"It was strange being in such intimate quarters with his former friend. He had not spent this much time with him in over half a century, and the time they had spent together was in mangled city streets, the taste of blood and dust in the air as they sparred for the strongest place in hell's sinner hierarchy. He knew that dance, that familiar push and pull. But this new set of circumstances was something else entirely."
I took the angst from the finale and I made it even more upsetting...and sexy. Enjoy!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Everyone please give all the love to @arsvoxinferna for their beautiful cover art!! I’m obsessed tbh. ❤️
((This one shot continues in “Love That Devours Me”- a multichapter Explicit fic!!))
I posted this originally on Letterboxd, but I want to share with all my mutuals as well
Spoiler Alert!!!!!
I just went back from watching Nolan's Odyssey movie, and I have so many thoughts. Prepare yourselves, this will be a long review.
I will start by saying how I hate the culture war that this film caused. I think I hate both sides of the conversation. I hate the pathetic anti-SWJs and how they made a huge deal of Nolan casting a few non-white actors and a trans actor to play a cis role, as if POC and queer actors never had played roles in Greek mythology films before. But as a Greek mythology fan, I hate how my own camp reacted to this film, being rabid Homer purists and not even giving this film a chance.
It's Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. It's exactly what it says on the tin. He doesn't even try to be historically accurate. Who knew that brutalism would be an architecture style so popular in the Bronze Age Mediterranean? Odysseus travels in a viking ship for goodness sake. This is a guy who has no experience directing period fantasy pieces, so he designed ancient Greece as a generic "the past" with a few fancy costumes. I can't say I'm a fan of this aesthetic, but the film is so much more than that, and I feel like reducing the whole end product to a couple of weird directorial choices is shallow, intellectually dishonest and anti-art.
I can say it right. @the-blue-fairie, @thealmightyemprex, I'm speaking specifically to you because I know you read my reviews and you don't like Nolan's style, this film isn't for you. Everything that you dislike about Nolan's directorial style is present in this film. This doesn't make the film bad, though.
Everything is gray, dark, moody; the film takes itself as seriously as a shipwreck. It doesn't allow a single moment of levity. And it still embraces the fantasy elements.
Contrary to past adaptations, like the Hallmark miniseries or even the Tiktok concept album, it embraces the fantasy elements without embracing the wonder. The magic feels offputting, strange, like a disquieting apparition.
Polyphemus doesn't speak properly, just proffering a few otherworldly and inhuman ramblings after Odysseus and his crew blind him, asking for Poseidon to curse them.
The Lastrygonians aren't rock-throwing giants , but an army of ruthless giants in full metal armor who don't rest until they kill as many of Odysseus' crew as they could find.
Circe isn't a beautiful sorceress in a huge temple filled with nymphs, she's almost an old hag living in an old hut who has to manually twist the bodies of Odysseus' crew to turn them into pigs, in moments of visceral body horror. There's no Hermes here.
The ghosts of Odysseus' fallen men don't just haunt him, they try to physically attack him when they journey to Hades.
There are no Lotus Eaters. Calypso is drugging Odysseus with lotus flowers herself, making him forget almost everything and making him live in a mist of confusion for years. All that to make him forget the horrors he saw.
Telemachus and Penelope share a very tempestuous relationship for a son and mother, with Penelope bitter about being powerless as a woman, constantly arguing with her son, belittling him, while Telemachus is constantly trying to prove he is fully capable of leading Ithaca.
And more, there are no gods here. Only Athena appears, in brief visions Odysseus has, before it's revealed in the end that she's wearing the face of the young priestess that the Greek army killed when they profaned Athena's temple in Troy. It's left ambiguous if she's Athena herself or only a manifestation of Odysseus' guilt for the horrors he took part in. She has tears in her eyes when Odysseus remembers the priestess being killed and Athena's statue beheaded.
Everything is meant to be unpleasant, not fully into horror territory, but extremely upsetting, strange. Maybe other directors could have made it more striking. Nolan has a too down-to-earth style. He films fantasy like he films sci-fi, but the guy is effective at what he wants to portray.
He makes you feel like you are right there inside this world. No matter how anachronistic this Greek world is, it feels like it exists. You won't see any bad CGI or bad special effects. The combination of score, camera angles, and editing choices immerse you completely in this story, as if the adventures and horrors are happening all around you.
And all this lack of wonder has a point, because the film has a central theme: Hospitality and decay.
