[This review spoilers the movie. DNR if you care]
Seldomly did I feel like a pack of words describe a movie better than in that single line. Nolans newest movie, clocking at almost three hours, is an attempt at telling the homeric Odyssey, Odysseus and his men attempting to return to Ithaca after fighting and ending Troy.
I've been sitting with my thoughts since having seen them movie about 23 hours back. I saw it with a friend, not in an IMAX, on a conventional cinema screen. And what I saw did not amaze me as much I thought it would. But let us not speak of foregone conclusions, for the case here is deeper than just matters of taste.
Homers Odyssey is, by its nature, episodic. A tale of the wittiest of the Greeks and his slowly dwindling number of men suffer adventure after adventure, being mislead by the gods after having witnessed the Acheans cruelty towards Troy, as well as Odysseus telling Polyphemus who he was, having tricked the Cyclops, son of Poseidon himself, who, in his nature, tells his divine father and thus loads the curse, the ill-fated journey upon Odysseus.
The scene of Odysseus tricking Polyphemus is not in the movie. Instead, we see Polyphemus mainly as a mythic monstrosity, a giant one-eyed humanoid who never attempts communication, no wordplay, not witticism. He eats some of the soldiers, and in the end Odysseus and his men cruelly stab Polyphemus in his one eye and while fleeing, Odysseus shots a final arrow at the giant to add insult to injury. In the movie, the stabbing of the eye leads Polyphemus to talk to Poseidon, at which point Odysseus men remark "The beast speaks. He might be intelligent" and Odysseus just dismissing it.
Mind you, Odysseus, in the movie, is constantly named "most clever of the greek" by the spartan king (only one, which was ....weird). He seldomly acts like a clever man. In fact, more often than not I felt like Odysseus was anything but. He dismisses the gods constantly going "this a thing YOUR GODS are going for?", like he's a wisecracking seinfeld character, while his mean, understandably, are afraid.
This, supposedly, serves to show us how callous and defiant Odysseus is. But for a man who tells his wife about the power of sacrifice and how strong the belief is here, in a world in which Agamemnon sacrifices his four-year-old daughter, in this world the same "man with wise eyes" seldomly speaks or acts wise. He lies constantly, to his men, to himself, to the gods, even in part to the audience, but never in the way that a clever man would.
But why am I harping on all of this? Because it feeds into a misunderstanding of the movies theme.
Bluntly hammering the theme home, as Odysseus himself states during the final half hour of the movie, clearly thinking the audience won't get it otherwise, by burning Troy and violating xenia, the laws of hospitality, the greeks destroyed the relationship their world, their "civilization" has had with the gods. As he puts it "this age of bronze of ours is coming to an end." One of the dumbest lines to put into Odysseus mouth, a man who at the same time is so wrecked of guilt from the destruction of Athenas temple in Troy that he saw the young priestess from Troy as his own, personal Athena (a good showing by Zendaya), chiding his path and choices constantly.
For one, meeting and tricking Polyphemus, then telling him who tricked him, plays directly into that theme. Instead, Nolan wants no part of witticism or cleverness. His Odysseus is a cruel man, who plans to leave the Cyclops blind instead of lied to. The scene was left out because, as Nolan puts it, "I couldn't make the wordplay work out, so I left it out."
The movie is overwrought with this "I couldn't make it work out"-stance. As the stations of the Odyssey are episodic, each feels disjointed, not because of the episodic nature, but because Nolan seemingly could not decide how to translate his theme into a structure for his movie to stand on. Instead we ten-minute vignettes, broken up by scenes on Ithaca, where his son Telemachus and his wife, Queen Penelope, attempt to stop the freeloading suitors from claiming a throne.
The suitors and the homecoming theme is something another version of the Odyssey, "The Return" with Ralph Fiennes from 2024, did much better. There, everything is given an austere bleakness. Ithaca is a land plundered, the suitors are bastards and they are few, but very personal. Even Telemachus curses this father he never got to know, at first, while Penelope has to endure, on and on and on and on. Its fascinating to see how the understatement of Fiennes helps shape a man so cursed by war and folly, that his homecoming feels akin to the final act of a belated downfall. And yet, it ends as the old homeric story did, with Odysseus taking the throne, again. As he should. In Nolans version instead Odysseus exiles himself, with his queen by his side, his son newly crowned king of Ithaca. The old making way for the new.
So why is this a problem then, why does this lead to a misunderstanding of the themes? Because it means that, in the end, the movie wants you to feel these episodes, this journey, see his actions and be wowed. By his decline, by his recognition of the destruction of "this age of bronze". Because it tries to create a theme, but it does not stay with it. If breaking xenia always dooms the greeks, then each station would have us feel this. Instead each station is empty, hollow, filled with their own message of doom, about men, doom for Odysseus, doom for those he lied to and sacrificed to win the war, doom doom doom. It's not coherent, it constantly swerves and never stays its course.
And with Göransson attempting authenticity by using ancient-era-instruments while missing that just constant drowning out of sounds and loudness does not a good scene make, we're left with a movie that, while watching, goes on and on and on.
It meanders. Yet, because of its own ambition, it insists upon itself. "Watch me", it says, "for I am epic." And frankly, I don't think so. I suspect, in the long run, the movie will be studied, but not as one of the greats, and certainly not the best movie Nolan made. If anything, I'd say its better than Tenet, but at best, I'd give it a 6.5 out of 10, a 7 if I were inclined to it. But I'm not. Because sometimes we see scenes that are more Dark Knight than Odysseus. More Oppenheimer, rather than Odyssey. More Interstellar, than Odyssey. Because Nolan has lost his plot and made a competent, but not a great movie.
Now, please applaud. I suspect the movie will win some Oscars. If it does, it speaks less of its own greatness and more of how mediocre the opposition must be, in comparison. *sigh*
In the end, a friend of mine who
watched the movie with me said it best:
"I do not feel bad for watching it,
but I don't think I'll need to watch it again."
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