at all. We may not be 100% accurate, but there is lots of evidence of how Latin or ancient Greek may have been pronounced. The most obvious example is comparison to languages descended from them like Italian and modern Greek.
When an English language movie is set in the past in a non-English language country, formal British accents or mid-Atlantic accents are traditionally used. The more formal speech helps set the tone and creates an immersive feeling that this isn’t taking place in the current time and place or vernacular.
The Google AI summary actually does a decent job of citing the different reasons since this question has come up before. Do a search for something like “why do modern movies use English accents to invoke the past”.
Anyone remember Kevin Costner’s American accent in Robin Hood? Now it’s a whole movie of Costners!
Exceptionally bad example using an English folk hero.
Yes, I get what the tradition is. But the tradition is equally silly. Substitution of one farce for another.
Just because that's the farce they always go with doesn't make it better, it just makes it what people expect. People objecting because the movie did something different are the same people crying about the cookie cutter tactics of the movie industry are ruining art.
It's so specifically a farce that has been relentlessly mocked for as long as I've been alive at least.
That anyone is using the "wrong" incorrect accent is laughable.
Those are advantages of more formal speech. There are also advantages to using more contemporary speech - it can feel more accessible and relatable. There’s no one correct approach, it’s a matter of what tone best suits the film.