AI-transcribed oration:
Once again, I finish Homer with a good drive ahead of me. So once again, I'll honor him with some unscripted oration. The Odyssey was everything I thought it'd be, and nothing I hoped it'd be.
As I expected, Christopher Nolan was not the guy for the job. His dialogue is always too poppy, and he specializes in plot twists and mind blows. But this story is so familiar.
It's set in stone, etched in bronze. What could Nolan do with such a classical tale? He has a sense for the epic, but not for the classic. He's a modern filmmaker, one of the more intellectually sophisticated ones, but a product of modern filmmaking.
He shows it with his obsession with technique and technology, with his special effects. Nolan is a modern filmmaker, and he hasn't done anything really classic. The Odyssey is as classic a story as any known to humanity.
It nearly defines antiquity. Nolan is not the guy for the job. Similarly, I was disappointed when I saw Matt Damon attached to it months ago.
He is not my Odysseus. I had a feeling when I first heard it that Matt Damon would just be Matt Damon. He wouldn't be Odysseus.
I hadn't put it into words like that at the time, but that's how I see it now. At the time, I just knew that Matt Damon doesn't have the majesty. He isn't high and mighty.
He's a tough guy, and such a guy. He doesn't have the classic nobility, so our director and our Odysseus are poorly chosen. I'll add Telemachus to the list.
I know Telemachus is young, and he should be, but he's also godlike in Homer. But Tom Holland was really just a kid. He spoke and acted and looked like a kid.
Matt Damon whiffed on the majesty of Odysseus, and Tom Holland whiffed on the maturity of Telemachus, even before he said dad. Thankfully, Anne Hathaway is exactly what I needed out of Penelope, and Zendaya is a compelling Athena, and Robert Pattinson can't not be a slimy suitor. But it's hard to recover from Nolan and Damon.
Not that either of them did a terrible job. I mean, Matt Damon is just Matt Damon. He always is.
And whether he works or not depends on how you use him. A hammer isn't good for drilling in screws, but you don't really blame the hammer. Matt Damon is just Matt Damon.
And Nolan did about what he could have being himself and dealing with this material. It's just not for him, so why did he try? Anyway, a word on the music. A friend told me the music was underwhelming.
I didn't really notice that, which probably means it's underwhelming. The only music that really stood out was the very strange choice of the dissonant second. Dissonant, slightly out of tune second.
Especially when Odysseus and Penelope are speaking through the screen, there's more out of tune reediness and dissonance. That was a very strange choice. Other than that, I hardly noticed the music, which is too bad for a Nolan movie.
Also too bad for the Odyssey. Imagine the potential. Maybe I need to compose it someday.
Maybe I need to write a concept album. So I've been taking the movie piece by piece so far, but let me step back a little. This movie was quite disappointing.
That's not to say I hated it, but that I needed a lot from it. That's what you're taking on with the Odyssey. It's a proud move, especially to skip the Iliad.
It's a tall task for a tall artist. Nolan is a big artist, not a tall one. He's loud, and he sells tickets, and he does some interesting stuff.
He's bold, but he's not a tall artist, and that's what we need to adapt Homer. Nolan depicted the Odyssey, and that's about the extent of it. He dramatized, he staged, he filmed a portrayal of the Odyssey, and that's about it.
He didn't reframe the Odyssey. He didn't redefine the Odyssey. He didn't interpret the Odyssey.
He didn't deliver the authoritative Odyssey. He just portrayed the Odyssey with the tools he had in his artistic toolbox. It's the wrong toolbox for the job, and I hope nobody calls this the definitive Odyssey in the years to come.
I hope somebody else takes a swing at it. I hope somebody does the whole Homeric cycle and does it right, not just because they have the money and the celebrity friends to do it. Enough people have dedicated their lives to this book, there should be someone else, plenty of people, who can do it better than this. Again, I didn't hate the movie by any means, but I can see the potential, and this just fell so flat relatively. It was sort of boring, and I really don't get bored in movies.
There are certain parts of the story that I wanted emphasized more, and yet I found myself sagging in Nolan dialogue that doesn't carry the spirit of the original poem, and doesn't move the story forward quickly enough, nor add any curious new light to it. I really wanted the Homeric spirit, and I didn't feel it at all. I just felt Nolan.
Perhaps he should stick to writing his own stories, because then, even when he's cheesy, you can call him inventive. Oh, and I should mention something about IMAX. I'm honestly not even confident I saw it in IMAX.
