Saw The Odyssey last night. Had to chew on it for a bit, because the technical quality and the thoroughline throughout the film may have been great, but.... it's hovering between 2.5 to 3 stars for me. More under the cut.
This was a very boy movie. Odysseus as a character is meant to say something about opening the door to the fall of Troy of civilization itself. But what I saw were just blatant displays of patriarchal violence. In Troy, there are only two kinds of citizens: hard men in armor who FIGHT, and pretty young women who run and scream while their throats are slit open. There's one blink-and-you-miss-it shot (I grabbed my friend's arm when I caught it) of a woman being dragged away by several men, implying more will be done to her before the throat-cutting. There are no children in Troy, no elderly, no men who aren't soldiers. The fall of civilization is when the greatest prize and commodity of their world is soiled: women.
So the whole movie, we're supposed to see Odysseus as mournful and remorseful for unleashing evil, for opening a sort of Pandora's box by violating Zeus's Law in the most violent way possible (to lie in the name of Poseidon and slaughter innocents in a temple of Athena and break the law of Zeus, that's a triple!!!) and that everything that happened on that journey back was a result of it. I did love that "the people from the sea" was Odysseus' men and, presumably, the other Achaeans/Greeks sailing home.
What I didn't love was the inconsistency. We're supposed to believe Odysseus is carrying this terrible weight on his shoulders for violating divine law, and then we watch him blatantly interpret it to his advantage and needs right after that. When he and his crew pillage that village after chastising them for abandoning their homes instead of greeting them, when Odysseus invites himself into the cave of Polyphemus, when he tells his men "the gods help those who help themselves."
Those aren't the actions of a man who was so deeply ashamed of his plan with the Trojan Horse that he didn't want to go home. Then when he gets home, he takes back his house and defeats his enemies through more violence. He's exiled for this, and he knows it, and there's something to be said about him recognizing his son is a good man who will respect and uphold divine law where Odysseus failed, but it's shot like Batman. It's shot and scored like James Bond and Mission Impossible. It's meant to look and sound triumphant, heroic, not tragic, and even Telemachus gets a moment to be A Man Who Can Fight and Kill™.
A premise of the horrors and shames of patriarchal violence is resolved with more patriarchal violence.
Yes, this gets exactly at what rubbed me wrong about this adaptation. I keep seeing takes that the film has a strong anti-war message, which certainly is what Nolan *thinks* he's doing, but like many US Hollywood "war is hell" movies, he ends up undermining his own themes. Oppenheimer did this as well.
