I saw it a few days ago and have been mulling on it.
No, it wasn’t histroically accurate. That’s basically fine but I wish it had instead leaned into the stylization more. I was mostly underwhelmed with the way everyone was styled. Little cohesion and few interesting choices. I loved Helen and Clytemnestra but that was about it. Everyone else looked… unimpressive. And Darth Vader Agamemnon just looked goofy. Give everyone the same level of drama! Choose one!
I CANNOT take Tom Holland seriously. I just can’t. I can barely take Zendaya seriously. And I usually like Matt Damon and his performance was fine but I felt like I was unable to suspend my disbelief that I was just looking at Matt Damon In A Fake Beard. Anne Hathaway was fine but I didn’t like how she played Penelope, but it wasn’t entirely her fault. Lupita Nyong’o was great but barely there, Elliot Page was great and a surprisingly complex character, and Robert Pattinson was a FANTASTIC evil suitor.
The spectacle was spectacular but went on too long. Scylla was cool. I appreciated Eurylochus. I thought it was annoying rather than clever how they teased that Mentor was Athena without confirming it. The writing choices for Circe were okay but for Calypso and Penelope were deeply weird and I was not impressed with how they were portrayed. The women definitely got shafted. Calypso had nothing going on with her, no desires of her own, and Nolan couldn’t seem to decide what Penelope wanted. The one interesting bit was Odysseus not admitting his identity to Penelope because he was ashamed of who he had become at Troy, and Penelope’s bow challenge was challenging the man she knew was Odysseus to step forward and prove it, and the tension came from wondering whether he would step up and Be Odysseus for her again—something that was, in my opinion, done better and with more interiority in The Return.
But now for the big one: I actually really liked that Nolan decided to make it about how our age of bronze is collapsing.
Nolan’s The Odyssey falls pretty squarely in @clonerightsagenda’s “Are We The Baddies” genre. Everyone adapting The Odyssey makes a choice of what theme to use to tie everything together, because the story as it exists is very hard to adapt to screen. We the audience want to see the famous episodes—the cyclops, the lotus-eaters, Circe and the men-into-pigs, the underworld, the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. In the book itself, this all takes place in the flashback in the middle, bracketed by many chapters of Telemachus bopping around in Sparta and Pylos and Odysseus in Nausicaa’a hall and then coming home to Ithaca. The middle bits of his adventures can feel pretty random! And then this happens, and then this happens, and then another fucking thing happens. Nolan’s theme that ties them together, then, is actually clever: he posits the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy as irrevocably destroying xenia, a spiritual destruction of their whole moral world. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Everyone they meet is a poor guest or a poor host. Killing Troy killed xenia and killed their world. Their age of bronze is collapsing and Odysseus knows it’s because of what he did to the moral fabric of the universe. I thought this was both a good way to tie together everything in a thematic through-line, and something that very obviously speaks to the politics of today. Our American empire destroyed the capacity for world peace with the shit we do.
Now, the effect would have been better if they would stop straight-up saying it like we’re stupid. Show! Don’t tell! I get it! You do not need to say “our age of bronze is collapsing”! That immediately makes me take the theme you’re building less seriously!
But as a thematic choice, I thought it worked and was a well-constructed one. It’s a theme that may be overdone—oh, boo hoo, the sad imperial soldier comes home with trauma from the violence he inflicted on Someone Else (over in Asia)—but it’s also a condemnation of how this kind of cruel and opportunistic imperial violence ruins everything, and you don’t even get anything out of it. Everything is just worse now! The world is no longer a place you can expect to be safe or follow the rules. Xenia is dead and we killed it and are reaping the consequences.
