Chris Nolan is back with The Odyssey, his most epic (pun intended) film to date. Having already amassed over $264M worldwide, the movie is an absolute triumph in filmmaking and pop culture entertainment. Once you see it, you’ll quickly realize Nolan has been retelling the story of Odysseus over and over again for almost his entire career, making this the most Chris Nolan movie Chris has ever Nolan’d. There’s a clear theme running through his filmography: the hubris of man, the guilt of being a “great man,” and how our greatest achievements can also be our biggest shortcomings. It’s an important film that fully cements Nolan as this generation’s auteur. More than PTA, Denis, Cuaron, or any number of amazing filmmakers, Nolan is making movies for our time, right here, right now.
Choosing to adapt The Odyssey is as bold a choice as one can make. It is, in many ways, the original story. A story every artist has been playing off of for centuries. So how do you adapt it for a modern audience? Nolan smartly dispenses with a lot of the fantastical elements (but leaves a healthy amount in) and chooses to tell this epic firmly through the eyes and emotions of the humans in it. In Nolan’s hands, Odysseus is Oppenheimer, the Trojan Horse is the Bomb, and both represent the idea that to be a “great man” or a mythical figure, you must abuse your knowledge of the human spirit. Oppie knows the US must be first to build the bomb so the Nazis don’t. He spins a tale of glory when recruiting for the Manhattan Project and succeeds in ushering in the Atomic Age, only to realize he has destroyed the world he knew and birthed another. Odysseus follows a similar path. In building the Trojan Horse, a trick disguised as a peace offering to the Gods, and sacking Troy, Odysseus defies the Gods and breaks a sacred pact between humanity and the rulers above (in the film, he calls it Zeus’ Law). Breaking that pact leads to the death of the Bronze Age and ushers in a new, darker era. Odysseus and his men become the haunting “people from the sea,” and he struggles to accept the consequences of his actions.
When I read The Odyssey in high school, I didn’t connect with any of the characters. Sure, it’s tough watching a guy just want to get home, but Odysseus is also a dick, an asshole, a liar, who doesn’t always make the life-changing choice for himself. In the original text, Odysseus doesn’t leave Calypso’s island under his own free will; Hermes shows up and tells him, “Hey bro, Ithaca is in shambles, you gotta get out of here.” That worked as a storytelling device in Ancient Greece, but for modern audiences it doesn’t quite cut it. Centering Odysseus’ time on Calypso’s island as a period of mental and physical waywardness makes his eventual decision to leave that much more impactful.
Quick side tangent: I resonated with Odysseus’ time on Calypso’s island far more than I expected. Eating the lotus flower to basically stay high for seven years, forgetting everything that came before or will come after, is deeply analogous to life in the 2020s after COVID. A lot of people still feel lost at sea. I certainly do: that restless feeling of knowing there’s more you should be doing but not being able to conjure the courage to do it, falling back on drugs or vices to make the pain go away. That’s an intelligent adaptive choice for that part of the story. What I remembered most from the original text was that Calypso is a nymph and she and Odysseus spend seven years going at it; that’s what I had taken from his time on that lonely island. What Nolan found was a more human experience to recenter Odysseus’ wants and motivations.
Much has been said about the different formats and aspect ratios for this film. As the first movie fully shot on IMAX cameras, it should inherently be seen in an IMAX theater. However, having now seen it twice, once in 70mm IMAX and once in standard DCP, the difference is minimal. You should just see it in whatever format you can get a ticket to. The IMAX experience is still unmatched; the images totally absorb you, but the film is in no way reliant on it. If you’re new to formats and don’t quite understand what the fuss is about, Ryan Coogler made a fantastic video on the subject in the lead-up to Sinners that’s worth a watch.
The film is exquisitely made: shot by Hoyte van Hoytema, production design by Ruth de Jong, edited by Jennifer Lame, scored by Ludwig Göransson. Nolan is truly working with the best in the business. The score is really, really good, my personal favorite being the Siren song. It’s beautiful and haunting, melancholic and off-kilter, and perfectly captures the tragedy at the heart of the story. It also doubles as Odysseus’ theme, which is a pretty clever choice, and will be in my rotation for a while. The Sirens sequence is maybe the most emotional part of the film. I won’t spoil it, but Nolan’s best writing is here, in Damon’s description of the song to his crew. Poetic, haunting, honest, and beautiful. Every department working in perfect harmony.
The effects are also incredible. Every ten or fifteen minutes I’d find myself thinking, “how did this motherfucker pull this off?” The clear standouts are the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, and Circe’s pigs. Nolan’s steadfast commitment to practical filmmaking makes it even more impressive, though that’s not to say he doesn’t use CGI; he just uses it more effectively than most. Even after two viewings, I don’t know how he pulled off the Laestrygonians, the silver armor-clad giants. One moment you think “that’s a CGI guy,” then he cuts to another shot and pulls out another insane magic trick. It’s an incredible sequence. And that doesn’t even touch the sequence in Hades, Agamemnon’s sick black armor, Elliot Page’s great performance, the insane water photography (there’s even a moment where they pass real dolphins jumping out of the water), or Pattinson being a perfect sniveling bastard. The film is pretty much a masterpiece, and I honestly don’t know where Nolan goes from here. Maybe a horror film. Maybe the Bible. Who knows. What I do know is that I’m grateful to be alive at the same time Nolan is making movies, because he will now certainly go down in history as the filmmaker of the early 21st century.
I got the popcorn bucket as well 🙂
