The Odyssey

The one word that's been floating around about this film that I actually agree with, now that I've seen it, is achievement. This is a massive achievement on a lot of levels. Based on my cursory knowledge of the original poem (I wasn't exactly paying attention in English class) the film does a genuinely successful job of conveying the gritty, human, realistic nature of Homer's text. That's the biggest takeaway for me: the way it humanizes everyone and everything in it, monsters included, with Odysseus at the center. I don't think I can really spoil the ending of one of the oldest known stories in existence, but the way Nolan and company redirect the meaning of that ending (into something that echoes what he pulled off with Oppenheimer) is staggering, and ultimately very poignant. Prescient, even. Eye-opening in a lot of ways. There's a running theme of Odysseus reflecting on the Battle of Troy, played with a kind of ambivalence throughout, until the end, when you realize it was never ambivalence at all. It was guilt. It was shame. That feeling carries through the film, especially after his visit to Hades, where he has to look at the faces of the men who died beside him because of decisions he made. That's the point where the film really hit its stride for me, thematically and morally. Back to that word achievement: this film looks nearly unlike anything else out there, or anything cinema has produced this century. It has a real tactile quality, which I think is both a feature and a bug, and I'll get to why later. Every trial Odysseus and his men face (the Cyclops, Circe turning the men into pigs, the island with Calypso, the Sirens, the dead in Hades) is rendered with such raw matter-of-factness that it defies the fairy-tale expectations we've been conditioned to bring to this story. This is not the fairy-tale Odyssey. It's bare bones and realistic, right down to the Circe transformation sequence, which is some of the most difficult-to-watch body horror I've seen in a Nolan film, maybe in any film. People in my theater were audibly wincing. A lot of it is achieved practically, in-camera, and that has to be commended. Beyond Odysseus's own physical and emotional journey, I found myself just as invested in the tension back home in Ithaca, Penelope and Telemachus. The cross-cutting between Odysseus's journey and Telemachus's own quest for answers (through his mother, through the bard's song, through his visit to Menelaus and Helen) is well balanced. And even though I claimed I never paid attention in English class, I found myself a step ahead of the film at every turn. Which was fun, honestly, like reliving nostalgia for a story I never really had a relationship with. The Odyssey has been adapted plenty of times, in plenty of ways (look at the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?) I can't say I was ever itching for a straight sword-and-sandals adaptation, but once Nolan announced it as his post-Oppenheimer project, it suddenly felt like the most obvious thing in the world. It's a grand story. An epic in the truest sense, maybe the original epic. I'm giving this four stars walking out of the theater, with the caveat that Nolan films tend to settle in me over time, and I expect this one will too. Now I’ll touch on where it falls short for me: There's a certain distance this film creates. I felt the emotional impact of nearly everything on screen, and there are genuinely grand, epic sequences one after another. This is a film I can recall clearly and distinctly, which isn't always true when walking out of a nearly three-hour movie. But something about the scale stayed a little too earthbound for my taste. I'm not sure what I was expecting (maybe some dabbling in that fairy-tale register) but the film almost never lifts the camera above eye level of the characters. Everything unfolds from Odysseus's perspective, or his men's, or Telemachus and Penelope's. It sometimes sits too close to the action. I think of classic epics like Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia, giant expanses, huge images, huge spaces. There's some of that here, but I wanted more of it. There's something humanizing about experiencing this from ground level, right next to Odysseus, but it costs the film some of that capital-E Epic quality. My other real gripe is technical: the fight choreography is pretty lackluster, which is true of most Nolan films whenever the action doesn't involve Joseph Gordon-Levitt fighting in a rotating hallway. A lot of the action sequences feel rough around the edges, like Odysseus's fight with the suitors at the end especially. It's hard to follow and frustrating to watch because I kept wanting Nolan to pull the camera back instead of keeping us in the weeds. Half the scene is in darkness, the other half out of focus, and you lose the sense of what's actually happening. It undercuts what should be a pivotal moment, a man fighting for his life, his family, his kingdom, and turns it into something closer to the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan. A strange, unexpected choice, and not one I'm happy with. That same instinct crops up elsewhere. Even the Battle of Troy feels a little too committed to that humanizing, ground-level approach. I know that's a strange thing to take issue with. But I connected more with the quieter scenes, like Telemachus and Penelope, Odysseus and Calypso, Odysseus and Circe, because those scenes allow for