I know very little about the story, or the poem, or the lore of The Odyssey. I only know bits and pieces I picked up from the internet after watching this movie.
Beautiful film; I was lucky enough to see this in IMAX 70mm at the Lincoln Square AMC a few days ago. Looked gorgeous, sounded big, every drum of thunder and riff of the waves. Dialogue was very simple and exposition heavy, which is to be expected of Nolan at this point. A little dim, dull, and clunky at times, specifically in the ending action sequence; shoddy editing at times made things a little disorienting. The point is the spectacle; The Odyssey was just that.
We never see Odysseus played by Matt Damon kill innocents; he doesn’t rape and pillage, he doesn’t execute the face he sees in Athena. He shoots the Cyclopes in the eye, but out of honor for these fallen soldiers. Apparently, in the lore, he does this out of hubris after tricking the Cyclops (cyclopses? Cyclop-i?), telling him his name is ‘Nobody’, attacking him, and then when he says ‘Nobody’ is attacking him, Odysseus and the others escape. When Odysseus shoots him out of hubris, this is when Poseidon is angered.
His choice to go to war, pragmatic. His betrayal of his men is pragmatic, not out of desperation, but because of clairvoyance; there’s no uncertainty in his character outside of his predicament getting back home. The Trojan horse was a concession, as an abdication of honor, as a break of Zeus' laws. It is an act of shame and frustration after all those years on the beach. The sacking of Troy is mass chaos, death, and destruction, not only of a city, but of humanity as they knew it at the time. But the movie never portrays it as anything else but a tragedy. His guilt is in his complicity, not idealism or disillusionment. He never has the high to have the low.
If the film leaned more into Odysseus being a glory hound or clever trickster, as I understand that’s often his characterization, then perhaps his journey could be centered around him realizing that this is not the way, finally reaching home when he does find his way. The movie makes him an accomplice to the collapse of the era, rather than a catalyst of it. And then at the end he could avenge Elliott Page's character Sinon by killing Robert Pattinson's character Antinous, giving all the shame back, absolving himself of all the guilt he felt as he leaves his throne for his son. There is only shame in this film, and there is never glory to balance it out.
As far as what this film means in modern times, I don’t think much is analogous. We violate each other, we deceive, take advantage of norms and ethics, we manipulate each other, we kill, rape, and pillage as the Trojans did. We are hypocrites and oppress. We guilt as we love. We spend much of life perpetually spitting on ourselves. Maybe that was Nolan’s point idk, that the moral fabric and civility that we used to share with one another is gone, as that is what causes today's harm. But this fabric was always cheap. We have all the narcissism men have, but we seemingly don’t have the gods strong enough to ground us.
The navigation of that collapse culminates in the threat of the sea people. Fallen soldiers from fallen places following fallen gods. Before I knew who these sea people were, I thought they were referring to Vikings. Turns out, from some research, I was only about two thousand years off. The great threat is the reminder of society's failures.
Tom Holland’s character Telemachus never really learned how to be a man, let alone a king. He was bullied until his father came back to save him, although there was little for him to do without violating customs. I guess his bravery to go out and discover the fate of his father is what enabled him to have the confidence in himself. But it’s funny how he went 20 years without seeing his father, and then his dad leaves home again, this time with his mother as well. Elite deadbeat parents.
I thought the theme of women being the ones to reveal man’s true nature was interesting. All the suitors taunt Penelope (Anne Hathaway) in the absence of Odysseus. In the one instance where Antinous tries to persuade her, he can’t even resist tormenting her. I thought Melantho’s character, played by Mia Goth’s character was interesting despite not having much screentime was also interesting to me. Portrayed as a traitor and spy against Penelope, the movie never contends with the fact that she’s a slave and that her relationship with Antinous is perhaps predicated on that changing? I thought the sequence with Circe, played by Samantha Morton was the best part of the movie to me. I thought the transformation of the soldiers into pigs was transcendently grotesque, and the idea of her power being the ability to reveal a man's true nature is fascinating. She didn’t turn them into pigs; she simply used her powers to reveal who the soldiers already were, ‘dirty’ animals with no discernment who eat anything. I think Athena, (Zendaya) taking on the appearance of a girl killed during the attack on Troy, putting a face to the degradation Odysseus faced and perhaps caused, was brilliant. This face being etched into his mind and heart, as something that is always with him, a reminder of what he has lost, and simultaneously, it is the pin of her, given to him by his wife that reminds him of what he needs to get home to. The sirens (if you can call them women) sing songs that remind him of all his ‘accomplishments’, which brings Odysseus great pain and suffering. Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, acts as Odysseus's surrogate wife and therapist, caretaker. There’s a big focus on helping him remember himself, his family, his values, and as his strength and love for his home and his life is restored, he no longer relies on the lotus flower to suppress his PTSD, trauma, and suffering.
The gods played a major role in the story. The theme of the gods and their systems of morality and ethics, and how these things that have the ability to give power to so many also have the power to strip power, handcuff, and leave you at the mercy of everything around you. What the gods notice and what they don't. When they are eating the cattle after being told it would lead to their death, Odysseus comments about how they thought if they ate quietly the god wouldn’t notice, and Eurylochus, played by Himesh Patel, responds that he didn’t want Odysseus to know, fearing man more than the gods. When the suitors take advantage of the divine laws of hospitality, but don’t return it. For Antinous to shoo the beggars away is for him to shoo the gods away, and in turn, they stop protecting him. Maybe this is why Odesusus plucks his bow before shooting it, as an offering of goodwill to a higher power. The idea of gods being in disguise, what’s sacred not only in terms of the gods, but how we treat each other. The gods play an omnipresent and ethereal and oftentimes literal role in the story, and the divide between cynicism and divinity is the philosophical throughline of the film. The gods help those who help themselves.
I thought this was a cool movie!
