I seem to have a habit of reviewing Christopher Nolan movies so I can hardly not cover The Odyssey. I'll keep this one spoiler-free.
In some ways this is essentially Project Hail Mary but in space. That is, it's definitely excellent – outstanding, even – but I don't think it's going to "change cinema forever" or anything as hyperbolic as many reviews make out. Or perhaps, Dune. It's certainly a cinematic feast and an absolute spectacle, and possibly the best version we'll ever get. Perfect ? No. Thoroughly enjoyable ? Absolutely. An easy 9/10 from me.
The Dune comparison also holds up in its sheer physicality. Things are intense, and thankfully Nolan seems now to be well out of his "let's make everything deliberately inaudible" phase. In fact, the screams of the Cyclops might well be the best audio effect I've ever heard. I'm convinced that some of the scenes, especially the storm(s) at sea, are actually louder in the cinema than they would be in reality, but the intensity is used very deliberately and selectively. I don't think I ever had any difficulties hearing anything.
The visual spectacle is equally compelling. Again, Nolan appears to have gotten over his "CGI is worse than Hitler" pretentious attitude and uses it sensibly and judiciously, where practical effects just wouldn't work. It looks, sounds, and feels stunning from start to finish. The creepy design of the Cyclops and the monstrous nature of Scylla are particularly well done : the Cyclops looks far more like a creature than an overgrown one-eyed man, while Scylla looks almost like an alien animal, something other-worldly. These are not ordinary mortal beings ramped up to 11. Nolan may have minimised the gods, but he doesn't hold back on supernatural : similarly, Circe's transformation of the crew into pigs is downright nasty. This is a scene that's more visceral and earthy than I would have expected from someone I associate with perfect cinematic cleanliness. It works brilliantly.
About the only other thing I would mention visually is the oddly contrasting aesthetics. Odysseus' palace looks interestingly archaic and pagan inside, dim and gloomy and lit by dark flame, but with a staircase that looks like something you'd more associate with something found in the home of an ultra-minimalist serial killer. Weirder yet is the palace's positively ruinous exterior. This isn't unique either : Athena's temple also has an interesting primitive vibe (as does Troy), but with a rather strange look as though nobody could afford to hire a cleaner or do any routine maintenance. Circe's island reminded me more of Tintagel than the Mediterranean, which was a little jarring*. And Agamemnon looks a bit like a scary robot while Odysseus' crew wear simpler but anachronistic armour – even when they're just rowing a boat.
* It was actually filmed in Scotland so I wasn't too far off.
It does work overall though. The palace looks like a palace, the temple looks like a temple, Agamemnon is clearly the leader even without saying a word, and Odysseus' crew are clearly a band of warriors. It's simple, iconic, and immediately clear to the viewer what's going on.
The storytelling is where it shines. Nolan's use of flashbacks to fill in the essential details of the Trojan War is carefully controlled, follows the overall structure of the poem, and fills in relevant similarities and necessary parts of the narrative exactly when needed. The moral aspects come through clearly without being overwhelming*. Nolan's choice of which parts to emphasise and which to discard feels like the most balanced approach possible.
* Though, I would say that its needs to reduce the mentions of both "Zeus' Law" and the "Sea Peoples" by at least a factor of five. Honestly if you make a drinking game out of either of these, you'll be dead by the end of the film.
Nolan does make some deviations from the poem, but I think he does so in a self-consistent way that doesn't undermine the source material. Whereas the original Menelaus and Helen live happily ever after, here they're at odds. Menelaus is a dominant masculine archetype, but Helen isn't afraid to push back. At the same time, Menelaus clearly has massive respect for Odysseus' cleverness that lends him some interesting depth. He's a brute, but not a villain... though he does look disconcertingly like Andrew Tate.
The Penelope/Telemachus dynamic is handled similarly well. Penelope is clearly torn by competing forces : wishing her husband had never left, desperate for his return both for selfless love and a purely pragmatic desire for security, wanting to do the best for her son but not yet ready for him to assume his father's throne Telemachus would have been easy to make into an annoying Wesley Crusher-type git, but to his great credit, Tom Holland manages to avoid this.
