Shadowflame

This is by far the longest review I have ever written for Letterboxd, and for this I apologize, but as a classicist I wanted to be thorough and thoughtful with this one. I’ve dedicated my entire adult life to the study of Greek and Roman antiquity and how that antiquity is represented in the modern world. As an instructor who works with undergrads, I think it’s extremely important to be intimately aware of those artifacts of reception that will serve as major points of access for people into the world of Classics, and Nolan’s Odyssey will no doubt be one of those for years to come; just as we have been answering boneheaded questions about 300 and dealing with that movie’s fallout for the last 20 years, so too will the film bros of the next 20 years make us talk about the good and bad of Nolan’s Odyssey (I promise I do have some good and complimentary things to say in all this).

To get the great bugaboo out of the way, I have little to say about the film’s general lack of interest in historical accuracy (insofar as the term even applies) that has not already been said. This is in part because I’m a philologist and my expertise is mostly literary rather than material; I leave detailed analysis of the baffling costume design and strangely distressed props to my colleagues in archaeology and art history, though I will have a few things to say here and there as they pertain to other elements of the film. Also, accuracy isn’t everything when it comes to adaptation and some of the creative liberties that were taken clearly had a deliberate skopos in the context of the film (even if I disagree with the skopos in question). One defense that I’ve seen of these inaccuracies—namely that this is a fantasy story and so accuracy doesn’t matter—misses that this is not in fact a fantasy. It’s an epic. Epic and fantasy are two distinct genres stemming from distinct cultural contexts and traditions. They are each bound by their own generic conventions and constraints; the role that epic, especially Homeric epic, plays in ancient Greek society is simply not the role that fantasy plays in ours, and conflating them is at best deeply ignorant. I think it’s important to address Nolan’s failure to present a true picture of his subject culture, or even a cohesive and consistent impressionism of his subject culture, especially since he is a white Englishman using that culture to make broad, sweeping statements about the grandeur of Western Civilization (a phrase and mode of thought that I fucking detest).

The point of cultural inaccuracy that I actually want to spend time on is what Nolan calls “Zeus’s Law.” Zeus’s Law (which is not a meaningful phrase—see also the film’s bizarrely Christian use of “forgiveness” and “faith,” which are simply not concepts compatible with the religion of the text) is standing in for xenia, a custom and practice of hospitality and reciprocity between a guest and their host. I get the sense that Nolan has decided that modern audiences, being stupid, could not possibly handle Hearing a Foreign Word and so repackaged the idea for us in a punchy, ominous phrase all while not really understanding what xenia means or entails; near as I can figure, he’s content to leave it at “Be excellent to each other…and party on, dudes.” The reciprocity of hospitality is an important theme in the poem, but Nolan seems a little unsure as to how or why it applies to the epic’s various episodes, misconstruing it as some spooky, pagan version of the Golden Rule. 

Indeed—and this is my main problem with the whole film—Christopher Nolan seems entirely uninterested in the text that he’s adapting. Which is very interesting, considering that he’s done the Odyssey a few times now! He’s made large parts of his career all about the Odyssey, and now that he’s doing an actual Odyssey, he doesn’t seem to care. Rather than investigate the core themes of the poem, he has abandoned most of them and substituted his own, but even these are not very well explored. He’s ultimately made the text about Western Civilization. The poem is partly about the closing of the heroic age, and so in this sense it kinda works, but overall it feels very much like he’s just handwringing about the loss of greatness past. His weird gesturing towards the Sea Peoples as a major force of civilizational decay, a dated theory that has no bearing on the historical reality of the Bronze Age collapse, might have been very interesting if it had been more consciously about the ways that powerful societies (say, the British Empire or the USA) turn inward and cannibalize their own people in the pursuit of dominance, but instead it’s about the loss of a previous civilized identity to barbarism, which infected us somewhere in our journeys in the East.

To escape their infection and reclaim their civilized selves, Odysseus and his people must escape westward. The prophecy of Odysseus’ final voyage becomes all about honoring his men, an action that will restore him to his prior self and absolve him (again with very Christian vibes) of his guilt for everything that he did while away from home. There’s a sense that he is going to have a hard reset, both of himself and of society, the latter of which is imperiled in the old world and needs to be rediscovered in the new one. This is just American manifest destiny: because our journeys to the East corrupted us, we will expand the frontiers of the West, exploring and bringing with us the light of literacy and the Old Ways (oh, excuse me, Zeus’s Law). And all of this is slammed into our faces over and over again because Nolan doesn’t trust his audience.

Which leads me to my hottest take about the whole movie: the movie Christopher Nolan actually wanted to make was the Aeneid. The Aeneid already has all of the themes and political ideas that Nolan shoehorned into the Odyssey. Worry about the collapse of civilized society? Check. Hero concerned with devotion and piety? Check. Desire to establish an all new and improved Western Civilization? Check. Focus on horror and the eschatology of the sack of Troy (a sack that does not get shown in Homer)? Check. Like my dude. You wanted to make the Aeneid. And I know American audiences don’t know the Aeneid the way they do the Odyssey, but I feel like at this point, you’re Christopher Nolan and it doesn’t matter, you can make any old thing you like and every white man in the world (who let’s be honest, remains the only audience you care about) will pay to see it in your six different formats. This is just cowardly.

