MY ODYSSEY REVIEW
“Christopher Nolan made a movie just for me!”- everybody who saw The Odyssey
Many people want to talk to me about The Odyssey. What an honor! Obviously, I Got Thoughts. The Odyssey stirs something in the soul as well as the eardrums. I have friends who have already seen this movie four times. It’s the perfect vector for discussing filmmaking, global politics, and LIFE. But mostly, I’m just excited we all have a really good movie to talk about.
This post contains the following sections:
I. Filmmaking
II. Anne Hathaway
III. Myths
IV. Themes
V. Troy
First, I will answer a few background questions.
Did you see it in 70MM IMAX?
Yes, and I have a big honking souvenir film strip. Not gonna lie: it’s pretty cool.
Are you a Nolan bro?
Yes. However, I prefer Jonathan.
Have you read The Odyssey?
I translated The Aeneid from Latin in high school and I wrote 50,000 words about the chthonic gods using MYTHOS by Stephen Fry and Greek Myths by Charlotte Higgins. I also read Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (but not Circe) and played Hades and Hades II, but the answer is technically NO
Did you like The Odyssey or are you about to dunk on it for 3,000 words?
I liked it.
IS THIS REALLY 3,000 WORDS?
It’s 3,500, actually. IT’S MY ODYSSEY REVIEW!!!
MY THOUGHTS ON CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE ODYSSEY
I. FILMMAKING
You could never accuse Christopher Nolan of invisible filmmaking. His editing, sound design, and dialogue all draw undeniable attention to the fact that You Are Watching A Movie. Nolan wants you to think about that underwhelming shot of Troy in Act 2, because it’s setting you up for the aerial shot that’s going to blow your mind in Act 3. He wants you to puzzle over muddled boat dialogue, because he wants you to wonder what they said, because he wants you to think about it in your brain during the next scene. Nolan treats his films like rich texts, full of symbolism and dots to connect. As audiences, we like this, because it makes us feel smart.
Most elements of Nolan’s filmmaking are exhilarating. As a director, I appreciate that his films leave room for debate. His whip-flash editing works sometimes (like during memory hits in first five minutes) and sometimes doesn’t (like during a shot- reverse- shot of characters speaking). I think we as viewers feel comfortable critiquing Nolan’s work because he feels comfortable with, and even invites, critique. It’s a comforting reminder that calling a film “good” or “bad” is extremely subjective and maybe a waste of time. The fact that so many people have thoughts on this film means this film sparks thoughts. This, too, makes we, the audience, feel smart. And I like to feel smart.
I like to feel smart; I also like to feel Not Deaf. The Odyssey has one pretty undeniable blind (deaf?) spot, and that is… the dialogue mixing!! I feel about The Odyssey the same way I felt about Oppenheimer: the score clobbers the dialogue. Nolan’s dialogue is notoriously hard to hear, but in The Odyssey, the dialogue constantly competes with the music.
Almost every time a character opens their mouth, music starts swelling. The music both distracted me from the actual words being spoken and made the dialogue harder to hear. When I wanted to appreciate some gorgeous shot or thematic element, or bask in the sonic emptiness of a sea breeze or a rustle of sheet, I would barely catch my bearings before I was smothered by droning synths. In many scenes, I thought the film needed no music at all. Visually, the movie feels spacious. Sonically, it’s pretty punishing.
I understand that people enjoy this about Nolan movies. I do not enjoy this.
Not only that, but I did not find the music very cute or special. I know some people worship at the altar of composer Ludwig Göransson, but I am not one of them. Someone told me Göransson only used lutes and lyres and other traditional Greek instruments. Ha! Even then, I knew better than to expect something tempered and charming like the Hades soundtrack. Nolan’s film scores have one note and it is
BWAAAAARRRMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
The Odyssey continues this unpleasant tradition.
Critic sometimes accuse John Williams and Steven Spielberg of emotionally manipulative film scores. I defend Williams, because he wrote some of the most memorable compositions of the 20th century, in or out of film, and also because he often scores movies for kids (Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Star Wars). Kid viewers are still learning situational awareness, so they need a little hint in the form of music. But The Odyssey has no such defense. The Odyssey is for grownups.
However, I suspect the droning, omnipresent score has an equally dumb goal: they made this movie for a global market, and because music is a universal language, the score has the power to influence audience emotion where dialogue localization may fail. But because I speak English, and Nolan wrote the script in English, and the actors all speak English, I found this very annoying.
