The Odyssey
Alright fine, I went to the IMAX. Not one of the fake ones where they make the screen a little bigger and double the ticket price, but the only legitimate IMAX in Toronto proper. I got a single ticket in the very back row, and while normally I’m a seat placement purist (a few rows back from the front, dead centre) it was totally fine. Screen was big, sound was loud, place was packed.
Nolan made an Odyssey and squeezed in also a chunk of an Iliad, save all the bits with Helen and Achilles and Hector and Paris and all those kinds of people. Just a smidgeon of Agamemnon and Menelaus, a big horse, and a violent rampage. The nature of the Odyssey is, and here I am referencing Dog Man twice in a row, “A Buncha Stuff That Happened Next”. Odysseus and his crew keep landing on islands and having things happen. The connective tissue that Nolan uses is actually pretty clever in hindsight, but we will return to that. I’m not sure there’s much point in rehashing the plot of the Odyssey - Odysseus tries to get home, Penelope is forced to host a 20 year dinner party for creeps - so it’s more about how those things are executed.
The cyclops was the best of them, a huge unsettling puppet guy. He moved in an uncanny way, though sometimes this was in a very I-am-a-puppet way, particularly when he’s petting his sheep on the way out. The crew roll into his cave and start eating his cheese (important) so he, in turn, eats them back and then instantly falls asleep. It’s a little bit disappointing that they don’t do the “Nobody hurt me” gag but there isn’t really a way to pull it off without looking very silly, and also expanding your cyclopses (?) into a society that talk to each other. They stab him in the eye and then half-assedly dress up as sheep to get out of there. However, oops, Poseidon is his dad so the sea is pissed at them.
Circe turning the men into pigs is also very good and very tactile, like An American Werewolf in London or Society, all goo and transformation. Neat little thing that she is saying that she’s turning them back into pigs, acknowledging their fundamental nature and joining the series of movies I have watched with the theme of “ugh, men”.
The Laestrygonians kill nearly everyone, there’s more to them in the poem but here they’re just really big dudes. The Sirens are interesting - note the song plays again when he talks to Penelope at the end - Scylla and Charybdis get breezed past (the latter is just a blob of tentacles and not a woman on top and a pile of dogs on the bottom, or whatever), the Hades bit is cool.
Meanwhile Tom Holland does his man/boy role as Telemachus, and gets outshined a lot by Anne Hathaway who does a really great job at what could be a pretty thankless “sitting around waiting for a man to come home” role. She gets a good rant about having effectively been in charge of Ithaca for twenty years but gets no credit for it. Pattinson is the weird goblin character he really seems to live for these days.
Once we get closer to the end the Christopher Nolan of it all reveals itself. Well, structurally it’s very him, with multiple timelines of Ithaca, the, you know, long journey, and also Odysseus hanging out on the beach with Calypso for seven years regaining his memory of what happened prior to that point. I guess he neglected to tattoo his goals, adventures and CV in reverse text on his chest (“Calypso - don’t believe her lies”). But what we really get to is the “are we the baddies?” ending, which I was a little ambivalent about when I started to see the gears click into place. I think it worked though, in the end, looking back at all the constant home invasions that the crew did, and the reasoning for Odysseus taking the long way home. I see the criticism that we’re putting modern morality and guilt on a pagan fairytale that was originally full of active gods messing with people, but I think the divide there is between people who want to see an accurate adaptation of the Odyssey and a depiction of the ancient Greeks, and people who want to take an ancient story and see what it says about us, now. For me the latter is more interesting.
Anyway, having felt all this horrifying guilt for breaking Zeus’ law (treat anyone in your home as if they might be a god in disguise), Odysseus slaughters all the lads hanging around his own home coveting his wife (even though this, like murder, doesn’t get banned until thousands of years later). The big closing fight was a bit of a letdown, visually, both in terms of coherent editing and also in light of all of the mad supernatural stuff we’d seen before it. I did enjoy Pattinson requesting all of the different kinds of weapons.
Also Zendaya was in this looking sad a lot.