Aaron's Thoughts
One of my least favorite things is to sit down for a movie where I already know beat for beat what the story is going to be. “The book was better” is an adage that many cling to when talking about text to screen adaptations & it’s something I try my best to avoid entirely. It isn’t that I find it impossible to enjoy a film about a book that I have already read, it is just that most of them are poorly done. Very poorly done. My last experience with this was “Where the Crawdads Sing” way back in 2022 & after the dreadful experience of watching the book play out beat for beat on the big screen, I swore off reading anything that was going to be turned into a movie.
A bit dramatic? Probably, but there are already too many books for me to read over the course of my life, so might as well lean into the ones that don’t overlap with my art form of choice.
That background is important, because it colored my feelings walking into the IMAX theater on Thursday afternoon. Like everyone else on planet earth, I read The Odyssey at some point back in middle school. And just like remembering that the mitochondria was the powerhouse of the cell, there was far too much of the story of Odysseus and his crew that clung with me well over a decade later.
The first thirty minutes are a tad clunky, but set the scene for the journey we are about to go on. From there, we are off to the races.
After a flash back of Odysseus and his crew having a run in with the cyclops, we cut to the present day as Telemachus arrives in Sparta to see Menelaus. This leads to a re-telling of what the attack on Troy was like from the inside. It is the first sequence in the film that took my breath away, but also the first that would take my breath away for different reasons on my second watch 24 hours later. Nolan is very deliberate about what he shows us on this re-telling of the attack, but in the moment you don’t think anything of it, you are just mesmerized by the filmmaking.
Hard cut back to Odysseus and his men continuing on their journey. Next up they wash ashore on the island of Laestrygonians & have a run in with some giant warriors. Then onto the next island where they encounter Circe (played wonderfully by Samantha Morton). While I think the practical effects used here are masterful and terrifying at the same time, I started to fall into the lull of thinking we were just going to continue hitting every beat until the story ended.
But then Circe gives a monologue that makes you start to wonder what Nolan really has on his mind with this adaption. The moment is a brief one before we once again start to check the boxes from the original poem. First to Hades to hear the prophesy before Odysseus and his crew have encounters with the Sirens, Charbdis, and Scylla. As much as these sequences felt like Nolan checking all the boxes of scenes to include, the Sirens scene is one of the best of the film & one of the best scenes Damon has ever given us on screen. I can still hear that haunting score three days later.
Fast forward through the final stages of the journey & Calypso lets Odysseus build a raft to head home.
And this is where you have to start giving Nolan his flowers on how the film is constructed because at this point you are EXHAUSTED. The weariness you are feeling as someone watching the film is only topped by the weariness Odysseus feels to be reunited with his family. Speaking of his family, it is worth noting that Nolan also makes the choice to portray Odysseus as someone you can relate to. Unlike the original poem where Odysseus almost seems god like himself at times, we get the feeling that he is wrestling with something deeper than we have been clued in on. Gone is the multi-year fling with Circe from the poem and gone is the notion that he was Calypso’s sex slave for seven years. This is a man that just wants to get home so he can be with Anne Hathaway (maybe the most relatable part of his already relatable character).
As he sets off from the island with Calypso, he turns himself over to the gods in scene that made me cry for the first time during the film (and far from the last). You see, throughout the film Nolan has made the deliberate choice to not really portray many of the gods on screen. You see flashes of Athena talking to Odysseus, but for the most part all of the gods are simply alluded to in conversation. They are talked about constantly but almost never present. Which was a necessary choice just from a pure practical perspective, but also a beautiful one. For most of the film Odysseus is doing everything in his power to defy the gods & so this moment of quiet surrender stirred my soul. He is not in control. He never was, even when he thought he was. And sometimes in life all we can do is lay adrift in the ocean seeing where fate takes us next.
From this point forward, The Odyssey goes from an achievement in the craft of filmmaking to an excellent film. You are better off to experience the beats of the story for your own, but I do want to shoutout a few more moments that moved me.
