I’m not usually one for classic film.  Even when they’re remastered and such, the sound still comes through poorly, the film itself often looks grainy and gritty, the special effects are a joke by even today’s standards, and the dialogue has this weird tendency to be pompous and overblown.

So when I sat down to watch Ulysses, now remastered from Lions Gate, I found a lot of the problems I expected.  But I also found some surprisingly great things here.

Ulysses is based on the Homer poem The Odyssey, itself about the legendary journey of Ulysses as he heads back to Ithaca following the sack of Troy.  On his long, LONG, way back, he’ll face off against witches, a cyclops, and plenty more, as he tries to get home before his wife remarries…against her will

And yes, all the problems I expected were here.  Lots of pops and hisses from the audio track, as though I were listening to an old record instead of digital playback.  Washed out colors, poorly synced dialogue tracks, the works.  Everything I expected to be wrong here was.

And yet, I also got a deep and masterful epic based on some of the greatest literature ever placed on the earth.  Sometimes, it’s true, that great gifts can come in horrible wrappings…this is one of those times.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives it a six out of ten–a nine out of ten for plot, and a three out of ten for presentation.  A great story with so many technical problems as to be badly obscured, Ulysses was a good watch, once you got past the sheer number of troubles in the playback.