Nolan is also fundamentally disinterested in Odysseus as he is presented in the epic. We lose so much of his craftiness, complete with Travis Scott’s bard completely skipping over the word πολύτροπος. We lose his cruelty, his arrogance, his weepiness, his horniness. We have here a perfect stolid American war hero, who feels soooooo bad about the things he did in Vietnam I mean Iraq I mean Troy you guys. He’s morally and physically clean but also tortured by his guilt. The epic and the ancients understood Odysseus as being kind of a piece of shit, but Nolan needs him to be likeable and so he ditches the original and substitutes in an entirely different guy who’s just trying really hard to be a Good Man (which is, of course, a universally understood and legible category of person regardless of the time, place, or cultural context). And it’s not even that Matt Damon is a bad Odysseus! He was good! He played his character really well (as did the majority of the cast). But that character doesn’t resemble Homer’s Odysseus in any meaningful way.

But you know what, Nolan isn’t even interested in the moral quality of the man he’s made up to be Odysseus. Like everyone else in the script, his moral nuance has been so flattened as to be a caricature of a hero, just in the same way that Darth Vadermemnon has been flattened into an inhuman monster, something that’s not a person. But we never really explore Agamemnon’s iniquities, or really make the connections of “What does it mean that these men are following this guy? What does it tell us about Odysseus that he held high position in that campaign? What resonance does the sacrifice of Iphigenia have with anything that Odysseus does or experiences?” For whatever reason, we just aren’t interested in that. 

This Odysseus has all the moral complexity of a rock, but Nolan clearly wants us to think the opposite. This is clear from the fact that the film really wants to be about the horrors of war and the atrocities that people inflict upon each other. And yet Nolan shies away from all of it. The violence is mostly bloodless and there is practically no gore—we don’t get to see the Cyclops’ blinding, the beheading of Athena*, the injuries sustained by any party in either the war or the slaughter of the suitors. This could have been cool if it had been about how Odysseus lies, but since Nolan’s Odysseus is a reliable narrator, we have to take the film at its very clean and tidy word. Nolan wants to gesture toward horror, but fails to take it all the way. The war itself does not show any of the atrocities that Odysseus and the epics both gesture toward. There is no rape, no slaughter of children. The Greeks (especially Odysseus!) are not shown taking slaves or war prizes of any kind from Troy. They are distanced from the barbarism, even though Nolan’s Odysseus seems to think that they aren’t. It feels kind of insane to be saying “damn this movie needed more rape” but if your movie is going to be haunted by sexual violence, and if you’re going to make it all about reconciling yourself with the horrible things you and your men have done, there needs to be a sense that it is a real thing that can happen in your world. It just makes it look like you either (A) want to talk about rape but are scared to do it, (B) think your audience is inept and can’t handle the subject matter, or (C) are yourself inept and don’t actually care to put the effort in. And there were missed opportunities everywhere to get into the horror and foulness of war! Show us the corpses and the piss and the shit in the Trojan Horse instead of telling us. Show us the blood and the guts that Odysseus can never escape. Show us the execution of the priestess and proper violation of religiosity (or better yet, make Athena* Kassandra and show the true breadth of men’s evils). If you’re going to make your three hour film about the horrors, you need to show us some horrors at some point in those three hours!

And even though we are supposedly concerned with the horrors of war and how they were wrought against Civilized People and That’s Bad (not that we see any of that, of course), there is a deep sense of foreignization and orientalism in how Troy, the Other, is depicted. The Greeks are all diverse people who have different styles of arms and flair and things, while the Trojans are quite literally faceless stormtroopers, complete with white helmets that mask their faces and dehumanize them so we can be fine with them being slaughtered as anonymous drones. This is not interrogated even a little bit. The Trojans’ armor is vaguely Greek in shape but looks otherwise as if it stepped out of the MCU’s Moon Knight, with its stark white color and texture of mummy wrappings, set against colorless northern African architecture (he does this again later with Asiatic elements in the silent Laestrygones’ equipment). It was simply Corporate Hollywood Does Egypt, and it brought all of the orientalism that comes with it. Between this and the looted Iranian earrings that Zendaya wore to the London premiere, there’s a strong sense that the people making this movie have no respect for either ancient or modern western Asia (see above re: America and manifest destiny). In theory we are supposed to care about the Trojans, but they are not filmed in such a way that would indicate that. We pay lip service to the deaths of women and children, but in the end we turn our eyes away and don’t care. 

On the note of women, Christopher Nolan’s female characters have always been…not great. He cannot write women and seems only to have just recently realized that women have any interiority at all, though he doesn’t know what to do with that interiority. It’s baffling to me that he’s managed to make every female character, without fail, less interesting and complex than they are in the 3000yo epic poem. They are all flattened beyond belief.