more control, and that control is what's missing from a lot of the bigger sequences. Even the Hades sequence, visually striking and powerful as it is, pivots right back into that handheld, Paul Greengrass–style chaos where you can't quite track what's happening. The casting generated a lot of conversation online, and I'm not going to add to that particular fire. What I'll say is that the performances are strong across the board, even if some stick out more than others. Not necessarily in a bad way, just noticeably. John Bernthal as Menelaus took me out of the film more than most. But this might be some of Matt Damon's finest work. Watching him turn off the wink-and-smirk charm he brings to nearly every role is genuinely interesting, especially as the film lets him drift into villain territory, at least from his men's perspective. Anne Hathaway probably delivers the most scene-stealing performance of the whole cast. I know people like to trash Tom Holland, but I think he's excellent, and not out of his depth at all, no matter what other people keep saying. He plays Telemachus with a youthful pathos that had me genuinely scared for him, especially during the assassination attempt at Athena's temple. Samantha Morton is similarly scene-stealing as Circe. Robert Pattinson as Antinous is devilish in all the best ways too; he’s also a standout. I wish we'd gotten more of Zendaya as Athena and Charlize Theron as Calypso. Though the female characters here, as in Homer's original, don't have a ton to do, and come across somewhat underwritten or one-note. That said, this is a story that's arguably meant to be the blueprint for this kind of storytelling going forward, one-note and all. I may come back and amend all of this. Like Oppenheimer, which took several days and a lot of conversations with other people before it really clicked for me, I don't expect The Odyssey to be any different. Nolan's other work never demanded that much of me before I could sit with it. It's interesting watching him in this stretch of his career, where he isn't trying to wrongfoot you or bend your mind the way he did in The Prestige, Inception, or Memento. He's telling straightforward, adult stories about complicated men. And I've followed his career unconditionally since middle school. Wherever he goes, I show up on day one. The most fascinating thread here is Odysseus's arc and the way the film recontextualizes his decisions, particularly the Trojan horse. And how it makes you reconsider a character, an archetype, I never really thought to question before. It's a smart, fascinating angle. And here is, I think, the real real subversion at the heart of Nolan's Odyssey: Homer's poem never actually asks Odysseus to atone for Troy. Cunning is his virtue, not his sin. The destruction of the city is his triumph, the thing his fame back on Ithaca is built on. Nolan takes that same act and treats it as the thing Odysseus has to spend the rest of the film answering for. It crystallizes in the Hades sequence, when he reaches Sinon, the soldier he deliberately cut out of the horse plan and sacrificed, left to sell the Trojans on the "gift" and die for it. Sinon tells him flatly he should be ashamed of his own cunning, and that's what sends Odysseus down the spiral that carries the rest of the film: even after he's told point-blank that every one of his men is fated to die and only he will reach Ithaca, he vows to defy the gods and bring them home anyway. That's not a hero accepting his glory. That's a man trying to buy back something he thinks he broke. It's hard not to read that against Oppenheimer, and I think that’s Nolan’s intention anyway. Both films end in the same place: a man who built something (a weapon, a war-winning trick shaped like a horse) forced to actually sit with what it cost the people on the other end of it. Oppenheimer ends with a man staring down the possibility that he's ignited something that will consume the world; The Odyssey ends with a man having to tell his own wife, plainly, what he did to Troy. Nolan even bakes the guilt into the film's visual grammar. Odysseus spends the whole movie being visited by Athena, played by Zendaya, seen by no one but him, and it's only in the final stretch that we learn she's taken the shape of a woman he watched get beheaded in the fall of Troy. The goddess who's been guiding him home this entire time has been wearing the face of someone his own deception got killed. That's about as clear as Nolan could make it: this isn't a hero's journey blessed by the gods. It's a man being haunted by what the gods let him get away with, so to speak. What you see is the guilt and self-alienation of a soldier who did things in war that violate his own ethics, and who can't “find his way home” even after he physically arrives there. So, all that said, I'm going to give this some time to marinate. For now: a stunning achievement with some genuinely glaring technical drawbacks, and a lot of movie to sit with before I can talk about it with any real clarity. But you can probably already tell, this has the juice to be one of Nolan’s best and one of the best of the year. EDIT: Oh yeah, and this movie is LOUD AS FUCK. Talk about full immersion. When they stabbed the cyclops' eye, and he started wailing, I thought my head was going to explode. Same with the storm that carries Odysseus' men out to sea. Deafening stuff (complimentary). I see a sound design Oscar in this film's future. 8.0/10