ok I said I was going to do a Nolan Odyssey review so here goes, although Emily Wilson's review that dropped today covers a lot of similar ground:
First, a few words about what I am not going to do here. I'm not going to catalogue all of the ways that Nolan diverges from the source material and make a case why that's a bad thing. As I mentioned in the post I made on this blog a few days ago, I think it's essential when dealing with adaptations of ancient texts and especially the Homeric epics to keep in mind that the text in the form we have it, as well as the cultural meaning that it carries, is itself a construction of a ~2700 year reception tradition, and does not inherently have some sacred primacy. An adaptation is not necessarily "bad" and does not necessarily "misunderstand" the source material simply because it diverges from it. Neither O Brother, Where Art Thou? nor Derek Walcott's Omeros (both of which are much better Odyssey adaptations than this one) is especially faithful to the source text, and a lot of their power comes from the willingness to engage in a conversation with the source material rather than follow it to the letter.
Now that's out of the way, let me say that on every level but technical this is a terrible film. It's terrible not just as an Odyssey adaptation - although it certainly is that - but because of its own failings.
I'll start with what I believe the film is about, which is a white male American Christian war veteran on a long journey home haunted by guilt for the war crimes he committed overseas against a populace that mostly remains faceless. This is not a joke - it's my best attempt to make sense of the moral universe of the film, in which Homeric/archaic Greek religious concepts like xenia have been replaced with "Zeus's law" (Christianized as the Golden Rule) but also in which Odysseus fears that by devising the Trojan Horse, he has essentially caused the Fall of Man via the breakdown of "Zeus's law." Alissa Wilkinson writing for the NY Times and plenty of others have noted that the film is thematically a companion piece to Oppenheimer, but that might actually be underselling the extent to which Damon-as-Odysseus might as well be Oppenheimer. It's ancient Greek dressing on a story that makes no real sense outside of a 20th-21st century American Christian framework, a point that is uncomfortably driven home in a scene in which Odysseus' comrades tell an elderly man who does not speak their language that "we're Greeks. from Ithaca" in the film's koine of burly American-accented English as his village burns. Of course, the elderly man who has just lost everything is speaking Modern Greek - a hell of a metaphor for the way in which this film is so deeply assured in its rewriting of the Achaeans as Americans and its claiming of the ancient Mediterranean world as terra nullius for an American-war-veteran-going-home story, an ethos that also seems to have pervaded the filming process.
There are, of course, other consequences to the portrayal of Odysseus as a proto-Christian war veteran haunted by guilt and PTSD. My lovely mutual Mal ( @gaius-sempronius-grackle) points out in this review that Nolan clearly wants to be adapting the Aeneid, an observation I completely agree with, and the Odysseus we get is far more pius than polytropos. But there's also not a single character in the entire film that is polytropos or even seems to show much hint of complexity. Excellent actors like Lupita Nyong'o and Elliot Page are wasted in poorly-scripted roles that give them nothing to work with, and Penelope is not the complex, tactically-minded woman of the Odyssey but an utterly one note character. Tom Holland's Telemachus likewise doesn't really do much of anything, because no one in this film does except for Matt Damon.
Emily Wilson's review also points out another crucial issue with the film - its complete sexlessness. The removal of any material from Books 23 and 24 from the film means that we don't get any real emotional resolution to Odysseus and Penelope's arc - much has been said about whether and when sex scenes are "necessary" (a framing I mostly reject), but it's hard to argue that there's a more necessary sex scene in all of ancient literature than the one in Odyssey 23. But we also have no sex between Odysseus and Calypso (who, because she's not a goddess, puzzlingly just seems to be a woman living alone on an island who feeds lotus to passers-by) or Odysseus and Circe. At the same time, for a movie that seems to be extraordinarily keyed into a certain aesthetic of male homosociality, we don't even get any spark of eroticism or emotional connection between men, either. In fact, from this blogger's perspective as a bisexual man, it's striking that a movie with this many sweaty men manages to feel this utterly sterile, sexless, and uninterested in the human body and embodied experience.
This all brings me to one of the few moments that bizarrely enough does work, which is the Circe scene. Mostly this is because of Samantha Morton's performance, but the actual portrayal of the transformation of Odysseus' men into pigs is notable both as one of the most unnerving things I've seen in a recent film (and most of the cinema I watch is horror!) and as a bizarrely erotic scene. It's one of very few moments where you actually feel the uncannyness of the Odyssey's apologue, and one of few moments where the lack of faithfulness to the source material actually seems generative (side note: if you are at all sensitive to emetophobic triggers or body horror, I would recommend fully walking out of the theater for this scene). The Polyphemus scene is similarly unnerving, with creature design that reminded me quite a bit of the Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth, although it's held back by its refusal to sit with the implications of Odysseus and his companions' violation of xenia and (ok, I said I wouldn't list infidelities as flaws but just this once) its decision to make Polyphemus incoherent rather than allowing one of the most famous exchanges in the poem to play out.
I could go on about some of my other least favorite aspects of this film, including the complete removal of Achilles, whose conversation with Odysseus is one of my favorite moments in the entire Odyssey, and the refusal to let any of the recognition scenes but especially those involving Eurykleia and Argos breathe. But all of these things are relatively minor compared with the film's biggest issue and the true reason I think it cannot be taken seriously, which is the "civilizational" framing of the story. Much has been made of the absurdity of the film's characters being aware of their own existence in the Bronze Age, but ultimately the obsession with the end of the Bronze Age and the constant references to the Sea Peoples etc. are all symptomatic of the fact that it's a film that is both deeply American and utterly obsessed with imperial decline. And while it's one thing for an adaptation to speak to its own era and its own audience - something that all adaptations do - the film's utter lack of curiosity about the Homeric world at anything more than a surface level turns it into a giant, bombastic, and deeply boring mess.
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