That said, Anne Hathaway is doing some of the best work of her career. She’s fighting for her life to bring some energy to the writing, even as much of her agency has been quashed. The whole thing with Penelope is that she does a lot even though she is limited by the social expectations of womanhood, but here she doesn’t get to do much beyond complain about her marginalization. She can complain, but she can’t do anything about it, which is to my mind a huge disservice to her role in the poem. We get very little of her wiliness or the homophrosyne—the like-mindedness and parallel expressions of self and feeling—that she shares with Odysseus. This is partly because Odysseus loses most of his craftiness and so she has nothing to mirror, partly because Nolan just doesn’t find women interesting. 

Likewise, the other women have very little to do and fail to live up to their roles in the epic. Helen is utterly stripped of the agency that she exhibits in the epic and is sidelined; the double casting of Helen and Clytemnestra could have been so god damn cool if we had explored even just a tiny bit the implications of their being identical, but alas we did not. It was in all a waste of Lupita Nyong’o’s talents. Nolan’s sidestepping of Melantho’s execution was done, I suspect, to avoid the misogynistic violence done to the enslaved women of the house in the epic. This avoidance does not make the movie any more feminist, however, and frankly reads as sexist. It is not empowering of any population—women, the enslaved, the victims of war, whoever—to simply handwave the atrocities done to them and not ever address them (the way this movie simply glosses over slavery pissed me the fuck off). It is important that the enslaved women are killed, it is important that Telemachus is the one who orchestrates it, it is important that Odysseus reestablishes his power through this violence. Talk about it. Reckon with it. Let the audience sit with it. Again, trust the people watching your movie just a little bit.

Samantha Morton’s Circe was probably the best thing about this movie for me. Circe as craftsman was a very cool idea. I loved the reshaping of flesh as clay and the horror of the whole episode (and that was for me the only real success at horror in this film; the Cyclops had a little too much “He’s standing right behind me isn’t he” energy and the cannibalistic resonances of the sun cattle episode were tragically lost). Morton’s performance was really fucking good and brought depth to shallow writing. The desexualization of her character was a little disappointing, but I’m not too fussed about it from a story perspective. I am a bit fussed about Calypso. Nolan really took everything interesting from her and made her the blandest figure in all the Mediterranean. No dread, no eroticism, no upending of gender roles, just a pretty blonde lady to sympathize with our beleaguered hero. Making her the audience to Odysseus’ story rather than Nausicaä is a weird choice that doesn’t work for me.

Although he’s a known ring structure junkie, Nolan has broken the epic’s gorgeous ring composition, leaving the whole plot feeling off-balance and a bit oddly paced. The removal of Nausicaä and the Phaeacians wrecks the structure. In the epic, Nausicaä forms—and preemptively breaks—a tricolon with Circe and Calypso; likewise, the tension of her first encounter with Odysseus parallels the tension between Odysseus and Penelope, with implicit threats of violence from both sides of each interaction. So even as she is part of a tricolon of strange women, she balances out the whole thing to create a chiastic narrative. Nausicaä is a load-bearing character for the structure and balance of the plot, and I think her absence is a big part of the imbalances this film has; Zendaya as Nausicaä instead of Athena* might have gone a long way to salvaging a lot of it.

One common misogynistic Nolan motif, the Dead Wife, even manages to show up here, a story wherein the hero’s wife is alive! With Penelope alive and well, Sinon takes on this role, which is deeply unfortunate given that he is played by a trans man. Not a great look. It is extremely noteworthy that Sinon is not mentioned in Homer; like the greater story of the fall of Troy, he’s borrowed from the Aeneid (the story that Nolan actually wants to adapt). So he’s been taken from a completely different poem and introduced into the film only to be immediately, brutally fridged in order to catalyze Odysseus’ guilt and, by the end, reestablish a pale imitation of the Homeric ring composition the script has wrecked. He is a man, and I think because he is a man Nolan thinks he’s a suitable proxy for Telemachus, but he functions in the script as the Dead Wife and proxy for Penelope. And I find this more than a little transphobic. 

The film’s greatest successes were visual. The Cyclops was extremely impressive, and like I said, the camera work in the Circe episode absolutely slapped. The shots were well-composed as always, and many of the visual tableaus—especially the ships and the house of Ithaka—were beautiful. Phenomenal interior sets all around. As with all of Christopher Nolan’s movies, though, the painfully limited color palette left me cold, especially given the visual richness of the source material and the unique ways that Homeric epic plays with color. A limited color palette can work, including in the colors that Nolan uses in his films (see my review of Beau Travail, a film whose limited use of color is incredibly effective), but this feels like such a wasted opportunity given the grandiosity of the full IMAX vision. Greek antiquity is so often presented, incorrectly, as whitewashed and drained of color; you might have used those outrageous cameras to reinject some polychrome into that world. Combine this with some very poor editing choices, especially in the third act, and the visual successes we get don’t do much to assuage my annoyance with his handling of the text. A final petty complaint about the IMAX thing: why are the directors who are obsessed with this format only making movies like this? Is the experience really enhanced by that extra ten feet of sea and sky? Is Dune Part 3 really going to be radically changed by that extra stretch of sand? Who is this for?