The Odyssey - a failed update with all the usual Nolan problems

I thought I should go see what all the fuss was about, so finally got around to seeing the movie while it's on its last cinema legs.

Unfortunately, there was very little about it that impressed me.  The best actor in it, I thought, was Anne Hathaway, by far.  Tom Holland didn't do a bad job.  As is usual for me, Matt Damon left me cold.

I was never bored - as I was continually mentally engaged with why it was failing to impress.   Let me list the ways!:

*    the unimpressive directing, cinematography and overall look of the film.  This was really the most surprising aspect, as I was expecting at least a great looking film with impressive sets, shots, and Nolan's famous practical effects.  But I really felt continually underwhelmed.  There's an endless number of (quite unremarkable) big open beach scenes, even allowing for the image of the Trojan horse being a nice one.  The movie somehow manages to make the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean look pretty scenically dull:  Troy looked like it was a relatively small backlot; Odysseus's home was one of the least impressive palaces I've ever seen; Circe lived in a small dilapidated hut instead of (what the internet tells me) should have been a "grand stone palace".  The boat was OK, but nothing we haven't seen before, and the whirlpool it skirted was nothing to write home about, visually.  There was no real effort put into the siren's scene.  Overall, I was infinitely more impressed with the visuals of The Pirates of the Caribbean initial trilogy: it created a fantastic looking, historical/supernatural seagoing universe.  

In Nolan's movie, whenever we did get a nice, dramatic shot, it didn't usually last long because - see next tab:

*    the editing was continually too fast, as was the dialogue, most of the time.   I kept thinking that the pace of dialogue (let alone some of its content - like "Dad", which didn't actually bother me too much) felt too modern, and not "classical".   But the editing too was definitely rushed, and especially ruined any excitement in fight scenes.   You basically couldn't tell what was going on in any detail in the forest fight; the sack of Troy was a muddled mess (as well as featuring the worst editing ever around opening the door); and the climatic "Odysseus fights the suiters" sequence I found a complete mess with a highly irritating attempt by the soundtrack to drum up (literally) excitement.   It was a case of John Wick lite, with somewhat less bone crunching sounds.

*  the score.  Remember my complaint about the continual, insistent score in Oppenheimer?  There's exactly the same problem in this movie.   He uses scores as an aid to propelling stories and doesn't know when to quit and let a scene breathe naturally.   I am completely puzzled why he does that.   I know from Reddit that some people found the sound mix far too loud in too many scenes - and yes, I would agree that like virtually all recent Nolan movies  the dialogue was sometimes hard to catch clearly due to sound and score - but overall I didn't find the loudness as bad as some others complained.   I more or less go into his movies expecting some loud sounds and irritation to some degree about the mix, it's just a question of whether it ends up being in the "so bad I must complain about it in the review" range.

OK, now let's move onto my "meta" take - and issues with - what Nolan was trying to do.

I said to a friend online that I thought the concept was interesting - a modernisation of the story that somewhat secularised it by treating the Gods as of uncertain reality, and made Odysseus the equivalent of a guilt-ridden modern PTSD sufferer returning from fighting a war that turned out to be pretty pointless (like Vietnam or Iraqi war vets).   Also, kind of a "the true story of Odysseus - he's not the hero you thought he was!" re-write.

I mean, the intent to remove the supernatural seemed clear from the opening title, which noted it was "a time of apparent magic" (emphasis on "apparent").   The movie then continually presents the only god who appears (Athena) as quite possibly a hallucination, a Cyclops which might just be a genetic mutation, and forest giants with moving trees but not much else that seems magical about them.  Calypso was so humanised that my son thought she was just an ordinary woman who liked living alone on the beach and seeing what men the sea washed up for her company, and who she then trapped with drugs and sex!

I gather that this is very different from the poem, where the gods are directly intervening all the time, including Athena helping protect the hero in the suiter fight, Zeus telling Calypso to let her lover go home, etc.

So the movie is, in many ways, very light with the supernatural touch, except that with Circe turning men into animals, there is no doubting at all that the supernatural is real and there's nothing "apparent" about magic in that world.   (I suppose you could say the same about the visit to Hades - but that is after Circe's confirmation that the supernatural is definitely real.)   