As for Odysseus himself, I think Matt Damon has become a fine actor. He takes a highly understated approach and I would actually have liked a bit more direct emotion from time to time : he could do with getting properly angry and (especially) distraught at least once or twice. There's a particularly poignant scene in the poem where Odysseus breaks down and weeps at memories of the war that I think would definitely have been a useful addition. At the same time, his massive PTSD comes through in other ways, and I think Matt Damon largely succeeds in giving the character latent tension rather than merely not bothering to act in a more thespian fashion.
Practically every other objection I have falls firmly into the "would be nice to have but not necessary" category as well. I like the "Nobody" joke with the Cyclops, the shade of Achilles lamenting his fate in the afterlife, Athena going in disguise as a man... none of these really need to be in the movie though. Excising these, in my opinion, allows Nolan to keep focus on the tale he wants to tell, without omitting or changing any of the key themes of the original.
Finally, I have to mention classicist and translator Emily Wilson's notorious and scathing criticism. It's a worth a read, because it brilliantly highlights exactly those key themes in a way that's better than I could have done. It's also a pile of garbage. Among many, many other things, Wilson is oddly fixated on :
- The colour of the sea not being purple
- The lack of time spent watching Odysseus building a boat
- Christopher Nolan having some sort of drowning fetish (seriously, which Nolan films has she been watching ??)
- Odysseus not being horny enough
- The movie somehow being a veiled criticism of Brexit and the War on Terror
- Odysseus spending too much time worrying about not telling Sinon he was going to die
- Lack of exposition / too much exposition / unclear motivations (even when the characters directly state why they're doing things, which in my view helps provide explanations Homer never did but should have done)
- The supposed lack of internal moral consistency, despite the fact that this is clearly bollocks.
This last particularly irked me because it's even more nonsensical than the rest of the post. Wilson picks up on many moral points that would probably have taken me a lot longer to draw out, but she gets them all catastrophically wrong. Being laced with militant feminism – she seems to hate all the female characters because.... well I don't really know why at all – doesn't help, but the way she seems to get everything completely backwards is damned odd.
The law of hospitality is only the most egregious example. This is a recurring theme in both poem and movie, with respecting hospitality to strangers being literally sacred. Admittedly, in the movie, the reason give is rather blunt and transactional : that guests might be gods in disguise. This is morally uninteresting but understandably simplified for the sake of a movie, but what's handled really well is the use and abuse of the law. This kind of law only works when enacted respectfully, when both sides understand the limits to which it should be used. Its wanton misuse by the suitors leaves Odysseus with no choice but to disregard it, leading to calamity and even the ruin of civilisation.
Like royal power, sometimes the whole point of giving authority is to deny its use : either entirely, or only to limit how far it's actually applied or restrict who gets its. Holding back, showing restraint, sometimes leads to more power rather than less. And with the law based on the authority of the gods, when it fails – when it's revealed as ineffectual – it can't be mended. The only alternative is an entirely new order.
My final points connect to this in a somewhat convoluted manner. Weirdly, Wilson laments that the movie is soaked in spectacle and there's always some loud exciting thing going on. This is a blatantly false claim, as there's plenty of brooding silences and quieter scenes that lend all the more impact to the noisy bits. Complaining there's too much happening here is surely a case of complaining there are too many notes. But even worse, this deeply flawed criticism misses the point that Odysseus goes through all of this, and so the viewer experiences all this intensity, as part of a journey of self-discovery. He has to overcome the external challenges, to be pushed to the very limits of endurance, before he can confront his own doubts and his own world view.
Yes, obviously that's all a horrible cliché, but this is literally the first such tale in Western literature, so it doesn't count.
The movie is explicit, and I think rightly so, that Odysseus' voyage away from Circe on a tiny raft into the turbulent sea is quite different to his earlier heroics, a leap of faith that tests him as never before. We don't need to hear some internal monologue to get this. We, the audience, can be rightly expected to fill in these kinds of gaps for ourselves; likewise, while I think some egregious violence in the sack of Troy would have helped explain Odysseus' inner torment, it isn't necessary. Wilson, on the other hand, seems to want the exact inverse of what makes the movie a success : she wants more exposition where none is actually needed and less in the (few) places where it's too much.
Anyway, for me it's a massive hit. It has definite re-watching value, as befits one of the world's oldest stories. There will be surely be more Odyssey adaptations in the future, but this one is likely to set the benchmark for decades to come.
