(putting on my mariner hat again) i think charybdis is a really good example of the worldbuilding problem in nolan's odyssey because according to nolan he wanted to have the gods express themselves through the natural world but in the movie the natural world is not very compelling. the only thing i thought was cool was when they show "a river of fire meeting a river of ice" as a river of lava meeting a glacier. Which is in the fucking background for like 30 seconds maximum. Can we get some drone shots in here for the love of god. we should be FEELING the wrath of poseidon from the sea even if odysseus denies it, not watching the crew get splashed by offscreen buckets. we should get dreadful shots of storms coming on or get jumpscared by white squalls. we should see rogue waves. Christopher Nolan has never made a sea movie before and so for all his gritty action chops he doesn't seem to know how to for example make a wave look real big, and that's honestly just not acceptable if you're going to take on the odyssey, and maybe that's why i was so unimpressed by the cinematography. The fucking Wolf Of Wall Street does the wrath of poseidon better in a 5 minute sequence. and for a writer/director who allegedly wants to make the magical feel natural, this total disinterest in actually portraying the majesty and gravity of the natural world made charybdis one of the biggest disappointments of the movie for me. To be clear i don't think there's anything wrong with doing a pirates of the caribbean style charybdis. i think that's awesome and charybdis in pirates of the caribbean was super exciting and scary when i saw it as a kid. but if you are going CGI whirlpool for your 3 hour summer action blockbuster you need to actually outdo or at least MEET fucking disney's pirates of the caribbean at the bar they set. instead we got a 5 second shot of a moderately(?) large and very fake-looking vortex in the middle of a calm sea just sitting there with no teeth or anything.
the thing is if you're actually trying to do realism over spectacle, charybdis is a huge opportunity. charybdis is my favorite maritime element of the odyssey because she IS EXPLICITLY a natural phenomenon. when she's described in the poem (living under a small rock on one side of a narrow channel, swallowing water and belching it back up periodically) i UNDERSTAND that this is a near-literal description of a strong tidal vortex in a dangerous narrows. that shit 100% happens in real life and it is scary and even today mariners treat these places with a mythological fascination. look up seymour narrows and the devil's hole in british columbia (there used to be a rock in the seymour narrows that according to local lore would create an even bigger vortex than the devil's hole before the canadian government blew up the rock so people would stop dying in the narrows). I also have seen some crazy breaker behavior on remote surveys that had me drawing a charybdis in my notes as a reminder of what to report for the coast pilot. so like. umm. if christopher nolan had any interest in depicting a natural world of mythological scale why on earth was charybdis so fake???? he had odysseus try to approach charybdis for some fucking reason-- why not justify it w odysseus thinking he's such a clever and excellent mariner he can make the passage at slack tide? why not set up and present charybdis as the scariest passage in the known world, the way she is in the text? mostly it comes down to nolan being a completely incurious filmmaker who thinks he's above the source material and above literally the entire physical world, and of course leaning in to the hollywood trend of including no one with any maritime knowledge in the development of maritime plot elements, which again is just not acceptable for THE ODYSSEY. and don't even get me started on the allision with scylla's rock. this guy isn't very good at boating
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
blakekathryn
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
