His alarm goes off at exactly five AM, just like it has every morning since he and Sam first moved in together.
His eyes pop open as soon as he hears the first wisp of sound, a habit he’s never quite unlearned from a war that happened 170-something years ago, and he briefly wonders if he’ll ever be able to get a full night’s rest without the sounds of crickets and car alarms and stray cats meowing in the night waking him up at least once an hour.
He’s getting too old for this.
The same could be said for the alarm clock, he thinks as he gently turns it off; he’s afraid too much force might finally be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, might be the end for that old clock Sam had given him a couple months before he’d died at the ripe old age of eighty-nine.
“Five o’clock sharp every morning, baby,” he’d said, over half a century ago now, his voice weak and his bones weaker, holding onto Bucky’s far less wrinkled hand with all the strength he still had. “Early morning exercise is important for old men like us: keeps us living longer.”
Bucky has lived fifty-two years, three months, and twelve days longer than Sam had ever gotten to, and, running his hand over Sam’s side of the bed, his favorite blanket kept pristine even after all these years, he thinks living longer is the last thing he’d ever want.
He still gets up at five to exercise every day, though.
After all, Sam had asked him to, and who is Bucky to deny Sam anything he asks, even all these years later.
below is my review of/thoughts on nolan’s odyssey. it contains spoilers, and is copy/pasted from my letterboxd. not normally something i do, but i have a lot of thoughts on this one.
muse, tell me about a complicated man.
odysseus has been complicated at his core for millennia now, a hero who is also a braggart and a jerk and too proud for his own good. a seemingly good husband, a clever general, a wily liar, a cold blooded murderer. a favorite of the gods (or most of them, anyway.)
nolan does his best to complicate odysseus still further.
his odysseus is, generally, a much kinder man. he waits to string his bow to give his hunted a chance to flee, he does what he can to save as many of his men as he can, he finds agamemnon distasteful and brutish, he pictures athena as the young woman his soldiers slaughtered, he cares deeply for the farm boy he brought with him to troy.
he also lies to that boy and leaves him to die. he gets his entire crew cursed by getting in one final shot at polyphemus. he slaughters every suitor in his house.
odysseus’s hubris and arrogance and brutishness are still present, more than enough to ensure his long winded odyssey still takes place, but nolan does a lot of work to make him a character worth liking, a king worthy of the title and reverence everyone bestows upon him, in a way that doesn’t quite exist in the original poem, bound by its own greek standards.
he’s also a much more haunted man, drowning in his own tragedy and war ravaged life, by the things he’s done, the things he’s seen, by the sacred pact of xenia he’s broken in order to end a war he’d helped a power hungry king wage for a decade without end. nolan’s odysseus is very reminiscent of his oppenheimer: a clever, imperfect, arrogant, brilliant man who reinvented the world of war and humanity forever, who helped tear down walls without thinking of the consequences he could never undo until it was too late.
it’s an interesting take on odysseus, one that isn’t exactly based in the text, but makes perfect sense for the way nolan tends to approach his stories and his protagonists. he’s found the perfect story that combines a fragmented take on time and memory with a complicated, immoral, but generally charming and likable “hero” who wants nothing more than to do great things while still getting to go back to how life was before he did them, grappling with the fact that he might never get home. i told a friend of mine before this movie came out that as weird as it might sound, nolan might be the most perfect person to adapt the odyssey. it’s so on the nose it could be painful.
for the most part, it wasn’t. i was kind of shocked by how faithful it was in some degrees. many adaptations of the odyssey fall into the same pitfalls: they focus too much on odysseus’s deeds and his journey home, and not enough on the home to which he’s trying to come back, and what he does when he gets there. nolan threads that needle well, and the movie, and nolan’s particular love of time, are both well served by the odyssey’s non-linear narrative. you get a good portion of time with both penelope and telemachus, and i was quite pleased in particular by how well penelope was adapted. she’s the heart and soul of the odyssey in many ways, in one of the only poems of that time so incredibly focused on a woman and her ways, on the ways in which women can gain and wield power, and how she is trapped by the conventions and institutions of marriage. emily wilson focuses a lot on penelope and what she knows and doesn’t know in her translation, and it’s obvious that, despite nolan’s not-so-great history with women, he really took that to heart when he read it and wrote his own.
