It’s been a week since I watched The Odyssey and I dont need to tell anyone that it has been a resounding commercial success worldwide! All the casting controversies have been laid to rest and the movie has flexed its muscles as a box-office hit - yet another feather in Nolan’s cap. I have been a Nolan fan from the day I saw Following and Memento and have even watched his shorts. I’ve watched Memento and Prestige a dozen times, Inception and Interstellar at least 5 times each and stood in line for 2 hours for the opening midnight show of Dark Knight Rises. However, The Odyssey is not a slam dunk for me.
What worked:
- Visual Spectacle
- Terrific casting
- Brilliant Acting
- Wonderful Background Score - Ludwig Goransson - need I say anything more?
- Managed to tell the story clearly even for those who have never read or heard of the Illiad and Odyssey before
- And the horse!
Where I felt let down:
This is not the Odysseyus I was expecting. He seemed to me more like Christian Bale’s Batman or Daniel Craig’s Bond or even Damon’s own Bourne - brooding, self-reflective, conflicted, remorseful. Which I guess is an interesting and modern take on Odysseyus and Nolan has every right to retell the story however he wants to! This is not history after all.
However, this version of Odysseyus is kinda boring to be honest as he’s just a superhero in modern times but with mythical background and has been done to death mostly thanks to Nolan's own Batman trilogy. George Clooney’s Ulysses McGill in O Brother Where Art Thou was closer to the multi-faceted Odysseyus than Matt Damon’s Odysseyus - where was his gift of the gab, where was the master of disguise, where was the tech wizard, where was the guy who made many mistakes, the quick thinker, the prideful one, the one who was tempted by many women? I didn’t want to see sex scenes and slaughter of handmaids but the complexity of the character could have been brought out differently for a director of Nolan’s caliber. Christian Bale’s Professor in The Prestige was not a very likable man for what he did to his wife and girl friend and neither was his adversary the Great Danton for his single-minded pursuit of revenge and one-upmanship but Nolan showed them warts and all.
This one was a superhero movie albeit one with PTSD but unlike The Hurt Locker it didn’t truly communicate everything our hero felt because the “others” in The Odyssey especially the Trojans and Polyphemus were non-entities to us. Why couldn’t Polyphemus speak? Why couldn't we see The Trojans? Why do they have to look like storm troopers? John Leguizamo was spectacular as Eumaeus but he had to be blind so he couldn’t recognize Odysseyus instead of giving Odysseyus a chance to prove he’s a master of disguise! Those kind of choices irked me a bit.
Final Take:
Having said all that, I will go see it again for the visual spectacle it was. My husband who has never read the epics and is not a big fan of Nolan’s “high concept” twist movies enjoyed The Odyssey a lot. It’s the same reason he and I will watch Liam Neeson’s movies -he’s basically done Taken in multiple transportation - in car, train, oil tanker, plane - but put Liam Neeson in a fast moving transport and give him a shallow backstory and ask him to save the world or save a kid, you bet I will watch if it comes up in a TV in a hotel room! That’s what superhero movies are. Great fun to watch with friends and family during the hot days of summer and that was exactly The Odyssey.
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