DIALOGUE
Some people think the dialogue in this movie is bad. I disagree. I think fables earn, need and deserve what some would call “corny” dialogue. Fables are stories meant to teach lessons. The Odyssey is based on a literal Greek myth, and the story is used as a vessel for THEMES. (see section III: THEMES). So The Odyssey gets to make a couple corny Theme Statements. My problem is not with the film’s dialogue but with how little Nolan trusts his dialogue. Dialogue characterizes characters, but when Nolan mistrusts his dialogue by clobbering it with music, he sells his characters short.
The dialogue also couldn’t really decide between “cool” and “epic”, and it took me out of the film when they said “mom” and “dad”. Personally, I call my mom “Mother” all the time, it’s fine.
CHARACTERS
I did not care for the characters in The Odyssey. Even though they were all constantly about to die all the time, I only felt emotional when Athena’s head was on the chopping block. And that is probably just because Zendaya is really beautiful.
Odysseus (Matt Damon) claims a fierce loyalty to his men, yet has close personal relationships with none of them. The only one he even really talks to is Eurylochus (Hamish Patel), and they mostly argue. True, the gods want to show Odysseus that he is a self- serving twit, that he’s really not acting out of concern for his men but out a need for his own for penance, so in a way, Odysseus’ social isolation makes sense. But if you’re going to sell me a lie (like “Odysseus loves his men”) for two hours, at least make me believe it.
We will discuss this more in Part IV: TROY, but I thought the (really stinking stupid and bad) movie 300 handled the army/ general dynamic really well. Even though all of those men wear identical leather bikinis, they each have a dumb little quirk or link that makes them unique. Michael Fassbender is the sadist! There’s a father and son! One’s really more of a poet! This creates personal stakes within the story, and also builds my investment, because I like some characters more than others. This gives me people to root for and against, and this makes the movie fun. Like sports! Okay, that’s it for Film 101.
I think in The Odyssey I was supposed to root against Antinuous (Robert Pattinson), but this is hard to do because he gives the best performance in the movie, and also because he has the distinction of being one of the only people besides George Clooney who looks good in a Roman bowl cut.
I will say, I was worried about seeing so many stars in the same movie, because stars can really take actors out of a role for me. I was not distracted by any actors except for one. I was able to buy (almost) every actor as their character. The Odyssey did a tremendous job bringing me into the world of the movie and keeping me there, and I thoroughly enjoyed the illusion, until it came to scenes with one key cast member:
II. ANNE HATHAWAY
Okay. I know this is an unpopular opinion. I hate Anne Hathaway and it cannot be helped.
People, I tried. When I tell people I hate Anne Hathaway they’re like, “you know, that’s really not in style any more”, and they do not understand. I do not hate Anne Hathaway for the reasons other people hate Anne Hathaway. Anne, if you’re reading this, I don’t hate *you, I don’t know you, I am sure you are perfectly nice- in fact, that is what most people seem to really like about you. But you can’t win ‘em all, and you unfortunately have lost me.
I felt so guilty of my Hathaway hate that earlier this year, after seeing Mother Mary, I did Anne Hathaway exposure therapy in an attempt to “like” her. I watched a bunch of Anne Hathaway movies, dug up Anne Hathaway clips, watched press tours, read interviews, looked at photos, scoured her Wikipedia article, and asked people, “What do you love about Anne Hathaway?”
And it backfired. Everything I learned about her made me hate her more. In one video, she describes wearing a garbage bag over her Met Gala dress while travelling in a clipper van as if this is a tip normal people can actually use. A friend told me that one time on set, Anne did not know what Depop was, and when Friend tried explaining it, Anne said, “Oh, like the Real Real?” I read a cover story where the journalist said, “Yes, Anne was so tired from doing so many movies, so we photographed her at her home IN THE HAMPTONS”, as if this made her insanely relatable.
She has enough. Anne has enough. She does not also need My Love.
Some of you probably don’t remember this, but in the mid- aughts Anne dated an Italian con man named Raffaello Follieri. In court, Follieri claimed he embezzled the Catholic Church out of hundreds of thousands of dollars to “buy gifts for Anne”. This sounds like it was, by all accounts, horrible for her- she had to surrender her private diaries to the courts- but I see where Raffaello is coming from. Anne is a Material Girl. I am not a Material Girl and so I cannot relate.
But I am done attacking Anne’s very mild and inoffensive character. This is about her acting.
