An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

"... the Homeric poems easily clear the bar [of showing the perspectives of both victims and perpatrators]"

Homer's writing was very empathetic to Odysseus's victims. The movie sanitized the tragedy.

This quote is also easily misinterpreted: "But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world."

A warlord from those times would not be reluctant. War was central to life, considered a duty of a leader in those times, but not in the sense of piracy as you put it. To grow and increase wealth was to protect your kingdom and increase odds of surviving not only war but downturns of all types.

And this is the strongest criticism of this movie - Nolan took the easy way out of just shoving the story in 21st century America instead of doing the work of transporting us into the world of different values and beliefs. It's an easy snack for infantilised audience who isn't trusted to actually engage into something that steps out of their locally cultural space.

It's about the most damning thing about this movie.

Looks pretty though.

Counterpoint to your view on critics. A discerning audience is equally as important to a thriving culture as artists. If critics just clap their hands whenever someone tries to make something, granting that making a bad work of art is often just as difficult as making a good one, we get junk. I don't see why the perspective of the maker is relevant at all.

“You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.” - Pauline Kael

It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.

This feels like a pretty shallow take on a what seemed to me like a pretty in depth and interesting review. Clearly there's a huge amount of potential ground that could have been covered in a film like this, so a critical look at what was and wasn't included, the angles that were chosen, the parts that were glossed over etc. can be revealing. Put another way, I think the review is a pretty in depth look at the questions "what was the artist trying to achieve?" and "Did they succeed?".

I think that’s just as true of his lesser films (Tenet capturing COVID’s barely comprehensible, antiseptic-psychedelic temporality, for example) as in his stronger work, and makes him - to me, at least - a very interesting artist within the Hollywood structure.

This seems very detached from reality. I very much doubt that many people seeing a movie like this will think "oh, I should read The Odyssey", or "I should read more." And most people who try the former are unlikely to get very far.

In one scene, Odysseus doesn't even blink as a puppy is thrown off a cliff.

Here is my reading: when the action unfolds it is indeed depicted as noble, where Odysseus saves his men, and brave, where the men take on a fearsome but incoherent giant being. By the time they make it to their ship, though, the realization dawns on them and that's when we all know it was neither noble nor brave. And, the men are all doomed from the start, according to prophecy.

The action/adventure film depicted brave and noble actions. The mortal humans on Earth were saving life and limb of their own kind, for their wives and children.

Context matters.

The spiritual reality was far different. The unseen truths were pre-existing; the truths were partly known to them already; and the spiritual reality was revealed later on, but their darkened intellect and concupiscence caused them to act as warriors and in solidarity and brotherhood, rather than following the Divine Plan.

Hindsight is 20/20.

And same for the recent Dune movies - (even more) gorgeous, well made and blah.

The first we see of Agamemnon is his crazy armor with the golden spine running down the back of the helmet, and it immediately establishes that some people in this story are much larger than life, so much so that they seem sort of monstrous and offputting. Agamemnon looks like Darth Vader, striding forward in that black and gold armor. And in a way, Agamemnon has made himself a monster to achieve his personal ambition, sacrificing his daughter at the outset. When he's later killed in bed by his embittered wife, it's in maybe the one scene of the movie where we see him without his armor - having returned home and stripped it off. Perhaps he thinks he can be a person again. But he is no longer the man he was, and his home too has become hostile to him. In making himself a legend, he has shut himself out from the life he had.

More broadly, he (and the kings who went with him) has perhaps even destroyed that way of life entirely by violating larger social contracts, such as taking Troy by a deceptive offering to a shared god. Which is the core shame that's hounding Odysseus through his trials (along with some survivor's guilt).

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. It felt both familiar and fresh at the same time, and made a lot of initially odd seeming choices that I wound up finding interesting and thematic.

Big recommendation.

As the screen adaptation of a work written about a real person, you’d need to have the prerequisite knowledge of history, the written work, the person.

These are very different points of view. If you didn’t know better you could enjoy a movie portraying Trump and the ICE (insert whatever real life situation fits your country better) as unsung heroes, reluctantly doing what is necessary to defend the land from foreign invaders. Once you get a glimpse of the history, the fiction is harder to enjoy.

