Where indeed. I had thought to skip Christopher Nolan’s latest and—in terms of loot, at least—greatest, The Odyssey, which has proved to be a thinking dude’s cash cow of absolutely unprecedented proportions, making the fabled Trojan horse itself look like a mouse in comparison. I hadn’t enjoyed Kit’s previous two outings, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, which I found to be “too cute” and “meh”, respectively, so I thought I’d bag this one, particularly since the howling mob of ululating “commenters” on The Big O—roughly two thirds of the entire blogosphere by my own back of the envelope estimate—had surely squeezed every last drop of “meaning” from the film. I didn’t care if Helen of Troy or anyone else in the film were black, nor did I feel like castigating those who did care. Get a life, dudelings!
Eventually, however, I caved—something that, I’m afraid, I’m often prone to. I couldn’t be the one English major on the planet not to see The Odyssey, could I? That would be a little affected, wouldn’t it? I mean, when people asked me “What did you think of The Odyssey”? I wasn’t going to say “Oh, I didn’t see it. I’m above such things, don’t you know,”1 was I? I mean, I’m not that bad, am I?
So I saw it, and what did I see and endure? Two hours and fifty-three minutes of “color” so washed out and colorless it made the Aegean look like, I don’t know, Puget Sound under heavy fog in November. Where’s a rosy-fingered dawn when you need one? I thought Oppenheimer was boring—and it was—but at least there was a decent bit of gratuitous nudity—some of it even appealing—but here, just about everything was, well, just washed out and boring. Circe was a babe, dude! Circe was a babe!
As many critics have pointed out, every twenty minutes or so there are touches of lame-ass editorializing, delivered in expository dialogue so clumsily written that the actors seem ashamed to deliver it, intended to imply that our own present-day lame-ass “age” is as worn out and morally compromised as the Bronze Age was—or as worn out and morally compromised as Nolan depicts it, at least—and, naturally, we’re the bad guys! we’re the “sea peoples”!2—but Kit is so determined to show that everything was worn out and boring “back then” that he succeeds in making the film itself boring instead. How can you squeeze a moral out of something when you’re falling asleep?
There’s some fuss about the film being “accurate” or not but who cares? As I assume others have pointed out, the world of Homer itself is full of “errors and inaccuracies”, describing an ideal time of “heroes” that never really existed. There’s some attempt on Nolan’s part to “deconstruct the myth” by making everything look dirty and uncomfortable, but this amounts to little more than deconstructing an old myth by constructing a new one. Nolan uses his usual tricks to make everything grim and portentous, like the Trojan horse itself—elegantly cast in bronze, it seems (how is that even possible?)3—not to mention the Cyclops, nude and dirty and glimpsed only briefly in confused, hurried, awkward closeups, accompanied by distorted grunts and groans on the soundtrack. Everything is so mannered in the presentation, so deliberately unglamorous and un-“spectacular” that the viewer is never allowed to get a clear picture of what’s happening. So who cares? I guess that’s the “point”—Nolan just being his usual pissy self, so dedicated to keeping the audience off balance for no other reason than to gratify his own sense of uniqueness and self importance, keeping us so confused that we can’t figure out what’s going on—as if this made everything “more profound”—that it pushes us away instead.
As for “rethinking” the Odyssey, making it “modern”, well, so what? There’s nothing wrong with reworking the past. The Greeks themselves did it, the historian Herodotus speculating that the “real Helen” was not at Troy, a “theory” that the dramatist Euripides later worked into the play Helen, in which Helen and her husband Menelaus are eventually reunited (happily) in Egypt. Dante “Christianized” the story of Odysseus to the extent of throwing him into what I believe was the eighth circle of Hell, reserved for the “fraudulent”, which seems a bit over the top, since war has always been full of stratagems and guile. And surely someone has also remembered Shakespeare’s nihilistic reworking of the entire Homeric world in Troilus and Cressida, depicting all the “heroes” at cowardly, witless oafs, devoid of either virtue or sense,4 a lot less “respectful” than Nolan’s take. So, yeah, I’m all for artistic license. But can’t you make your license interesting? That would help! A lot!
1. I have never said “Don’t you know”.
2. The destructive power of the mysterious “sea peoples” and their role in the collapse of Bronze Age cultures circa 1200 BCE are discussed in any number of the “Collapse of the Bronze Age” videos that flourish on YouTube these days. Also see Eric Cline’s dramatically titled 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. There’s no doubt that America’s post Cold War “record” has been awful, but are we really as “sea people” level, assuming that they were really as bad as their victims claimed? Are we “worse” than Al Queda, Hamas, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.? And are we really on the verge of a civilizational collapse? Give me, and “us”, a break, Kit.
3. I also wonder how armed men in a confined space could survive being tossed around for several days like ants in a bottle.
4. For over three hundred years, Shakespeare scholars regarded Troilus and Cressida with a mixture of deep embarrassment and disgust. How could the noble Shakespeare write such an awful thing? After August 1914, they got the picture.
