woldy

I was a bit meh about seeing it initially, tbh, because the trailers strongly implied there was a lot of the GrimDark Grey Filter Of SRSBSNS Historical Production, and I am very weary of that. But then I spent weeks seeing rabid cave trolls ranting about Nolan being woke, and about Lupita and Elliot Page, and I reached the point of needing to go see the damn thing as a massive Fuck You to those people. (And, I mean - it’s Christopher Nolan. The man knows how to make a film.)

So I’m just back from watching it on 70mm film (film!). This is not a proper review, just initial thoughts.

It’s a big, meaty epic, as advertised. And, honestly, the pissbaby bigoted snowflakes who have been losing their damn minds over Lupita and Elliot need to give their heads a wobble. (Personally I found the armour on the giants much more jarring a visual choice - but that may be me having a misunderstanding of antique armour designs? Idk. Felt very anachronistic. i know that the Greeks’ armour was designed to look like the kind of armour people are more used to seeing on screen in Ye Olde Antiquity movies, rather than the more dramatic styles that would actually be period appropriate, but the giants’ armour wouldn’t have been out of place in an Arthurian story.)

I mean - idk whether Nolan chose Lupita Nyong’o for the Helen/Clytemnestra roles because he was trying to make a particular point, or as ragebait, or for the excellent reason that she is drop dead gorgeous, but it’s a Hollywood film with a diverse cast made primarily for a diverse English-speaking audience, not a Greek film full of Greek actors performing in Greek. Greek mythology is THE mythology that the rest of the educated Western world knows, in place of our own native mythologies; I am SLIGHTLY sympathetic towards the ranting trolls with Greek names, but tbh I think if I can be perfectly sanguine about Zulu and Thai versions of Macbeth, and of Portuguese-language Brazilian street theatre Romeo & Juliet performed with clowns on stilts and ballet dancers en pointe, and of a Disney cartoon version of Hamlet with lions, Greeks can calm the fuck down about non-Greek adaptations of Homer’s poetry. 🤷‍♀️

Stories only last if they can rise beyond the particular time and place that made them, because they have something true to say about the human condition. So, yes, this is The Odyssey made for Americans, in American English, with a diverse cast that looks like America. Boohoo?

(And, wrt Helen of Troy - Greece is A TWENTY MINUTE FLIGHT from Africa, ffs. You can nip over to Morocco from Spain on the ferry to do a bit of shopping then pop home for tea. You can SEE Africa from various parts of Europe with the naked eye. Black Africans very much DO crop up in Greek mythology because there is an entire massive continent full of Black people *right next door* to Greece, and the ancient world very much did have both boats and trade, so Black people are frankly WAY LESS JARRING than English speakers, who appear precisely never in Greek mythology. Get over it. All of which feels beside the point, because Lupita has maybe two minutes of screen time total - and the film VERY EXPLICITLY makes it clear from the get go that Agamemnon’s war was never about his hot sister in law, and always about power and avarice.)

I think that the casting of Elliot Page, otoh, IS purposeful. He plays Sinon, a minor character who dies at Troy, betrayed by Odysseus; he’s a kind of symbol of the courageous young soldiers who realise too late the whole “Dulce et Decorum est” bullshit is just propaganda to turn them into canon fodder - but ALSO he (or his ghost) is the first person Odysseus speaks to in Hades, after Circe sends him there TO SPEAK TO TIRESIAS.

Surely that’s not a coincidence? Tiresias is the blind prophet of Greek myth, but he’s also famously transgender - Ye Olde Detransitioner, if you will, since he was AMAB, then transformed into a woman by the gods, then later transformed into a man. (or in other versions he was AFAB and got zapped back and forth across sex & gender lines half a dozen times by the gods.) The character of Sinon never appears in Homer’s poem, only in later iterations of the story, but Nolan has added him in as a kind of Telemachus stand-in, as Odysseus’s own version of Agamemnon’s betrayal of his daughter Iphigenia: a touchstone and a symbol of all the victims of betrayal. And he’s given him the Tiresias-in-Hades moment. (Most of the audience won’t know who Tiresias is, so there’s no particular weight to having a Mysterious Old Guy spouting prophesies, whereas Homer’s audience would be all “omg, celebrity ghost!” But instead of celebrity ghosts, we get ghosts who have emotional weight for Odysseus.)

I feel like he would have REALLY LIKED to cast Page as Tiresias, but the guy is just FAR too young, so instead he’s crowbarred in a role for a trans actor there spitting truths among the dead as young Sinon.

Back to the film itself: very solid performances all round, and an effective narrative structure. By far the lion’s share of screen time is given to Matt Damon, unsurprisingly, followed by Tom Holland - but massive shout out to Himesh Patel (who also does a superlative Hastings in the Dinklage Poirot audioplays), who gets a heck of a lot of screen time in this film alongside Matt Damon, and whose character gets put through every kind of hell. He deserved to be on the red carpet FAR MORE than he seems to have been? Because don’t get me wrong, I love seeing Zendaya doing Law Roach proud in exquisite outfits, and Charlize and Lupita, but Himesh Patel put in THE HOURS, man! He deserves his laurels! Robert Pattinson also does an admirable turn as the sleazy suitor, just one bwahaha short of going full Panto Villain, but he’s getting cooed over predictably in the publicity circus, whereas Himesh Patel nsm. Justice for this man! They nearly drowned him on screen! He was nearly eaten by many different monsters! If ever a man was Tired Of His Boss’s Bullshit, his character was that man. (Zendaya and Anne Hathaway and Charlize are all perfectly good too, don’t get me wrong, but they’re being feted on the red carpets & they weren’t almost drowned on screen.)

The Odyssey is a story about grappling with consequences (which, I mean, I guess that’s Every Greek Myth Ever), and especially grappling with personal responsibility, and the horrors of war, and Nolan leans in to that. There’s an elegiac tone to the end of this film, a real sense that the days of honour are gone, if they ever existed: Odysseus and Agamemnon and their men did some Very Bad Shit and were punished accordingly, and Odysseus knows that. (Rousing cheer for Clytemestra’s successful avenging of her slain daughter Iphigenia. Yah boo sucks to Orestes for sticking up for his dad.) (The Circe sequence is fascinatingly portrayed.) In particular Nolan focuses upon the fundamental horror of betraying the law of hospitality, and so upending the world order. The Law of Zeus gets mentioned again and again, and it’s The Golden Rule: do not do unto others that which you don’t want to have done to you. This felt very timely - but I think it’s probably ALWAYS timely?

I’m still pondering his choices about the ending, which diverges slightly from that of Homer’s poem. It put me in mind of Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, which is one of my absolute all time favourites - but tonally the rest of the film isn’t vibing with the Tennyson version of the myth, so I was a little surprised he went with this. Not bad surprised! Just - I think I need to think about it some more.

One other point that struck me is that this really is 100% intended for the theatre. It’s going to look crap on a small screen - not least because a lot of the scenes are in dark caves or shadowy temples or set at night. Works fine in a darkened cinema, but anywhere else it’s going to suck.