The email arrived in the morning, about 7 hours before I was to see The Odyssey on glorious 70mm IMAX.
Unfortunately I have some bad news. We encountered an issue with our film system lamp before our first show of the day today and had to cancel the show. The nature of the issue requires in depth technical repairs that will effect all further shows for today.
Dammit!
I was in Indianapolis for Gencon and decided to avail myself of the opportunity to see Christopher Nolan's latest epic on the big-big screen and on genuine film, the way he and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, intended. Back in 2023 I saw Nolan's Oppenheimer on 70mm IMAX there and was looking forward to further Nolanian celluloid revelry. But cruel Fate intervened which meant I was relegated to seeing it projected digitally onto the IMAX screen at the Indiana State Museum which, I should add, has an exhibit going on now about cats and dogs.
Well, I will have to be content with looking forward to Nolan's next summer blockbuster on 70mm at a Gencon coming soon. (When the Signia by Hilton Indianapolis is open and I get a hotel room downtown again. Rant over.)
Truth be told, I am not a Nolan fanboy. I respect his love of film, the IMAX format, and practical effects quite a bit but his output after The Prestige - what I've seen of it - has been hit or miss. I love that he loves film but I don't necessarily love his films. Going into the theater last month my main concern was peeing as much as possible before taking my seat as The Odyssey is nearly three hours long and I wanted to see every byte of every digital frame. I am incredulous that men in middle age or older make these 3 hour epics and don't include an intermission. L-A-M-E. I get it, it's your movie and you can sit around in an editing bay and hit pause at your leisure to take a leak. However, I do not have that luxury.
Beyond prostate issues, my hope was to simply have a good time watching Homer's poem brought to life on a ginormous screen. On that count, The Odyssey delivered.
It had been several years since I'd read the poem (Robert Fagles' translation) so it was not exactly fresh in my mind as the lights went down but I recalled various plot elements from the written work that Nolan had discarded as I watched.
I want to add that there was one trailer at this screening. Well, not a trailer, really, as it was a few minutes of Dune 3 or whatever it's called. Basically a bunch of futuristic flying Higgins boats land on some planet. Ramps open and space infantry run out looking for shelter on some kind of Herbertian version of Omaha Beach. Laser cannons make mincemeat of many of them before a giant worm emerges from the ground and basically it's real shit show for the poor space infantry.
I am not someone who maintains that Nolan had any obligation to slavishly adhere to the source material but some of the things he excised disappointed me. The Odysseus in the movie wasn't as clever as Homer's hero, e.g. - where was the "nobody" subterfuge? Odysseus is supposed to be hubristic - he didn't tell the cyclops his real name in the movie, did he?
Instead it seems that Nolan crossed Homer with The Deer Hunter. Matt Damon's Odysseus is suffering from PTSD after the Trojan War and 10 years of wandering doesn't help. Speaking of the wandering, Scylla was really neat and Charybdis looked fantastically menacing on the IMAX. Those giant armored warriors - weren't they cannibals in the poem? I suppose the main point was that Odysseus lost a lot of men and was left with but one ship. Still, that scene feels incomplete, a bit random.
The Odysseus of the film is a bit one note - he's got shell shock. His cleverness doesn't get the attention it deserves, although the Trojan Horse scene is really neat. It gave you a taste of his ingenuity and a large dose of the horror of war that has so traumatized him.
The Circe sequence in the film was great fun and the transmogrification of Odysseus' men into pigs was simply fantastic. The way they gorged themselves with the stew and how she massaged them and put her hand in their mouths to mold their faces into porcine visages was at once entrancing and grotesque.
Didn't Odysseus schtup Circe and Calypso in the poem? He is oddly asexual in the film.
I recall being rather appalled at the graphic violence in the poem as Odysseus puts paid to the hopes of the suitors by terminating them with extreme prejuidice. If I recall correctly, Homer describes evisceration and a pecker or two being lopped off. Odysseus is absolutely vicious. While he is definitely out for blood in the movie, it's mostly stabs and slashes with no viscera falling out.
