general thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey
[This was originally written for a thread in a Discord server before it, ah, ballooned in size and is hence being posted here for easier reading and less disruption. This is not a comprehensive analysis by any means, doesn't contain full development of ideas, and is rather informal.]
[I also do not have a way to spoiler-tag on Tumblr. Most or all spoilers are pretty vague and refer to single scenes or narrative threads.]
I am returned from Nolan's Odyssey! Overall thoughts: in a vacuum, this is a pretty good to quite good film. The cinematography is mostly effective (horrendously juddery in many places, which both makes some parts -- being chased around in a dark cave, the crush to get out of Athena's burning temple, etc. -- very good at disorienting the audience in a way that doesn't feel pointless and also makes others fucking annoying, e.g., being unable to make your eyes focus on anything in the Troy sacking sequence, which leaves you with the impression that "faceless women are being slaughtered", which was probably intentional but is… more headache-inducing than pathos-touching).
the stand-out here is the monsters, Scylla and [Polyphemus]. They're very effective, in large part because the movie conceals them -- for most of the time they're on screen being threats, you don't quite see enough of them to get a sense on where they are. Something is coming out of nowhere and eating people, and you get limbs or pieces of a face and you have to fight to resolve it into a whole.
Nolan et al. are also pretty good, for the most part, at building emotionally resonant narrative threads. There's this one thing with a dog that's surprisingly effective, and the revelation that the Athena hallucination is a priestess of Athena whom Odysseus saw brutally killed by his men, which is foreshadowed by Troy being the only place with a distinct visual identity and Zendaya's outfit having that same visual identity, and then having that hallucination be an incarnation of his guilt over Troy when he's finally talking with Penelope again and finally confronting his feelings about Troy and his role in its destruction, is very well done indeed.
also the score is pretty good. I think they had Ludwig Goransson on board, so that makes sense. The actors generally did great jobs; no major comments there. There were no obvious "aw man you're a bad actor" incidents, which I know is a low bar but it cleared it. Penelope and Helen were very effective, Odysseus and Telemachus were pretty good, Circe was… creepy in a way I liked well enough and then really effective when she was telling off Odysseus. The only ones who come to mind as mid were Calypso and Agamemnon, both bit parts.
[Given I'm posting this on the wider internet, I ought to clarify that while I think all of the following are definite issues, they are less than I have with many movies. This was a fine and enjoyable film by a talented set of people, and I'm not denying they put their hearts into it and I'm not shaming you for liking it. In a vacuum, I liked it. With that said:]
the plate armor people should have just been cut. They are on screen for perhaps seven minutes and are of literally zero benefit to the plot; they just destroy two of Odysseus's ships and kill all of the men aboard, which could have been brought about just as well by Polyphemus -- whom I have thoughts on later -- destroying two of the ships, or, hey, your offscreen Poseidon doing that. They're wasted time. If you're going to have them, have someone comment on the fact that they used a child as bait and compare it to the horse. If you're going to go for the angle that Odysseus's idea to take advantage of the Trojans' trust via the horse, which isn't even what they do in the movie, (a) is a violation of xenia (b) destroys the moral fabric of the world and brings on the Bronze Age Collapse, you need to like. Develop that theme before the last fifteen minutes of the movie. And this is such an obvious way to do it.
the religious hysteria when they decide Polyphemus was muttering Poseidon's name and must therefore -- inexplicably, before any weather has turned or anything -- be his son is really not well developed. "From then on any misfortune was more proof in the men's minds that Poseidon was against us." --Odysseus to Calypso, paraphrased. And they decide it immediately after they leave his island, and the way this is done is one guy stating "you know he was Poseidon's son?" Someone asks why. "Because he was saying Poseidon's name." (He was just blubbering in pain and/or speaking an unintelligible language. It was not resolvable as Poseidon.)
also, the presence of the gods is zig-zagged with Odysseus defying them and getting away with it versus all of his men being very literally and obviously killed by the hands of Zeus and Poseidon, because they've killed some cows that directly belong to another god, without priests or anything as intermediaries, and intentionally sparing Odysseus for not touching the herd. And then there's the renunciation, "your gods" (said to another character), which is… odd… and not fully developed. There is a longer thread of him defying the gods, [which was a concern of the Discord server in that it reflects a modern atheist viewpoint more than an earnest attempt to adopt an ancient Greek viewpoint, to reflect the actual text, or to deal with the interesting question "what if the gods were gits and you couldn't deny that they were real?",] but... it's developed but not effectively, you know?