Hospitality in this world is not just courtesy, it's a sacred law that guides this civilization. You should accept and treat well everyone that reaches your residence, be it a noble or a beggar, because they may be a god in disguise. Yet, people are constantly exploiting or breaking the laws of hospitality, the sacred laws of Zeus: From Antinous and the other suitors abusing Penelope's hospitality for years, from Polyphemus eating Odysseus’ crew, from Circe turning them into pigs when they were almost starving, and lastly, when the Greeks offered the Trojan Horse as a gift of peace to Athena before slaughtering the whole city.
This single act of breaking the laws of hospitality is what dooms this entire world.
This film is set during the Collapse of the Age of Bronze, the period of dark ages between Mycenaean Greece and Classical Greece, a period in which the epic poems were meant as a reminder of all the glory lost in the process.
This is a world in decay, where everything is dying and collapsing.
At all times, there are constantly mentions of the Sea People and how they may attack and destroy their kingdoms at any time. The Sea People are an unknown people who are theorized by some historians to be one of the causes for the Bronze Age collapse. It’s one of the threats that makes the suitors’ situation even more urgent. Ithaca needs someone who can protect it from the Sea People.
And then, almost by the end of the film, it’s revealed: The Sea People are the Greeks who sacked Troy. The memory of what they have done, of how they broke the laws of Zeus spread through the Mediterranean, and that has caused a cascade effect of every rule that governs civilization starting to collapse.
This is the main reason for why Odysseus can’t go back home, he can’t live with what he has done. The whole journey is him dealing with his constant guilt and trying to make things better, but only making them worse as a result. He knows what he has done has consequences, and he’s watching as it spreads to the whole world.
In the end, Odysseus and Penelope exile themselves to a journey into the west, while Telemachus rules Ithaca as king, but even though our main leads are happy, it’s evidently clear that as a whole, this world, all kingdoms visited are doomed. Everything will collapse and the songs about their feats and mistakes will be the only things remembered.
The Trojan War is depicted as both this world's Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, and its Original Sin, the primordial crime from which every subsequent horror symbolically descends.
This film has a happy ending, but it doesn’t end on a hopeful note. The final shot of the film is the Trojan Horse ablaze, symbolizing the violation of the laws of hospitality and how that symbolizes the decay that will destroy everything.
We are living in times of economic recessions, environmental catastrophes, and liberal democracies in decay. Despite all the dubious choices Nolan made, the text is incredibly rich. Maybe this is the story for our times.
Forget not including the nobody scene, how could they cut the scene where Odysseus, because of his pride, tells the Cyclops who he is and where he’s from? HOW DOES POSEIDON KNOW WHO HURT HIS SON??? I’m like 95% sure that the Olympian gods were not omniscient, how did he know who to target???
He's not though. His belief in Athena, his guilt for what he did, what he witnessed, and those sacrificed. He's literally carrying that with him as he holds onto these mementos. That's pretty religious, no?
I get what you’re saying but it felt more like the gods (Athena) were just a metaphor for his guilt and the gods presence was really just natural occurrences or human intervention. To me he didn’t really believe in the gods he just followed the laws and such because he was supposed to (like bowing your head in prayer when you aren’t religious). For example, he says something like “the men were convinced I’d angered Poseidon” it just felt like he was removed from it and his story was all focused on his guilt and the guilt was what was punishing him, not the gods. It was just a very grounded take for such a fantastical story.
That's actually why it works for me. I'm no longer Catholic (I don't go to church on Sundays, I don't fast for Lent, etc.) but wherever I'm in church I still know all the words to the hymns, etc. So, like Odysseus being world-weary and that like diminishing his religiosity makes sense to me. But also, he can't shake it off completely. He's changed but he's not a different person.
That makes sense and if that was his goal with it then I’m glad he did it well and you related to it! For me I was wanting the standard odyssey with the gods and the mythos so it just wasn’t for me. I told my husband leaving the theater that it wasn’t my personal preference but it was its own interpretation and wasn’t meant to be the literal odyssey as we are accustomed to it. To each their own! (my husband really liked it btw but I’m the deconstructed Christian of the two of us haha ironic)
He's not though. His belief in Athena, his guilt for what he did, what he witnessed, and those sacrificed. He's literally carrying that with him as he holds onto these mementos. That's pretty religious, no?
I get what you’re saying but it felt more like the gods (Athena) were just a metaphor for his guilt and the gods presence was really just natural occurrences or human intervention. To me he didn’t really believe in the gods he just followed the laws and such because he was supposed to (like bowing your head in prayer when you aren’t religious). For example, he says something like “the men were convinced I’d angered Poseidon” it just felt like he was removed from it and his story was all focused on his guilt and the guilt was what was punishing him, not the gods. It was just a very grounded take for such a fantastical story.
