The Odyssey
Row, row, row the boat, gently down the Maelstrom, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a speck in Athena’s eyes.
Closer to Tenet than Oppenheimer, but it’s a middle of the road affair. Nolan is deep into his own ass that he forgets to crib good ideas from other films. He just fails in uninteresting ways.
It’s not a theatrical epic like Troy, but neither it’s a post-modern take on an ancient story. Updating the language a bit while keeping the core of tribal politics intact is just silly.
There is some title that mentions a time when “magic” existed, but it’s very much a po-faced “gritty realism” film, all grey and brown, muted and drab. There is no whimsy, barely any colour, just a smidgen of orange and blue. This not Tarsem Singh, not even Clash of Titans.
The Hades sequence is the prime example. This not Hercules nor Pirates of the Caribbean, Hades is an actual black sand beach, you can see the sky, and some minor lava in the distance. The dead can be easily confused with the living, particularly in wide shots. It’s like The Northman never existed!
The cast is all wrong, but not for that reason. Pattinson is too much of a pretty boy to be a ruthless and coward pussy, gunning for the throne. Penelope is too old to have hundreds of ravenous suitors wanting to bang her. Zendaya is a child god, keeper of all knowledge in the world? Ridiculous!
Agamemnon appears in the poster, but he’s not a character. He stands there like Sauron, and only talks in Hades. He is not overshadowing the protagonist, that’s for sure, but we also don’t understand why is Ulysses bowing down to such cypher.
There was no rhyme or reason to the changes to the source material, there doesn’t seem to be any intent. Even tough it’s almost three hours long, it still treats viewers as idiots, with the little flashbacks to the puppy as the old dog dies, to the drawing of lots.
If they were going for post-modernism, they should go all-in, and do O Brother, Where Art Thou. Set it in the present day, Ulysses went to Iraq and took him 10 years to get back stateside, travelling through Somalia, Mozambique, Brasil, the Caribbean. He had to go raid civilian homes in night vision goggles, and that made him not want to get back home so soon. His wife works in retail, even though she has a PhD, because she is waiting for her husband to choose an university.
Go read Emily Wilson’s scathing review, it’s awesome. This and Oppenheimer in a tweet:
We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it - a very different point
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.