in general, there’s a lot that points to the fact that emily wilson’s odyssey, in particular, inspired nolan to write his. the language is the most obvious clue, of course, but there’s also the incredible focus on xenia, which wilson spends a significant portion of time on in her introduction and translator’s notes. the odyssey is, at its core, a story about how you should treat your neighbors, and how that can be corrupted by others and by yourself, both in your favor and against it, and nolan played that through line perfectly.
before i get to what nolan didn’t quite adapt, though, i’ll take a brief moment to acknowledge the filmmaking here. it’s staggering, a behemoth of a film. the practical effects are gorgeous as always, especially in the scene where circe turns the men into pigs, which was viscerally horrifying enough that i almost want nolan to pivot into body horror, and the cinematography is beautiful. the editing, especially at the beginning, is not the best. there are times when nolan’s chosen format works against him, and telling an epic might be one of those times. there are plenty of points in which the visuals are choppy, spliced together in a way that screams “we have a very strict limit of how long this can be because of the amount of film we can put it on!” thankfully this stays mostly at the beginning, in scenes with telemachus in ithaca and then leaving it, so it mostly works. were meant to feel uncomfortable and out of place and a little disoriented then anyway; it keeps us in line with telemachus.
ludwig göransson is well on his way to his fourth oscar. i felt his score in my bones, rattling through my chest, heart beating like a drum.
now. to the rest of it.
nolan’s odyssey is undeniably human. athena—arguably the second most important character in the story, the guiding hand through much of odysseus’s struggles, and the one character who gets to come of age in the poem, as telemachus doesn’t manage—is incredibly stripped. she is less a force of will and more a metaphor, a reminder to odysseus of what he’s done and what he’s lost and that he has to continue on through it and face his own shame if he ever wants to get home. athena is not in the background pulling the strings, currying favor, and convincing her father to make poseidon back down to get her favorite hero home. she is there to remind odysseus of who he is, of what he’s done, of what he must do. odysseus must still make his own way home, and he must take responsibility of what’s occurred for him to do it.
the other gods, similarly, are stripped down. poseidon’s curse is made off to be like something that was just superstition by odysseus’s men, zeus is mostly only evoked when they mention his law. helios causes the death of odysseus’s men but we never see it on screen. outside of athena, who feels more like an apparition borne of guilt than a goddess throwing her hand and favor into the ring, the vast majority of the magic and myth come in odysseus’s adventures, with circe and the sirens and polyphemus and the lastrygonians, at least half of which felt a little lackluster in their fantastical natures (once again, the circe scenes are a standout). even calypso feels a little stripped, though it makes her much more likable. it does kind of remove one interesting level of gender dynamics and politics in the odyssey though, as penance for that likability.
(speaking of which, i have a LOT of thoughts about nolan’s portrayal of helen. they’d take up way too much room in this review but let me know if you want to hear them. tldr there’s something very interesting in the way nolan allows helen to keep her wits and anger and guilt and horror versus the way the poem has her free herself of all sadness with a sort of drug and magic. it also answers how nolan feels about some of the ambiguity there of helen’s own role in being with paris rather than menelaus, just like he’s a little more transparent about how he feels penelope falls on the divide of if she misses her husband or she misses the social safety net he provides.)
nolan’s odyssey lives in a weird space. it is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of the text we’ll ever get in terms of what is actually happening in the story, and in the way it is told (as mostly a collection of stories after the fact, though in nolan’s version odysseus is recounting to calypso rather than the phaeacians, which is a change i don’t mind at all). there are some small changes (both material and otherwise), like the inclusion of sinon, that i think really work for the story, and some changes that i think really work for nolan’s story, like the reduced role of the gods and the focus on the trauma of warfare.
all in all, though, it means nolan’s odyssey is a surprisingly faithful adaptation that is somehow still telling an entirely different story. nolan has his own agenda here, and one that i am generally on board with for most of the runtime. i think he blends it well enough with the original story and meaning that i get sucked into it, and am on board with the way he’s nolan-ified it all.
at least until the end.
the real tragedy of nolan’s odyssey, i think, is it is one of the first truly great nolan films i don’t think stuck the landing.
the ending was perhaps what i was most excited to see nolan do. the odyssey famously doesn’t really have an ending. the ending of the poem is so abrupt and anticlimactic there was a time when scholars thought the last chapter and a half were artificially added on later, and that the real ending is in book twenty-two. the poem ends with odysseus almost going to war with the families of the suitors he’d killed, itching for another fight, before athena steps in and forces them all to stand down.
