Homer just keeps raking in the dough. Perhaps somewhere up above he's pleased by the box office take of 2026's The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the poet's great, influential epic. He would, though, perhaps find the film's underlying morality somewhat odd and perhaps be bored by Nolan's method of deploying exposition in the first act. But it's hard to imagine anyone not getting caught up in Nolan's dynamic narrative flow and his instinct for finding the appropriate focus amidst a complicated plot with numerous characters. While Nolan's film is no masterpiece, and has several glaring flaws, on balance it's a worthy way to spend three hours in a movie theatre, especially one with air conditioning.
I suppose Homer might also find the colour blind casting to be an odd choice. Right wing media has been vigorous in its derision of this creative decision, which is the second prominent movie this year, after Wuthering Heights, to cast ethnicities without regard to the source material. Personally, I'm not fond of the choice either, but I've been putting up with it for a very long time. It's extremely common in stage adaptations of classic plays and operas. I don't even like it when Shakespeare adaptations aren't set in the place and period Shakespeare intended. I consider these things, even if they seem purely aesthetic, as part of the fabric of the story. It's hard for Americans now to imagine an ancient world in which you could easily deduce someone's region of origin by their physical features but back then--and even now, in many countries--it was a fundamental part of every day life. But while I don't like it, I can still appreciate, for example, the production of Hamlet with David Tennant that appears to be set in the 1930s for no reason. Or a production of Die Walkure with a black Brunhilde, particularly if the woman happens to have a terrific voice. Productions with other positive qualities can win me over even if I persist in disliking their anachronistic aesthetic choices.
But Nolan isn't presenting a realistic adaptation of The Odyssey anyway, though some might mistake it as such because it is gritty and has a severely limited colour palette. There are plenty of deliberately articifial aspects to the film. One of its weakest points is its depiction of the sack of Troy. The famous wooden horse in this film is a finely sculpted, perfect representation of a horse, rather than something hastily assembled on a battlefield, and for some reason it's half buried in the sand. This presents a curious and ominous visual but the overwhelming response I had to it was, "Why? Why would it be like this?" Similarly, Odysseus and his men exiting the horse's belly and stealthily taking out all the guards seems like Nolan went out of his way to make it as implausible as possible. The men are aided by muted sound though the clanking of their armour and the falling bodies must have been comically noisy on set.
I was surprised by how underwhelming many of the action sequences were. But, then, I remember people complaining about the scenes in Batman Begins that were too dark and confusing. However, Nolan's aesthetic interest here is in extreme juxtaposition, showing abnormally large things in contrast to vulnerable little humans. He conjures some real eeriness, particularly with the Cyclops, for which he had a 60 foot puppet constructed. However, the conspicuous choice to keep the giant's nether regions shrouded in shadow was one of the many moments when modern morality was awkwardly foisted on the story. The Greeks certainly weren't shy about depicting genitalia.
But Nolan's Judeo-Christian preoccupations permeate the story in ways it did not in Homer's original. The poem presents us with a window into a world in which morality is intimately tied with physical dominance. Nature, as a manifestation of the Gods' wills, is capricious and brutal, and so human beings are capricious and brutal to one another. Nolan's version of Odysseus is a man consumed by guilt for his participation in warfare itself. He's consumed by guilt regarding his intrinsic moral worth in a way that only an audience that has inherited Judeo-Christian cultural tradition would understand. This, combined with Nolan's ineffective instincts for action sequences, makes the slaughter of the suitors sequence underwhelming.
Matt Damon is excellent casting as Odysseus, I can't imagine an actor to-day more suited to the role. He's effortlessly natural which makes him a great touchstone in a world of Nolan's cold, nigh monochromatic, sepulchral aesthetic. Samantha Morton is great as Circe and the scene in which she transforms the men into pigs is really creepy though this was one of the scenes where someone ought to have said to Nolan . . . it's time for a little cgi. His devotion to practical effects is charming but there are moments we needed to see, like Damon grabbing a crow by the throat, which Nolan felt himself obliged to put off-camera. Yes, practical effects can be wonderful and have the advantage of being more tactile and surprising than cgi. But Christopher Nolan is not Terry Gilliam or Jean Cocteau, he doesn't always have the kind of imagination to make practical effects appreciably bizarre or astonishingly convincing. There's no shame in using a tool at hand if you can't do better without it.
Tom Holland is very good as Telemachus. Charlize Theron, as much as I like her, is distracting as Calypso. She doesn't have time to give a performance so you just see Charlize Theron. An unknown actress may have accomplished more by being more of an enigma. There's nothing about Theron's Calypso that says she's a nymph. I'm not saying she had to be naked all the time, which was a conception of nymphs belonging more to 17th and 18th century painters, but something more interesting than her beige tunic would've been nice. But Mr. Nolan is doggedly devoted to drab and dour.
Robert Pattinson is an effective villain as the head of the rowdy suitors besetting Penelope and by the film's climax I was really invested in Odysseus getting back and wiping the floor with this smug bastard. This, the lead up to the showdown (not so much the showdown itself) is when the movie really finds its stride and Nolan's best instincts are brought to bear.
The Odyssey is now in theatres.
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