Robert Pattinson is a fine actor to my mind and he is generally good as the venal, arrogant jagoff of a suitor, Antinous, in the movie. Yet I had to wonder why Nolan had him verbalize what we were able to so plainly see in the scene where Odysseus returns. The weapons that line the great hall are stowed in a room upstairs so that they're inaccessible to the suitors who are locked in when Odysseus appears to take his revenge. But one of those who sought to gain entry into Penelope's knickers and purse enters the store room and busts a hole open in the floor down which he drops weapons for those confronting Odysseus. Every time he drops a spear or some kind of melee weapon, Antinous is shown in close-up urging someone to take up the newly available weapon.
A spear drops down so he says frothing at the mouth, "Get the spear!" Then a sword falls to the floor and we again cut to the suitor in close-up who shouts, "Use the sword!" It made for a weird, superfluous kind of play-by-play.
And there's Athena. Rather than a goddess of war & strategy who favors Odysseus because of his cunning and actively intervenes on his behalf, she's just this robed apparition in the movie that glumly stares at our hero for a spell before disappearing. And she's not clad in armor nor does she have a shield nor a helm nor any weapon of any kind. She appears in robes looking more like a sullen Aphrodite than a bad ass who wields an Olympian croupier stick as she plots of the fates of men. It's like having Thor appear in a suit & tie with no hammer.
OK, so Nolan's movie is missing a lot of the cool bits of the poem. But as far as spectacle goes, it was, um, spectacular.
The Trojan Horse was really neat. Rather than standing upright on all four and being on wheels, it has its two front legs up in the air with no helpful wheels. And so it's a hard slog pulling it into Troy meaning Odysseus and his men are thrown about as the horse is dragged inside the city walls and they relieve themselves in situ. The sack of Troy was exciting and visceral. And horrific too so it's no wonder that Odysseus agonizes once the war is done.
As I said before, the scene with Scylla and Charybdis was thrilling. The long shot of the whirlpool churning away amongst the rocks was gorgeous on the IMAX and made me feel the peril in my bones. The sequence where Odysseus' men are slaughtered by the giants was heartrending. This bit also benefited from the IMAX format by emphasizing the large size difference between Odysseus' men and the badass islanders. The heroes of the Trojan War are puny in contrast to the warriors who are built like Tiger tanks and you just know they're doomed from the start.
Circe was cool but I felt that the scenes with Calypso didn't get across just how long he had been there very well. But I think Nolan gets away with combining the nymph and the Lotus Eaters.
I felt that The Odyssey was an old school Hollywood epic full of beautiful actors with lots of dramatic conflict, thrilling action, and a fairly simple good vs. evil binary. Trading the wily, horny, hubristic hero of the written word for a shell shocked warrior rendered a more simplistic Odysseus. Nolan's hero is imperfect but not flawed.
I've been thinking about theme here. Zeus' Law™ is invoked multiple times during the course of the film, - the concept that people should welcome visitors and treat them well and, in turn, guests should treat their hosts with kindness. Odysseus sees the Trojan Horse episode as a violation of it in that he treated his hosts poorly. Really poorly. The sack of Troy here is a lengthy sequence full of Greeks committing atrocities. It is quite intense as we see that women and children are not spared.
And so he feels tremendous guilt - a bit like the subject of Nolan's previous film, Oppenheimer, dare I say. I'd need to watch The Odyssey again to get this straight but I think our hero sees Zeus' Law™ breaking down everywhere in his homeland and he is exiled at the end of the movie for dishonoring the ultimate law of hospitality in a scene that reminded me of the end of The Lord of Rings, like he's being sent to the Valinor Home for Naughty Kings.
Odysseus sees the Bronze Age coming to a close and a dark age, of sorts, beginning because Zeus' Law™ is being ignored. And he has contributed to this.
Does this, along with a generic "war is bad" thing count for deep thematic content? It's a general exhortation/admonition that we should be nice to one another. I suppose this is the true modernization of the tale.
Before I end, the soundtrack deserves mention. Nolan eschewed the conventional orchestral accompaniment with sweeping washes of strings for music that sounded like it had one foot in the ancient world and the other in 2026. Were replicas of ancient instruments used? Sampled? The music aimed to manipulate the audience just like a typical soundtrack would but it felt older, more period. Good stuff.
Despite some shallow characterization and missing source material I simply had a good time watching The Odyssey. It was wonderful to see so much of the epic brought to life on a very large screen. Watching Antinous get what was coming to him was extremely satisfying while seeing Argos lying on a dung heap tugged at my heart strings.
However flawed Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey may be, it is still full of thrills and a lot of fun.