HER ACTING
I have noticed, in the last six months, an influx of MEN singing the praises of Queen Anne. My theory is this: men like Anne Hathaway because she performs suffering and hysteria well. Men often associate suffering and hysteria with women. So, men think she is an amazing actress, because she is very ready to portray these womanly qualities. Anne won her Oscar for playing Fantine in Les Misérables by being the most miserable, long- suffering misérable in that entire miserable musical. I think “I Dreamed A Dream” is honestly one of the most tasteless performances in the history of Oscar winners. Also, that director went on and made CATS, so there’s that.
I personally believe Anne is an over- actor. I believe she over-acted suffering in Mother Mary and she over- acted hysteria in The Odyssey. In most of her scenes with Tom Holland she is seething, three inches away from his nose, teeth gritted, eyes bulging, verbally abusing her very mild and inoffensive son because she is upset that her husband’s not home. No and No. Furthermore, in 70MM IMAX, you can see the slices in her face, which tells me loud and clear that she is not an Ancient Greek Woman. Fine. Whatever. You can see them on Charlize too, who, for the record, is almost ten years older. But they bother me on Anne. Everyone is trying to convince me Anne Hathaway looks “stunning” and “ageless” with her new “work done” and I am having none of it. She looks like a 40 year old woman with a facelift.
Also, why is she in every single movie this year?? She’s already been in four huge movies!!! Why is she the in the dinosaur movie??? Why do I have to suffer her presence in every movie I might want to see??? Get this girl out of all my boy movies!!
Let me tell you people, when Anne launched her “comeback” with The Idea of You, that Amazon Prime movie about Harry Styles, I was on board! I thought she did an amazing job! She looked amazing! Her clothes looked amazing!!! She was the perfect casting choice! I made a whole video essay about it! I adore her in The Princess Diaries (Volume 1). She’s a goddamn delight in Devil Wears Prada 2. I think she is a breath of fresh air in Rachel Getting Married, the only movie where she acts like an actual person. Most of the time, though, I feel like she comes into movies with “ACTRESS” written all over her, and I do not like her style of acting. We also both went to the same acting school, so I know she knows better.
That is the end of my Anne Hathaway rant (for now).
III. MYTHOLOGY
If you’re still with me, and I hope you are, it’s time to talk about Mythology.
I do not care how accurately this movie adheres to any tradition or translation of The Odyssey because this is a movie. I care if it works as a movie. It works as a movie.
Now, onto the important stuff.
IV. THEMES
This is the part of the blog post where I gush. Like Odysseus’ ship taking on water after Scylla and Charybdis, I gush. This is the part where I feel like Nolan made a movie just for me, the reason I am a changed man after seeing The Odyssey. THE THEMES.
What Nolan lacks in character, he makes up for with Theme. The tagline of this movie is “DEFY THE GODS”, and I thought about this tagline often while watching the movie. So, bonus points for a great slogan. The entire movie, Odysseus tries to defy the gods, but he can’t. Only when Odysseus Lets Go and Lets Gods does he find his way home.
The Odyssey struck me as surprisingly spiritual. This film believes gods exist, that there are supernatural forces outside of our control we can never fully understand, and that fighting these forces will only bring us misery. I believe everyone is on their own spiritual journey, and I am at a place in my journey where I’m ready lap up the lessons suggested by The Odyssey. I am sure I’ll be picturing the shots of Odysseus floating half- dead through the Aegean Sea when I meditate. I got into big trouble on a Greek beach once, and I’ve also almost drowned, so Odysseus and I have that in common.
I can also relate to the theme of getting in your own way so badly that you don’t notice until half your friends are dead.
Humbling yourself in the sight of gods/ God/ nature feels like a particularly apt theme this year, because we are juggling some real egos. Elon Musk loves a book called Twelve Against The Gods, an anthology of egomaniacs like Napoleon and Christopher Columbus. When your civilization elevates you to the heights to which it has elevated men like Elon Musk or Odysseus, you may mistake yourself for a god. But you are not. One of my former roommates, a Jehovah’s Witness turned party girl, used to say, “God will keep teaching you the same lesson till you learn it”. That is The Odyssey’s whole plot structure.
Even if you don’t believe in God, you can humble yourself in the sight of the weather. As Athena says, who doesn’t understand storms? Who doesn’t understand lightning? I loved how much weatherfucking took place in this movie. And in TODAY’S day and age, extreme weather is becoming more frequent BECAUSE of some of these God- poseurs and their reckless pilfering of our good planet. Listen up, you tools!!! They deserve an extra reckoning is what I’m saying.