My overall take away from Nolan’s Odyssey is when you suck all the whimsy out of the story, it really just starts to feel like a Gladiator type movie? So much of the story is the mythology and so, when you take that away or diminish it, it just doesn’t feel like the same story.
I kept finding myself dissapointed at the things he left out or changed. I feel like he missed the mark on some big themes of the story tbh.
It felt like a watered down version of it for the masses. Which maybe was what he was trying to do?? But I don’t like that.
this ended up turning into a 2k word long essay, so bear with me. discussion welcome!
disclaimers: i did not see this movie in an IMAX theatre. my background with the odyssey is that i have read both of homer’s epics several times, in several different translations, because the greek classics (homer, euripides/sophocles/aeschylus, etc) have been a personal passion for me for many years. but i do not claim to be an expert at all!
table of contents
comments on the technical aspects of the movie
what was zendaya doing?: divinity, fate, and the power of the gods
the “man of twists and turns”?: odysseus’s portrayal as a hollywood hero
the slave girls: the cycle of violence that…ended?
acting, pacing, additional changes and comments
part 1: technical aspects
i realize, after typing out the table of contents for what i want to talk about, that most of my review is quite critical. so i want to start off by saying that the odyssey is an epic. for thousands of years, the purpose of an epic has been to tell insanely long stories about extraordinary heroes who do extraordinary things. it’s supposedly to feel close to the gods, it’s supposed to be grand, and i think the technical aspects of this movie were able to do this better than any adaptation has so far. i truly think it was worth it to use IMAX cameras throughout, even though i have some issues with how pretentious it feels (the gods were pretentious!). i think it was worth it for the movie to be this long. the “epic” aspect of the poem was therefore captured quite well in my opinion, from a technical perspective. i know the movie stills tell a different picture, but it didn’t feel like a cheap medieval fantasy, and i think that’s something i appreciate a lot about the movie.
i will say though…i do not like the horse. you can look up pictures of the horse. it barely looks like wood, it doesn’t look like its time period at all, i wish the horse didn’t look so manufactured and shiny. not a huge deal though, it’s fine.
part 2: what was zendaya doing?
okay, now i’m going to start getting a bit more critical. and i want to say this as an objective fact, a HUGE part of the odyssey is about the gods. and how the gods have the control in the end, how much wiser they are, because human mortality is NOTHING to the gods. odysseus’s life is but a blip. the gods’ morning show. athena’s entertainment. so where is their power in the movie? what exactly do they do?
there were no scenes with the gods conferring in the movie. it’s fine i guess. but what i REALLY wanted to see was athena, and how she (and hermes) help odysseus in his journey. odysseus doesn’t know how to survive circe on his own. he doesn’t know how to fight the suitors on his own. there are SO MANY instances of athena telling odysseus exactly what to do in the poem. and the movie removed ALL of it.
zendaya (as athena) stood there for several scenes and did nothing, genuinely nothing. (it’s implied that she was mentor and was on the ship with telemachus to sparta, but that is ONE scene out of countless that she’s supposed to be in.) odysseus came up with every single one of his ideas by himself. and this movie decision is something that i really, really dislike.
the epic was passed down orally, then in writing, for thousands of years. humanity has put in substantial effort to keep it alive, and one of the biggest reasons is that it reminds us of the power of the gods, the inevitability of fate, the futility of mortals to stand up to the lifeless gods. this—the weakness of humanity—is the main lesson of the epic. instead, the movie went the opposite direction. it made odysseus more capable, and is fundamentally a movie about the strength of humanity.
part 3: the man of twists and turns?
i want to talk about odysseus next, and the definition of a hero. the epic hero, in classical literature, is a person who is admired for certain“heroic” traits, who is famous for their epic-worthy accomplishments, who has the support of the gods, and who has some kind of character flaw. this differs from our modern understanding of a hero, which is someone who is a role model for society. i think this movie tried to modernize what a hero is, and the character of odysseus we get as a result is very different.
first, odysseus’s wit is…overplayed. i talked about this in part 2, how he comes up with all his ideas by himself, with no input from the gods. this is NOT an accurate characterization of odysseus!