I haven't read the original, but I have to figure it has vastly more substance given how famous it is.

The real hero's journey is not external, but internal - that's what allows us to connect with them so deeply. I didn't really get any sense of internal strife, reflection, sacrifice or growth.

I wish he would go back to his older philosophy of movie making but he never made a bad movie I Think

The landscapes were often gorgeous, but otherwise I thought it was all a bit dull unfortunately. Can only imagine what it would have been like if someone as detail-obsessed as PJ took it on.

It's almost as if a work entitled "Oppenheimer" is not supposed to be a character study of this American scientist during the war named Oppenheimer.

Juuusttt maaayyybeee, an adaptation of The Odyssey is mostly gonna be about Odysseus and his side of the war, and that's when Troy gets narratively involved. TFA justifies this criticism with a polemic about what a "serious depiction of violence" is supposed to include but doesn't pause to consider that maybe that is not the film's point. Even the source material isn't about the Trojan War---there's another epic prequel for that! Not to mention Virgil's sequel.

She also says, in the same paragraph, that the "Homeric poems easily clear the bar". Sure! The other Homeric poem---the one not the subject of this adaptation---did that.

I'm not saying these are not themes worth exploring just that maybe it is not a mistake that it wasn't included here. Not an oversight, but intentional. Maybe a work of fiction is supposed to have biases (gasp!) and that is just fine.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Had Nolan involved the Trojans beyond Zendaya's character we'd be hearing criticism along the lines of the film being "thematically incoherent", "could've had a more focused treatment, easily shaving off twenty minutes to its already unforgiving runtime".

The fact that Nolan claims inspiration from the author's translation adds additional interest and relevance, of course.

Plus, there were some delightfully cutting lines about how abysmally terrible and expository Nolan's dialogue is, which alone were worth the price for admission for me.

Not that you need knowledge of the original to plainly see that there was no depth to the movie, in any regard. I felt and thought nothing during it, let alone after. That's the definition of not Artful.

Moreover, it vindicates Homer and makes me want to read the original (which I apparently had bought on audiobook ages ago and never listened to. At 12 hours, I expect to finish in the coming weeks).

* It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea

* Odysseus and his crew had not seen them or found them, because they are not sufficiently self-aware or spiritual

* They violated the Law of Zeus. All of them.

* They (Odysseus and his family) ultimately attacked Ithaca (the suitors)

* Odysseus, his wife and son go into exile by boat, and sail west, [beyond Gibraltar], thus permanently becoming People Of The Sea

* The Odyssey is a myth, fiction, legendary, and none of its characters actually existed

* The People From the Sea are not mentioned in Homer's text. They're extra-canonical. They were hypothesized, starting in the 19th century.

I also think that it is ok to be unrealistic in myth movie.

> That was the key to being embraced by the population of our town, a community that openly took credit for the fact that we were still alive, but wanted to know nothing of our past. Month after month, my mother was asked to give her testimony in churches and women’s groups, at schools and even at dinners. I remember sensing the moment when all conversation would stop and she would be asked to repeat our escape story. The problem, of course, was that they wanted our salvation story as a talisman, no more. No one ever asked what our house in Iran looked like, what fruits we grew in our yard, what books we read, what music we loved and what it felt like now not to understand any of the songs on the radio. No one asked if we missed our cousins or grandparents or best friends. No one asked what we did in summers or if we had any photos of the Caspian Sea. “Men treat women horribly there, don’t they?” the women would ask. Somehow it didn’t feel OK to tell them about my funny dad with his pockets full of sour cherries, or my grandpa who removed his false teeth when he told ghost stories.

From https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-nayeri-un...

This review was an amazing read, by an amazing writer, and in my opinion these 11 words were the best part.

Not just in this movie but in general I think Nolan lacks any kind of sensuality, lyrical qualities, humor or eroticism. Which are key features of classical literature. Cosmic seduction, divine erotic passions are a big deal in the Odyssey and Nolan is closer to the "asexual Ken doll Marvel superhero" genre than he is to the classics with this one.