Notes on The Odyssey
I saw Nolan’s The Odyssey last night. It is one good movie, and one bad movie, mushed together into overlarge movie.
The good movie is a grand epic that dares to tell this story at all. Homer’s Odyssey is episodic and mythic. It has a lot of parts, each of which, on its own, can devolve into farce or fairy tale. It also has many themes. Some of them, like wandering and homecoming, are amenable to a modern blockbuster.
The bad movie spends a lot of time on themes that are difficult and confusing for a modern audience. Hospitality, the ancient Greek xenia, referred to confusingly as “Zeus’s law” in the movie, was a virtue in many cultures. Before travel was easy and portable money could reliably satisfy your needs, the life of anyone on their way from anywhere to anywhere else might literally depend on the kindness of strangers. In a series of overwrought monologues, Nolan asks his characters to connect this solemn duty between people to the fall of civilization, a jump that makes no scholarly or dramatic sense. I am excited that now everyone has heard of the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age Collapse. I’m not excited that Nolan tried to make Penelope have nostalgia for the concept of civilization in general.
The good movie is visually stunning. It makes the Homeric world, a world of relatively small numbers of people, in relatively small boats, seem grand. My breath stopped every time Agamemnon was on screen. What Homer did with speeches, Nolan does with costume design and a quick shot of a man holding a baby in front of an ocean. The movie shows the palace on Ithaca as an actually believable size, with a plausible kind of sparse decor, and yet makes it the site of sweeping drama. It makes Circe’s magic horrifying and specific.
The bad movie looks cheap. It looks like an animatronic dog tail, wagging its last wag. It makes Troy, supposedly the greatest city in the world, with unthinkably high walls, look like the set of an Indiana Jones ripoff, with flimsy plywood towers and one or two little streets, and a gang of generic-looking extras.
The bad movie is visually and aurally repetitive. I got bored of watching Matt Damon’s dark body outlined by fire. More fire. And yet more fire! Make it louder! More noise! Epic amounts of noise! Homer’s Odyssey has plenty of violence, and that’s important, but good storytelling weaves counterpoints, and doesn’t spend too long in any one mode. In the final palace fight, which felt like it went on forever, the guy upstairs is chucking weapons down through the hole in the floor. The bad guy downstairs shouts, “Gets the swords!” Then “get the shields!” then “get the spears!” I started laughing out loud at this moment. Does Nolan not think the audience knows what these objects are? Does naming them help us understand that they are weapons? Then again, I was bored watching Matt Damon do martial arts in the dark, so it was actually kind of a nice reprieve.
The good movie has strong acting. Penelope walks the knife’s edge. Circe is somewhere between righteous, manipulative, and insane. Telemachus is just trying his best.
The bad movie has overlong monologues. Blind Tiresias (totally awesome) tells Odysseus to feed the kid the blood. I’m on the edge of my seat. And then there’s a long discussion about the relationship between the kid who died at the horse and the bad guy in the palace. It’s mentioned like ten times, and the shot of the two of them with the lots is shown over and over, but I still don’t really understand who got paid for what. I kind of wish this shade would shut up and let us move on.
The bad movie has rapid switches between registers. Sometimes people are talking about grand ideas and speaking like they’re in an epic movie, but other times they talk like they’re in a Marvel movie or a Gen Z basement. I was never transported to another world.
The bad movie is long. It spends a lot of time on things that don’t serve the broader plot. Like, sure we have to spend a lot of time on the cyclops. That’s Homeric fan service. But we could have skipped the giants, and we could have trimmed the Pylos temple affair (more fire! more noise!). Many scenes could have been 25% shorter. I watched men eat meat, and I got grossed out, and then it just… kept going.
It was a fun romp and I’m glad I saw it, but I don’t expect I’ll ever want to spend 173 minutes to watch it again. Lord of the Rings this is not.
