A message to Hollywood screenwriters: you don’t need to make up any stories with great heroes, it’s already been done for you, and it was done several millennia ago by big names such as Hesiod and Ovid.
However, your track record in putting these great stories on the big screen has proven spotty, at best. I know that the Greek myths have bee told and re-told, or “re-imagined”, as some of you like to say, many times. The old characters are pretty much unrecognizeable by now – Homer would scratch his head reading all the scripts claiming to be “originating from Greek Myth”.
There has been a standout or two, namely in the way Zeus has been presented at the movies. Laurence Olivier in 1981′s “Clash of the Titans” was great fun to watch – he was both regal in hs gestures, and annoyed with his women. In general, Olivier plays him like a befuddled patriarch who has sort of lost it a little – just like the Zeus of yore!
Liam Neeson, in the remake of this (ahem), “classic”, is conflicted and confused, but still delivers his “Release the Kraken!” line with olympian gravitas. In other words, just like Zeus.