A Trojan Horse Wrapped In Rags.
To sum up this review in one sentence: Lend your ear to Epic: The Musical, instead.
To preface: I've read the complete Odyssey, from Emily Wilson's translation.
Firstly I want to air out my general grievance; this was just not a good movie. The pacing, editing, acting and writing were all things that affected my enjoyment of the film.
I really tried to go into this movie with no expectations and just try to be open minded. But it's one, a bad faith adaptation and two, a movie about The Odyssey that doesn't want to be a movie about the Odyssey. I honestly don't know why Christopher Nolan decided to adapt this epic tale, because watching the movie, I didn't see any kind of love or respect for the work Homer put forth.
To get into the gristle of this review, I want to start by analysing why: Polyphemus, Charybdis, and Scylla, are treated like mindless monsters devoid of higher thinking and reason.
The biggest culprit of this character assassination is Polyphemus. I will state that I did like his design (the large skinny humanoid stature was genuinely frightening) but everything else about him just made me scratch my head: Polythemus doesn't speak to Odysseus or his crew, he doesn't even speak to his sheep. He also doesn't wear clothes again that could just be a choice of adaption. But there's no intelligent conversation between Odysseus and Polyphemus, in the original text, Polyphemus promises to eat 'Nobody' last, as a gift to his guest. In the text he's intelligent and caring toward his sheep, in the movie, he's a dumb, lumbering beast that only talks to his father (Posiedon) when he's blinded.
Odysseus may have robbed him of his eye, but Nolan robbed him of his being.
A similar issue I have with Scylla, is that all we see of her is her tentacles/mouths? That's it. We never see her human side, nor the raging dog heads snarling at her hips, the rest of her body is concealed in a cave on the mountain. Also the design of the tentacles was horrifically dull. Nolan, you have so much free will, so please actually use it and make these designs interesting. Scylla was the main section of the movie i was excited to see; her scene lasted 30 seconds and all we saw was gnashing tentacles the colour of slate.
On a shorter critique, Charybdis was just a whirlpool. Probably the worst design of the three.
But again, I don't understand why (in the movie) these characters are treated as monsters, one dimensional. They're mindless, driven by hunger and nothing else. It's just an incredibly cheap way to explore complex characters: label them as monsters.
Some more things I disliked was the complete absence of God's, (except Athena) I feel like Nolan wanted only realism in the film because there are literally no humanoid representations of the gods...not even Hermes! It's just ridiculous to base your adaption on the original text that saw these gods as real and material. Posiedon is a storm, that's it. Zeus? A lighting bolt. Even Athena felt loosely attached to the plot, she comes and goes like a feather in the wind. Barely keeping her relevance.
Again, I have to ask, what is the point of adapting a bombastic epic with gods, monsters, witches, if you have no interest in showing them?
Other smaller things that bothered me were: no olive tree bed...that part of the book is just nonexistent. Odysseus' mother doesn't appear in the Hades scene (she's literally so important in showing what he lost going to war) Menaleus and Helen's relationship (this could be up to debate, but their relationship in the film was quite volatile, but the relationship I saw between them in the translation I read was of a loving couple) also the scene with Argos and Odysseus just felt so rushed and ham fisted. Also there was no bag of winds, it honestly feels like Nolan hates the idea of magic and magical items...
The last larger thing that I disliked heavily, was the change of Calypso's relationship to Odysseus. In the original text, Odysseus is cognitive the entire seven years he spends with her:
'Of Odysseus there was no sign, since he sat wretched as ever on the shore, troubling his heart with tears and sighs and grief. There he could gaze out over the rolling waves, with streaming eyes.'
But in the movie, Calypso fed him Lotus' to permeate him with amnesia.
I'm sorry but I hate this change. In the original, Odysseus goes the shore every single day and openly weeps for his wife, son and home. Odysseus' sufferering is constant.
But the movie just let's him forget everything for the sake of delivering exposition.
In the original text he also openly weeps many times throughout the story. He's allowed to show emotion. But his film version, never does, and predominantly affixes a straight face through most of the scenes.
Which completely alters his charactr; also, Odysseus just feels so dumbed down in the film, he's supposed to be a trickster, and highly intelligent, we literally see none of this.
This film feels like it was made for people who don't want to read the Odyssey.
In conclusion, this is (in my opinion) the worst adaption of the Odyssey.
I'd recommend 'The Return' (2024) if anyones looking for a good movie adaption.
