"Our age of bronze is collapsing."
My big takeaway from Nolan's Odyssey is that the ancient Greeks never thought to invent windows. Or paintings. Or art of any sort. At least three times, we visit a palace, a temple, and find it to be a great big cement room, very dark on the inside, lit only by torches and braziers (they haven't invented candles either). No sculptures, no frescos, no mosaics. Odysseus's palace looks much like Menelaus' palace looks much like a temple where Telemachus is ambushed and almost dies. Just a bunch of big blocky rooms that must get pretty stuffy, considering there are no windows. And brother, you'd better believe that if they don't have windows, they don't have skylights either. The budget for all those braziers and torches must be enormous.
Told in Nolan's now-signature fragmented structure... which made sense to liven up the semi-boring life of Oppenheimer, but here feels rambling... the movie progresses in montages rather than scenes. We rarely stay in a moment for any amount of time, instead flashing back to Odysseus buying a puppy
or taking the grown puppy on a hunt
or taking a break from the hunt to eat a sandwich
or packing that sandwich but forgetting to put coffee in his thermos
If you think that's annoying, well, that's every scene. We'll go from Odysseus fighting the Cyclops to Telemachus paying a visit to Menelaus to a flashback to the siege of Troy. The movie both assumes a baseline familiarity with the Odyssey and the Iliad for any of this to make sense, and hands out clunky exposition as the characters need their own society to be explained to them. At one point, Penelope needs Odysseus to explain the concept of sacrifice to her; wait, wouldn't she know?
Speaking of Penelope, she's abysmally characterized, yelling at her son in every scene they have together and getting an embarrassing girlboss moment where she cries "Empty throne? I've been sitting on this empty throne for twenty years!" Yeah, since you bring it up, lady, you've sucked at it. There are suitors everywhere and they're fucking the place up.
In fact, all of the female characters are faintly ridiculous. Helen has been maimed by Menelaus to pay her back for, you know, that whole Trojan War thing, but she also openly mocks him--you wonder why Menelaus, the asshole tyrant/abusive husband, doesn't get haul off and smack her one. Circe is turned into an arch-feminist who transforms Odysseus's men because they would've raped her; Odysseus doesn't overcome her so much as make puppy-dog eyes at her and go "Please? Please can I have my men back? Pretty please?" While Circe, who actually does rape Odysseus, isn't given a comeuppance--she's more characterized like the shaman in Widow's Bay, giving Odysseus lotus for years until he's 'ready' to stop being date-raped. How can you be less woke on rape than a 3000 year old poem?
Odysseus doesn't fare much better. As you might expect, Nolan characterizes him less as a daring hero and more of a Boomer full of manpain, which his adventures serve as therapy for. But he can't seem to decide what Odysseus's flaw actually is. Is it that he's too much of a dick, like when he pointlessly shoots the Cyclops after they've already overcome it? Or is he too much of a nice guy, like when he refuses to let all of his men die even though the gods have decreed it? Finally Nolan lands on him having PTSD, just like Ralph Fiennes' take in The Return, but he adds a risible version of the "aliens are really future humans" thing from Interstellar. Yes, Greece is an ahistorical, multiethnic empire full of Indians and Asians, but it's also in danger of collapsing from the Sea People. The attempted combination of anachronism and a foray into serious historical fiction is laughable.
I'm sure you've read the cope where the woefully miscast Helen of Troy and Sinon are only in the movie for a few minutes. But Odysseus' crew--who are in eighty percent of the thing--are as diverse as an eighties street gang and it's impossible to take seriously. And this is a movie that very, very much wants to be taken seriously.
Also, the Sinon character is super important to the narrative, to the point where Odysseus's final vengeance on Robert Pattinson revolves around him going "This is for Sinon!" And every time they bring up the character, you're reminded that this is the they/them character played by tiny, weird-looking "Elliot Page." It's like a version of Black Panther where T'Challa's dad is Gary Coleman.
Yeah, he wouldn't be in the movie that much, but try watching Killmonger going on about his dad being killed without snickering at the thought of Gary Coleman committing murder. I'm sorry, it makes the whole thing a joke.
Travis Scott is there too, playing a bard who supposedly sings about the Trojan War, but his 'performance' is just banging a stick and saying short, declarative sentences like "A man! A war! A thought! A plan!" Entertaining stuff.
That's really the problem in a nutshell. It's just not much fun. Troy, for all its faults, had a real cinematic scope and beautiful look. The actors, with their accents and their archaic language, felt like they were playing characters. You could buy that Eric Bana was the noble Hector or that Brad Pitt was the glorious Achilles.
