James

I have no words to describe the film, only my reaction. I am in complete and utter shock. Even after watching twin peaks I am still left in a shock or a state of sadness. I think, it’ll take me a while to come around to watching this again.

Homer’s epic the Odyssey, visually presented in today’s medium by Christopher Nolan.  Nolan almost certainly deserves some praise for bringing an ancient story to life and presenting it to the public eye and leaving room for discussion opposed to being kept behind closed doors by the academics. The Odyssey itself contains some stunning visuals at times and an epic score composed by Ludwig Göransson and some stand out performances such as the likes of Benny Safdie, Matt Damon and Samantha Morton as well as some surprise performances from Tom Holland. However, this is where my praise ends. There were some controversies circulating before The Odyssey’s release based around having too much star power and over simplified dialogue. These controversies proved to be true. I personally like to believe there’s over simplified dialogue and then The Odyssey. I agree that the dialogue doesn’t have to be complex but at points in the film it was just lazy with clear words missing from a sentence and being presented as modern day linguistics when it clearly isn’t you can have modern day linguistics without missing whole words from a line. This particularly for me disturbed the rhythm of the film. This disturbance of the rhythm was further emphasised by the editing of the Odyssey which came off as choppy to me as well as disrupting the pace of the film entirely. This paired with the poorly written dialogue made the film annoying to follow. For long periods of time you get a lot of exposition (which sometimes I felt like it wasn’t needed) that set up the next scene, only for the next scene to be some kind of montage. This I feel defeats the entire purpose of the original scene. The Hollywood star power also brought the film down. At times Anne Hathaway just sounded like a complete New Yorker with a thick accent and Jon Bernthal was just Jon Bernthal to be honest. Travis Scott was also in this film. I feel like you’d know this because it was Travis Scott, if not for this very fact you probably wouldn’t care at all about his character. Zendeya for me just existed and didn’t deliver anything ground breaking which really dampened my mood considering the pr before the film talked about a perfect take. If these scenes with Zendeya were perfect I’d like to see the imperfect ones because it just felt like there was no spark. Lupita Nyong’o suffered the most from the bad writing. Her acting was incredible and you could really see it with her screen presence, but as soon as it came to dialogue it was just incredibly frustrating. These are my criticisms contained to the production side of the movie. Thematically speaking and speaking in relation to the source material… the movie was very lack lustre. We really went from having Oppenheimer to the Odyssey huh. Why is that Odysseus has these reflections and regrets about his actions yet at the same time also doesn’t care at all about his actions and what happens to his men. Also the fact that Odysseus is a cunning character was completely erased and this version of him seems more barbaric than heroic despite the Odyssey removing Odysseus barbaric traits from the Iliad. This just very much defeated the purpose of Odysseus’ character whom committed heroic acts despite his massive flaws. Obviously what happened in Iliad would be too graphic for a Hollywood blockbuster but here he isn’t really doing anything but contradicting himself. Any momentum the movie built up thematically as well was instantly shot down by a stupid action sequence that served no purpose. As for all the female characters in the movie? Aside from Penelope the rest of them really didn’t do much compared to the Iliad. I feel like we would’ve seen more if we had focused less on Telemachus. This brings me to the point where the movie felt more like a movie about Telemachus as a character than it ever did about Odysseus himself. Whilst there were complaints about the Odyssey not being faithful to Ancient Greek history regarding armour and depiction of temples… on the one hand I’d disagree because Agamemnon aura farming was needed but on the other hand these temples were whack and my biggest criticism is the myth in this film. Athena was just Zendeya in cloth to be honest which just made it very underwhelming because why give Agamemnon so much aura when he was kind of a bum anyway when Athena the literal goddess of wisdom deserves that aura regardless. Then the emphasis on practical effects very much limited the story such as the Cyclops (which just looked like a giant blob)and Scylla (which looked like sock puppets).  These things really held the Odyssey back from being a good movie. Then again does it really have to? It is after all just another auteur driven blockbuster made for the zeitgeist.