The second moment that made me tear up is the moment when Odysseus reunites with his dog & then Telemachus realizes who he is for the first time. The score here is firing on all cylinders, which helps, but this is another moment where the pure length of the film really pays off. You spend so much time with both Odysseus and Telemachus on their own longing to be reunited with the other. You are along for the ride on their long journeys to this moment that you almost let out an exhale in the moment that Odysseus has returned home. You feel the weight of how long he has been gone. And while I don’t think that Tom Holland is superb in the film, I will say that this scene convinced me that maybe he actually can act well, which is something I wasn’t sure about going into the film.
The final scene I want to shout out (and one that made me cry like a baby) is the Damon monologue when he is reunited with Anne Hathaway. I am trying not to use hyperbole here, but this is probably a top 25 scene in the history of movies for me because it ties together the whole movie in a way that completely wrecked me. In this monologue we finally piece together what has been boiling under the surface for 2 and a half hours, Odysseus has a tremendous amount of shame and regret about his role in changing the course of history as we know it. The monologue is intercut with that same attack on Troy earlier in the film, but this time seeing everything we didn’t see before. The desecration of a civilization and disregard for the humanity of everyone they come in contact with - man, woman, and child. The way these flashback scenes are shown with Damon’s haunted and trembling voice overlaying the footage is out of this world. Easily the best thing that Christopher Nolan has ever done.
While this monologue transpires, Athena (played by the always delightful Zendaya) is once again appearing in front of Odysseus. Throughout the film she appears to him as sort of a moral compass, but in this flashback we finally piece together what is going on. We see the soldiers behead the statue of Athena and at the same time they behead a girl that is also played by Zendaya.
Now there are multiple reads on this that work, in my opinion. The first would be that Odysseus saw this innocent civilian girl get beheaded at Troy and now Athena is appearing to him as this girl to haunt him. The other would be that Odysseus is visualizing Athena herself getting her head chopped off when his soldiers cut off the head of the statue - the desecration of the statue was as if they were spitting in the face of the gods. Nolan is intentionally vague about the answer (which I love), but I very much believe the former is what was implied. Either way, a masterful scene.
By the end of the monologue we see very clearly that Nolan is interested in this story as a vehicle to talk about what keeps our societies together, what causes their erosion over time, the importance of moral order, the cost of war, the price of power, and why the bond to our fellow man is something that can never be broken if we want society to continue as we know it.
While there is still 20-25 minutes left in the movie at this point, the heart of it is already on the table. The final fight is just as great as you would expect & Damon plucking his bow is a cinematic moment that will go down in the history books.
As someone who has long been frustrated with Christopher Nolan, I have to give him major praise for this. I love that he didn’t just try to remake the story beat for beat. Instead he had a real vision for how the story of then mapped onto the story of today & found a remarkable way to map that out.
I also love that you don’t have to figure this movie out. You just simply get to discuss what you think he was trying to say with the film (which isn’t very hard). So many of his films feel like a puzzle box waiting to be solved and it is nice to see him once again not operating in that mode.
You can also see tremendous growth in his writing. I have long given him a hard time about how poorly he writes women characters, but the Penelope character here is easily his most well rounded female character ever. And that is impressive considering it would have been remarkably easy to just lean into how she is portrayed in the poem and claim it was baked into the text. He isn’t fully off the hook because I felt like his characterization of Calypso was a bit one note & felt like her only purpose was for the narrative structure to work the way he wanted. But he’s moving in the right direction!
Aside from that, and some of the limitations of shooting entirely on IMAX (some of the out of focus shots are almost distracting on a second watch), it is a miracle of a film that I am so glad exists.
You could say I was on an Odyssey of my own to finally love a Nolan film after thinking Interstellar and Oppenheimer were nothing special. Which makes this one feel all the sweeter! I am going to enjoy this one for quite some time, and I hope you will too, because it isn’t every day that we get a true spectacle of this scale on the big screen that has this much heart and craft behind it.
Movies, nothing quite like them!!!
