u/No_Durian9227

I didn’t really understand who the giants were while watching the movie, since the film doesn’t spend much time explaining them, so I looked it up afterwards.

They’re called the Laestrygonians, and in Homer’s Odyssey, they’re a race of cannibalistic giants ruled by King Antiphates.

When Odysseus’ men arrive in their land, they initially approach the king’s palace looking for hospitality. Instead, Antiphates immediately kills and eats one of them. The other Laestrygonians then attack the Greek fleet, throwing massive rocks from the cliffs and destroying almost every ship.

Odysseus’ own ship is the only one that escapes because he had cautiously left it outside the harbour. This is actually a huge moment in the original story: Odysseus goes from commanding an entire fleet to having only one ship left.

So they’re not really characters with a long backstory or an important mythology of their own. They appear very suddenly, completely destroy Odysseus’ fleet, and then disappear from the story just as quickly.

That probably explains why the scene feels slightly random in the movie. Without knowing the original poem, they can easily seem like unexplained giant warriors rather than one of the most disastrous encounters of Odysseus’ journey.

Am I the only one who felt the movie could have explained them a little more?