Everyone in Odyssey... except for Robert Pattinson, who I'd be willing to bet decided to make his villain character a shitty little pussyboy with no direction at all from Nolan... is just there. Tom Holland's doing his usual Tom Holland performance. Ditto for Jon Bernthal. Ditto for Matt Damon. (And you KNOW Zendaya is just squinting like she always does.)
They emote some and look very serious, but you never buy that they're these ancient people in a world of gods and monsters, no matter how much they go on about "Zeus's law!" Between the modern accents and stupid-looking costumes, you would almost think that during the Pandemic, everyone decided to get together on Zoom and read through Homer's epic as a fun little time-waster, wearing whatever they could throw on that looked "classical."
Except that probably would've been better. At the very least, it wouldn't have cost three hundred million dollars.
Even Clash of the Titans... even the remake of Clash of the Titans... felt like it wanted to have fun with some colorful characters and gnarly monsters. Liam Neeson as Zeus. That's hard to argue with.
The Odyssey... ehhhhh. Nolan makes a go at putting some horror into Odysseus's encounter with the Cyclops, but it's hard to find it too scary when this Cyclops can't talk and pretty much goes to sleep immediately after doing anything.
After that, it's just variations on a theme. Odysseus goes somewhere, some of his crew get taken out by monsters, he feels bad about it, move on. The Giants are just there. The Sirens are barely seen. Scylla and Charybdis show up as a whirlpool and some tentacles that honestly look like shit. Like, literal shit. None of them make much of an impression. Nolan doesn't manage to make a meal out of any of this. The entire Odyssey in The Odyssey is honestly a bit of a slog.
Things liven up a little when Odysseus gets home, because it's hard to fuck up an action hero coming in and getting revenge on a bunch of assholes. Even there, though, the whole thing hinges on "Zeus's law!", the rule that you have to treat guests nicely, which here is shown to be pretty much the central tenet of Greek/Indian/black/Asian civilization.
But I guess Nolan figured that Odysseus killing all those assholes is a bit mean. If he were a real hero, he would just ask them to leave and let them go! So the Zeus's Law thing somehow ends up that he can't tell them to leave? (As explained, you wonder how this Zeus's Law shit isn't being abused by dickheads in every single kingdom of ancient Greece/India/Africa/Asia.) So Odysseus is in this fix where, even if he's king again, he can't get these guys to go except by killing them, and if he does that, then he's also going to be in trouble, because these suitors are rich guys with powerful families. (Wouldn't rich guys with powerful families have stuff to do besides hang out in Ithaca for years, trying to get Penelope to marry them? I guess not.)
So you think Odysseus... being freaking ODYSSEUS... is going to have some clever ruse to kill all these guys without getting in trouble for it, or at least get rid of them. No, not really. He just kills them all and goes "so long, suckers!" with Penelope. See, it's also come out that Greek/Indian (you get the idea) civilization is pretty much collapsing because the Trojan Horse broke Zeus's Law (you should take a shot every time Zeus's Law is said) and now no one is taking this Zeus's Law shit seriously, so now everyone is going to war with each other, and that's the Sea People. Because no one went to war before the Trojan War, I guess. And I thought Zeus's Law was bad because it let these suitors cause all these problems? No?
So, since civilization is over and the Dark Ages are starting (citation needed), Odysseus and Penelope are putting Tom Holland in charge and peacing out. Good luck with the collapse of civilization, kid! Have fun!
Very Boomer of them. They don't quite sail off on a cruise ship, but...
None of this is very entertaining and it's not very edifying either, since we're not getting any accurate portrayal of Homer's Odyssey, just Nolan's 'update' of it and a bunch of stock aesops on the horrors of war and how women are great even when they hold you prisoner and rape you. I'm kinda at a loss as to what this brings to the table. You won't see this and get any sort of accurate idea of how the Greeks visualized the world or what happened in Homer's Odyssey, and it's not much fun on its own merits.
It's three hours long. You sit there a long time. You see a bunch of stars who wanted to work with Nolan. I guess it's kinda fun that Nolan is big enough to have, like, the guy who played Barsad in The Dark Knight Rises show up as just a guy with no lines in Odysseus's crew. And you're like, hey, he was the main dude in The Collector and here he just, I don't know, picks up a pen or something. Sort of like when Chadwick Boseman showed up in Psych before he got famous, but since Nolan's a big deal, this is him showing up to pick up a pen after he got famous.
It's amusing. I don't know if it's really fun.
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