secondly, odysseus is kind of a hypocrite in the epic. he weeps for penelope every day on calypso’s island, and then at night goes and has sex with calypso. i’ve always disliked him a little bit for playing up his misery this way. in the movie, odysseus eats these lotus flowers that make him forget about his wife and son. which to me just reads like they’re removing yet another “negative” aspect of his character. same with circe: odysseus happily and willingly chose to stay with circe for a months. in the movie, he doesn’t stay on her island at all??
third: odysseus’s cruelty towards the slave girls is 100% SO completely important to understanding his character. it’s a major part of who he is, someone capable of this brutality. we can have many discussions about whether the slave girls “had it coming”, but the fact is that odysseus’s decision to murder them all IS brutal and violent and shocking. and in yet another effort to cleanse odysseus’s character of faults, in another effort to make him fit the modern hero, this scene is…REMOVED. YES THAT’S RIGHT, ENTIRELY REMOVED FROM THE MOVIE. the girls are spared. the end.
odysseus is described as a man of twists and turns. as a complicated man. i believe the movie’s attempt to turn him into a hollywood hero has removed his complexity.
part 4: the slave girls
let me elaborate on the slaves. the truth is that they are barely in the movie. not only is one of the most vividly brutal scenes in the poem (their hanging) flat out removed, i would say that other than melantho (the one who “betrays” penelope), their whole characters are absent from the film. i blame odysseus for this actually; in an effort to keep the focus on our brave hollywood hero odysseus, the “unimportant” women are brushed aside. of course.
but most importantly, the hanging of the girls has a wider message in the poem, which is that the cycle of violence never ends.
in the movie, there is a long speech between odysseus (in disguise) and penelope about the futility and brutality of war. i actually found it the most memorable and emotional moment in the film. but. is war the only thing that terrorizes us? is war humanity’s only crime? is war the only time we face violence?
NO!!! it is not!!! the cycle of violence never ends, odysseus’s mind will never be at rest, do you really think 20 years of fighting for his life will have no effect on him?? of course the hanging of the girls makes sense in that context. but instead (spoilers for the plot twist ending)…odysseus and penelope QUITE LITERALLY SAIL OFF INTO THE SUNSET TOGETHER. i’m not just saying this metaphorically. no slave girls killed. no more blood. no more violence. odysseus and penelope are in love as ever, and sail off into the sunset and live happily ever after.
absolutely not i say!! there are so many possible end scene ideas better than this one!!
part 5: acting, pacing, additional changes and comments
this review is horribly long already, so i’m going to give some rapid-fire miscellaneous comments.
i do recognize that it’s extremely difficult to turn the odyssey into one (1) singular movie. i understand the cuts, i wouldn’t want it to be any longer. by the time we got to the sun cattle scene i remember thinking, oh my god, i’m so ready for him to go home, i can’t sit through 10+ minutes of nausicaa and every other little detail of odysseus’s journey. so thank GOD they cut out nausicaa and her entire island. thank GOD they cut out the bags of wind. thank GOD they cut out returning to circe and going through scylla/charybdis again. i know not everyone will be happy with these cuts…but let me tell you, if i had to sit in that theatre for 2 hours and odysseus still had not landed in ithaca, my experience of the movie would be 10 times worse. i KNOW people will complain about the cuts, but i was so infinitely thankful for them, i truly was.
however. cutting out “nobody is my name”?? colossal crime. unforgivable. such a memorable part of the epic, a great display of odysseus’s wit, gone. gone gone gone. THE OLIVE TREE BED???? they could have stuck that in idc idc they could have. and even if it was just for a second, i really wanted to see cassandra in the trojan horse scene.
circe. ughhhhh. i like what they did with her character, i like the witchcraft, but i wish they didn’t cut the visit to her island to, like, a day. i love circe too much for them move on from her so soon!
i wasn’t initially opposed to helen’s casting at all, and i think the actor is gorgeous and did a fantastic job. my issue is that with the way she was treated by the spartans, and the way she was the only black person in the room…it kinda felt like her race was actively being used to make her look…exotic, almost? like i think it actually did affect the interpretation of her character, which i did not really like.
telemachus reminds me of percy jackson. i’m sorry but his acting took me out of it at times.
one of the things i liked about the odyssey is how odysseus was CRYING all the time. where is the weeping in this film? let my man cry!!
anne hathaway is gorgeous. i have no issues with her penelope. i also liked the scenes with eumaeus, as well as argos (the dog).
conclusion
i know i spent most of this review criticizing aspects of the movie, and i stand by those criticisms. however, i do like the rest of it, and i do think it’s worth seeing. for a movie of that length, though, i think seeing it once is enough for me.