So what seemed to be the point of the re-telling wasn't followed through, at all.  Or it was done in a half-arsed way.   To me, you either go all the way into the mythology and we have the fun of seeing, say, a gigantic Poseidon causing trouble, Zeus with the blue glow that I liked from Clash of the Titans, Athena deflecting arrows, etc; OR you do the complete removal of the supernatural, and turn it into a secular story where people only imagine magic and the gods are real.   Going only half way along the "lets make it more real for the modern audience" route was, I think, the fundamental flaw from the start.

But wait a minute, I hear some reader say - how could you possibly completely remove the supernatural  from the story and still have it The Odyssey?   

Well, I think the movie itself suggested a way:  with Odysseus becoming a lotus eating junky for 7 years (which he doesn't do in the poem, apparently), how hard would it be for there to be a reveal that he was the sole survivor of a normal shipwreck - caused by one of his own bad decisions - and then spent years hallucinating (due to his drug habit) the various supernatural incidents of the trip that worked to only exacerbate his guilt about the war and accidentally killing his men?   

See - easy peasy!   Why aren't I consulted on these things??

Now, I am aware that in my recent discussion of Disclosure Day I complained that it seemed a lot of negative reviews were based on the movie not being what the viewer thought the movie should be, rather than fairly assessing it as it was.   You might complain that I am doing the same thing here, and I guess I am, to a degree.   But I think I am more presenting an argument was to why the movie seemed on its face, from the very first title, to be caught in the middle of conceptual indecision, and I am suggesting a way it could have avoided that.   I don't think you can say the same about Disclosure Day, as there is nothing to indicate that it was confused as to what it wanted to show.   

Anyway, I guess I should end on the point that, of course, the Right wing culture warring over some of the cast choices, or silly things like how authentic the armour or boat was, etc, didn't influence me at all.  If anything, it would have made me happier to be able to say "those idiots, letting stupid things cloud their enjoyment of a great film."   But as it happens, I did watch Critical Drinker's review of the movie months ago and, as much as I dislike the excessiveness of his culture war attacks on Hollywood, I thought he got it right:  the movie is underwhelming and actually pretty forgettable.  It certainly has no emotional kick (not that Nolan is ever great at that), and the strong critical reception is a bit of a puzzle, frankly.   Fortunately, there are a handful of critical reviews by "normal" high profile critics, and there are plenty of threads on Reddit along the same "underwhelmed" theme, so I think I am right in predicting that this movie is going to be reassessed downwards in a decade or two's time.

Anyone who disagrees is welcome to try to start a fight in comments.

Update:   I forgot to mention, it seemed that some Right wing commentary - including I think Ben Shapiro? - praised the film because Nolan seems to have emphasised Greek ideas of morality as being equivalent to the Judeo-Christian "Golden Rule". As US Catholic writes:

Nolan also reinterprets one of Homer’s key themes in terms overtly drawn from one of the most revered of Jesus’ sayings, the Golden Rule. The ancient Greek precept of hospitality or xenia, called “Zeus’s law” in Nolan’s film, is repeatedly summarized as treating strangers and others “as you would be treated.” Yes: “Zeus’s law” is equated with Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31.    

Actually, that article at US Catholic goes on at length about how Nolan deals with Christian themes in a pagan setting, and it's quite interesting.  It does note this near the end:

Nolan’s Odyssey is ultimately somewhat at odds with itself, as to an extent it must be. It laments violence and deception, yet the story demands that Odysseus use deception to wreak thrilling, crowd-pleasing vengeance on the odious suitors in his own home. In Nolan’s final twist, Odysseus accepts enduring consequences for this violation of Zeus’s law—yet this is presented, not as penance for a great sin, but as a way to placate the families of the slain suitors. It even allows a happy ending for the reunited lovers.  

Anyway, I get the feeling that Nolan is a bit canny about placating the American Right - I always had the feeling that the environmental disaster in Interstellar was meant to be climate change, but that he probably went with an unexplained "the Blight" instead to deflect culture war charged rejection of the movie if he treated climate change as real.   Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm very suspicious.

Similarly, the Christianisation of Greek ideas in this movie made me feel it was a bit like pandering.  

This review has ended up harsher than I intended, really!   Oh well, can't be helped. :)