When I first learned about the Greek Pantheon in fifth grade, I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of. It sounded like a bunch of superstitious contradictions made up by people who don’t understand science. But The Odyssey had me thinking about faith in ways I haven’t really experienced outside of Mel Gibson movies. It’s great fun to juxtapose The Odyssey, a movie where gods and magic definitely exist, with Troy, a movie where gods do not. Which brings me to my next section:
V. Troy
I am an outlier here as well. I hate Anne Hathaway and I love Troy. I watched Troy one week before watching The Odyssey (because I couldn’t get decent tickets to The Odyssey) and I think Troy is a fantastic film.
Some of us know that Warner Bros. offered Christopher Nolan Troy in 2003 after 2002’s Insomnia. Nolan worked on development for Troy, while future Troy director Wolfgang Peterson worked on a Batman pitch. When Peterson fumbled Batman, he asked for Troy. The studio agreed, and gave Nolan Batman as a consolation prize. So it feels totally fair to compare Troy with The Odyssey, both because they have the same source material and because we can assume Nolan has been thinking about making The Odyssey since Troy.
It seems like it’s currently cool to dunk on Troy because Brad Pitt is a jerk, they hetero- washed Achilles by making Patroclus his cousin instead of his lover and David Benioff shit the bed with Game of Thrones. Which you all liked at the time, so maybe take it out on yourselves and not on Troy.
In the case of Troy’s “inaccuracies”, I defer to Section III. I do not care. It works as a movie.
This is a sword- and- sandal epic with special effects that still look great, complex characters, great acting, and some of the best period armor I’ve ever seen in my life. This is not a two star movie. This is at LEAST a three and a half star movie.
I gave both Troy and The Odyssey four stars. The Odyssey spoke to me on a more personal level, but I do think Troy is a better movie.
I think The Odyssey missed one major opportunity by omitting the piety of the Trojan people. In Troy (and in legend, I assume), the Trojans sit on a high horse of godliness. Their ruler, Priam, is extremely superstitious. They accept the Trojan horse, a “gift to the Gods”, because of this piety, and the horse becomes their downfall. Satisfying, right? But why, as the Trojans puzzle, would the gods reward the blasphemous Greek army? As we see in The Odyssey, they do not. The Greeks siege Troy, but they do not receive the glory they seek. Odysseus takes 20 years to get home. Agamemnon, who always really sucked, gets murdered by his wife. Achilles dies in battle.
In Troy, the characters talk about the gods constantly, but we never see them, which makes the theme of faith even stronger.
Almost every speaking character in Troy has a strong, visible perspective. Achilles is an incredibly complex character. We see what he cares about (fame, glory, Patroclus) and what he doesn’t care about (kings, religion, having a family). We see his stance on religion change through his relationship with Briseis (Rose Byrne, take that, you haters), a devout Trojan priestess. Achilles admires Briseis’ faith in a higher power and realizes this faith makes her powerful and connected to a greater good. Achilles has never fought for a cause he truly believes in. So why is he fighting at all? Achilles has an incredible arc, and he’s not even the protagonist.
Then there’s Hector, who is really too damn good for this world, trying to do the right thing for his family and his country even when those aren’t remotely the same thing. Hector struggles to balance his own political acumen with the leadership of his devout but backwards father Priam (Peter O’Toole) and the impulses of his pure- hearted but foolish weenie brother Paris (Orlando Bloom). We see Hector’s values of love and honor in painful conflict when said weenie brother surrenders to Menelaus. We also see Hector grapple with faith. For example, when Achilles shows his ass by sacking the Temple of Apollo, Hector wonders why the gods do not strike him down. This makes Hector question his faith.
Troy falls to the Greeks, but I somehow always forget this when I start the movie. The Trojans don’t deserve it. And that is the inciting incident for the entire atonement arc of The Odyssey.
“What happened to the Trojans?” my sister asked, as we watched the movie.
“Take this sword, Aneas,” Paris says, right at that moment.
I thought about it. I took Latin. We read the Aeneid.
“Oh yea,” I remember. “They become the Romans. They found Rome.”
“Oh, so they did win,” she said.
Whether the Trojan War is history or merely a fable, the story has staying power because it still has something to teach us.
In conclusion, go see The Odyssey. It’s awesome.
WORKS CITED:
Anne & Raff Relationship Timeline
Nolan vs. Troy
Twelve Against The Gods