Characterize Ithaca, please. If it is worth raising an army to defend from the Sea Peoples, I want to see why. All I know about it is that Penelope wants to defend it, Odysseus and his men care enough to want to go home (the men here being the thing that partially characterizes Ithaca), and it produced the fucking suitors. whom I hate. (the movie was very effective at that.) Penelope is stuck in the palace for social reasons, but the viewer is not; can we not get five minutes (possibly reallocated from the redundant plate armor people) in the streets seeing what's so worth fighting for? It can be in the past or in the present, I'm not picky.
I would have liked to see Odysseus honoring his men. They deserved that, and it would have hit me in the emotions.
and now for the star of the show: the fucking Sea Peoples and the double-fucking BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE REFERENCES. The film goes for a thing where Odysseus's men are maybe the Sea People? and/or at least responsible for some of the phenomenon, showing up and raiding places in order to get home, but then doesn't commit fully to that and also has part of it be real Sea Peoples. Probably.
One or two nods in the background would have been fine and an amusing historical reference -- what, you're getting raided by mysterious people in kinds of boats you don't recognize, acting basically like Vikings? that could be Odysseus and his guys, or it could be the Sea Peoples! fun historical reference! -- but holy crap it is over-done. They are a looming threat that isn't tied into the actual plot, but they receive so much screen time -- probably we spend more time hearing people in the palace talk about them than we do on the goddamn plate armor guys -- that it's clear the writers want you to think they're clever, and/or want there to be enough references to "Sea Peoples" and "Bronze Age" to maybe make a non-historically-inclined audience dredge up "oh, Bronze Age Collapse caused by Sea Peoples! ooh cool!" from the depths of their sixth-grade history knowledge, even if it takes eight different mentions.
And HOLY FUCK it is IMPOSSIBLE to take the way Nolan et al. decided to spend the end of the movie -- ham-handedly foreshadowing the Bronze Age Collapse -- seriously. Somehow, Odysseus Just Knows that him breaking xenia has caused the Sea People Apocalypse. And that there's going to be a Sea People Apocalypse specifically. This is not creeping guilt or him blaming himself for the decay of civilizations in a more abstract sense, or a xenia-focused sense, or anything that would be narratively fitting -- he literally knows the Bronze Age Collapse is coming, and that it's going to be called that, and that, apparently, everyone who can write or compose worth a darn is going to stop existing, so "through the dark ages to come" their story will only be sung. (There's no evidence of writing in the film, and I've added the word compose.) I nearly uncontrollably cackled in the theater over "Our age of bronze is collapsing" because I forgot it was coming. I just… that's the thing I chose to monologue about to my parents. It's the most blatant craft fault in this film.
The mixed cast is handled very well for the most part; actors slot fluidly into characters and positions without the movie going "wowww look at us we're being so diverse," like I've seen some other things do. The problem is that all of your white people are from northwest europe, or are americans whose ancestors are from northwest europe. In this adaptation of an ancient greek epic. It's not like the greek people went extinct sometime between then and now, and you don't even have the dubious excuse that their language went extinct like you might if you were adapting the tale of the shipwrecked sailor (ancient egyptian). they're literally right there.
Polyphemus: holy shit I have complaints about Polyphemus. I am… very curious… about why they made him nonverbal. (Or at least gave him no speaking lines except for some pained blubbering.) The in-text explanation is "do you talk to ants?", but it plays into a stereotype sooo blatantly. A nonverbal, implicitly mentally disabled person with a facial abnormality? Woooowwww, so original… (What I mean by facial abnormality here is not the one eye, which is completely expected cyclops behavior; it's the nose being randomly turned ninety degrees. I assume they did this to essentially make the nose match the eye, but it ends up looking like, well, a facial abnormality that someone might actually have a version of.) IDK. This sort of thing is pretty common in movies, so I'm not accusing Nolan of more ableism and face bias than the rest of Hollywood, but it's still very much there.
and you could fix this so easily. Put the nose on a vertical axis. Then have Odysseus and his men, who are hoping for dinner and provisions under the rules of xenia/Zeus's law, greet him when he enters (being surprised at him being a giant cyclops, but still trying to say hi and establish a dialogue). Have Polyphemus just dismiss them completely, maybe shaking his head and laughing and saying "ants!" or "you presume [something or other making his viewpoint clear]?" Note also that when Polyphemus enters the movie Odysseus has just said "let's stoke the fire and welcome the owner back!" in exchange for getting to eat their very good cheese. Instead they all go silent and draw their weapons.
[insert general concerns of this thread]
also the aesthetic is very very generic hollywood dark medieval, but we knew that was coming. the only place with a consistent visual identity is Troy, which is used for good foreshadowing one quite effective time, but I cannot tell Ithaca from anywhere else.
also², Odysseus looks like an idiot multiple times in this movie, which could have just been avoided, but this is eight thousand characters over budget and I'm not going to talk about that.
anyway, in a vacuum I'd give this film an 85/100. it avoided making me hate it, but when it's dumb it's really dumb.