it doesn’t make for a very satisfying ending, and it certainly doesn’t evoke the kind of anti-war character growth odysseus experiences in nolan’s odyssey. i was anxiously awaiting to see what he’d do with it all.
i can’t say i care for his take this time. odysseus banishing himself along with penelope and leaving telemachus on the throne felt a little too happy ending, a little too good guy saves the day and realizes he can never go home again because of what he’d seen. it’s a very stereotypical anti-war movie kind of ending, a theme that’s been prevalent in many of its genre since world war i, but i’m not really sure it works here.
odysseus is simply not that good of a man, and telemachus is not that good of a leader. odysseus wants revenge for his house, for his home, not just to protect his family. he could have gone for significantly less violence otherwise. and then he just leaves the home he’d killed dozens of men to protect, taking along with him the wife who has diligently ruled a kingdom alone for twenty fucking years, entrusting said kingdom to a son who can barely hold his own. telemachus in the poem is well known for never being able to come of age, because odysseus comes home so he no longer has a possible throne. in nolan’s odyssey, this gets solved by odysseus sending himself away, except we never really get to see telemachus earn his way up, to prove he can hold his own after his father has swept in and solved most of his problems. the ending feels like a good wrap up to nolan’s humanist anti-war messaging, but it feels just as unearned and anticlimactic an ending for odysseus and his family as the poem’s does, just in a very different way.
much of my reverence for nolan comes from his ability to stick the landing, as i’m a real sucker for an ending, so it did feel kind of like the wind got knocked out of me a little when this one ended how it did. it kept me teetering on a lower score for my entire hour long drive home from the 70MM IMAX theater in the suburbs, but eventually i landed on appreciating nolan’s odyssey for the message he’s trying to tell, rather than the message the poem was trying to get across.
i can’t say i’ll ever rid my mouth of the slight bitter taste of the ending here when i think of this one, but the rest of the movie was sweet enough i’ll be happy to return to this one nonetheless.
excited to see what i get out of it when i see it a second, a third, or even a fourth time whenever i have more time. i’ve got a lot to marinate on with this one, both as an adaptation and as a film/story in its own right, and i’m sure my feelings will continue to be as complicated as odysseus himself.
This is one of the drawings I gifted to Kyle Adams! I purposefully draw my Grantaire design to look a bit different from him, so I wanted him to at least have something that resembled him most haha
Seeing Bahorel enter the cafe, Courfeyrac scooped up his hat and attempted to go. But Bahorel was quicker, making his way to their table in what seemed to be the mere blink of an eye and clapping a friendly hand on Courfeyrac’s shoulder– a friendly hand that also happened to force him back down into his seat.
“And where are you off to in such a rush?” he asked.
“Oh, I, uh–” Courfeyrac looked frantically to Bossuet, who offered nothing but a shrug.
“I cannot possibly come up with a lie for you,” Bossuet said. “I don’t know the truth, and the odds are good that in lying, I would accidentally stumble upon it.”
“Did we quarrel? I am engaged in a number of them at present, it is possible I have lost track.”
“No… no.” Courfeyrac appeared to make a silent resolution, and straightened. “I cannot face you, Bahorel. I cannot disgrace you with my company.”
Bossuet and Bahorel exchanged glances.
“And why?” Bahorel asked.
Courfeyrac’s courage seemed to fail him, and the words came out in an inaudible mumble.
“Once more,” Bossuet prompted. “This time with vowels.”
“I passed my exams.”
The words rang in the silence that followed. Bahorel took a step back, and Courfeyrac sprang to his feet, hands clasped in supplication.
“I didn’t intend to. The illustrious Monsieur de Courfeyrac began making rumblings about how if I was not intending to continue my studies, perhaps I had best return to Provence, and– well, I had to appease him somehow, but I never thought, never dreamed–”
“I cannot speak to you,” Bahorel said, continuing to back away. “I fear the contagion. I will speak to Joly about preventative measures, then perhaps, gradually, I can continue to share your company.”
“To be fair,” Bossuet said. “If your only plan was to avoid him, this has had the same effect. At any rate, take a seat, drown your sorrows. I, for one, am not above drinking with a lawyer. So long as he pays, of course.”
