Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey film review: The Odyssey has been making headlines for months
Odyssey ★★★★
(E) 172 minutes
Christopher Nolan has a way of solving the time paradox. Not content with backtracking narratives or building to whatever a 2020 sci-fi thriller is supposed to be Principle – Big budget adaptation of Homer Odyssey He gambles that he can take one of the oldest stories in Western culture and make it feel new.
Drums beat, eager listeners lean forward in torchlight, and a bard (Travis Scott) summons the figure of a man trying to return home the long way. This man is Odysseus (Matt Damon), Greece’s most cunning warrior, returning from the Trojan War. While his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) waits patiently, his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) searches for him.
The adventures depicted here remain fantastical enough to reveal that realism or historical accuracy is not the goal, nor is it for Homer (whoever he was). Still, adjustments have been made for a 21st-century audience: The monsters are visible and the gods are mostly out of view, except for Odysseus’ ghost guide Athena (Zendaya).
Within these limits there is an attempt to confront us with the archaic strangeness, even surrealism, of the source material, far removed from the traditional sword-and-sandal epic (Pier Paolo Pasolini sometimes comes to mind, despite Nolan’s characteristic disinterest in sex).
Beyond Ludwig Goransson’s typically aggressive score, much of the shock value comes from the hallucinatory contrasts of scale best experienced on an IMAX screen: In extreme long shot, the orange sail of Odysseus’s ship resembles a postage stamp on a wide blue envelope.
Cyclops (Bill Irwin) is a spotted, pale giant, much larger than expected; perhaps deliberately reminiscent of Goya’s famous painting of devouring Saturn (and brought to life with masterful practical effects rather than CGI). In Homer he is defeated partly through verbal trickery; but, as Odysseus observes, expecting to talk to such a creature is like expecting a human to talk to ants.
Language is almost the Achilles heel of the film. I didn’t object to the American accent or to Telemachus calling Odysseus “father,” but when Samantha Morton’s earthly Circe spoke of the “primitive impulses” of the men she turned into pigs, it was an idiom that didn’t quite fit a character in myth.
Admittedly, there’s no way this whole project can escape self-consciousness (when Damon shows up, weatherproof, something about him still suggests a boy with a knack for bluffing). Where the young Telemachus longs for his father’s return, Nolan’s own ambition is closer to the Oedipal passion: to make us see Homer as his own harbinger.
Looking back, it’s clear that he did this Odyssey riffs on much of his career: Beginning depicting a journey to the underworld interstellar tied to a long-delayed family reunion and Memory It evokes the deliberate memory loss of those who eat lotus.
Reversing the order of precedence, here the flashbacks to the soldiers stuffed inside the Trojan Horse recall the images of drowning that are the Trojan Horse’s nightmare. DunkirkThe horse itself is equivalent to an atomic bomb. Oppenheimerleaving the wounded Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o) to suffer the destruction wrought in her name.
But while Odysseus’s strategic mastery is also his burden, he remains clearly superior to his chief rival, the grinning coward Antinous (Robert Pattinson). War may be hell, but what kind of man can get away with adventure?
Penelope, who works at her loom during the day, solves her work at night; It’s a metaphor for Nolan’s ability to create self-effacing objects, or to put it less respectfully, his ability to have it both ways. But no matter what the unfinished business is, his Odyssey It shows that a Hollywood blockbuster made with artistic conviction need not be such a paradox.
In cinemas starting Thursday
More about Odyssey.
Jake Wilson is the film critic for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