I mean, I know I did, because it said IMAX on the screen at the beginning, and it said IMAX over the theater that I entered, and because the person at the counter told me to go to the IMAX theater, and I did. But the evidence ends there. I literally couldn't tell that there was anything different from a normal movie.
The screen didn't seem any larger as far as I could tell. The picture wasn't any more beautiful. The sound was actually kind of bad during some of the dialogue.
Like, I couldn't understand what they were saying. Now, I was quite a few rows back and a bit off to the side. I was worried about it when I got my tickets, but then when I sat in my seat, I thought it was a perfectly good seat.
Maybe I just don't know anything about IMAX, and I was in the wrong seat, or my expectations were wrong, or somehow I didn't actually see it in IMAX. But I think more likely it's just a bunch of marketing hype. I really couldn't even tell a difference.
I suppose that's the last time I'll go to IMAX until I learn some new lesson. I was also tempted after the movie ended to say that's the last time for a while that I'm going to prioritize anything by Nolan, but I kind of doubt that's true. I mean, it does depend on what subjects he takes up in the next few years.
For example, if he does another biopic, I might not be interested at all. But if he does another space movie, I don't think I'll be able to pass it up. Some of his filmmaking is just so exciting, it's really hard for me to pass up.
And it's so popular that I want to be able to talk about it and think about it. He's one of the major filmmakers of my lifetime, and I've seen so many of his movies and really been interested in a few of them that he's hard to ignore. So I can't swear to ignore him.
But I'm stating for the record that he has been quite disappointing to me in the last few years. Basically, I like Interstellar quite a bit. And every other movie of his that I remember was disappointing.
Typically, there's something interesting about it, like the concept of Inception, or like Heath Ledger's Joker. But Interstellar is really the only Nolan movie that I can say I seriously liked. Let's back up again.
The more I think about this movie, the more disappointed I am, and the less I like it. Part of that's because as I distance from the experience of the movie itself, I recall what people told me before I saw it. I remember hearing that this is the movie Nolan was waiting to make his whole life.
I remember hearing that you have to see it in IMAX. I remember hearing it was really good. I'm hyper aware of bias.
I think it's because I'm such a skeptic by nature that I really, really value pure evaluation. So I'm hyper aware of bias and other things that taint my evaluation. In this case, the bias just made me like the movie even less because it frustrates me that people see qualities in it that aren't there, or at least that aren't there as far as I can tell.
And I kind of feel like I'm not missing them. I kind of feel like they're just not there. For example, if you have to see this movie in IMAX, and IMAX is really all that it's marketed to be, shouldn't that just speak for itself in the beauty of the experience? I shouldn't have to know the technicalities of IMAX, right? I should just experience a gorgeous movie, right? And I'm completely certain that I didn't.
Therefore, that IMAX talk was as the wind. I'm skeptical, and I hate bias, and I hate spoilers. And when I try to see this movie purely, I'm left with a movie that is not terrible, but that is terribly disappointing because it took one of the mightiest stories of all time and shrunk it down to Matt Damon.
It expanded the expenditure with no dramatic expansion. It's just an expensive staging of an old story that the director doesn't understand. I'll probably see this as one of Nolan's better movies in the end, funny though it be.
It might be better than some of his plot twist movies, but I'd still rather he skipped stuff like this and stuck to the plot invention cheesy movies, because at least they're inventive. Between Oppenheimer and Odysseus, he's trying too hard to be serious and noble. He just doesn't have it in him.
He's crafty, not mighty.
Later notes:
I think I know how this came to be. Nolan asked ChatGPT "I've run out of nonlinear story ideas, give me a classic example"
When adapting, you need to either capture the original effectively (Harry Potter movies, Lattimore's Iliad) or do something interesting with it (Fennell's Wuthering Heights, Pope's Iliad). This achieved neither: it missed the original spirit of the poem, and it didn't offer any interesting new take. It introduced a ton of new dialogue, but why would Nolan ever be the guy to fill in the blanks in Homer? It cast Helen as Black, but that's not really an artistic choice, it's more of a cultural statement, and anyway that only consumed a few seconds of the movie. It combined the lotus-eaters and Kalypso, if I interpret right, but that's the lowest-effort plot-consolidation imaginable for a long poem that needs to fit inside three hours. So the most original thing this movie did is invent a ton of new dialogue, but nothing in any of Nolan's prior movies suggests he should be augmenting Homer. I'd far rather he take Lattimore's translation directly, so we can see what Matt Damon can do with "Circumspect Penelope, what word have you let escape your teeth's barrier?" I love quirky archaisms, and I typically loathe Nolan's dialogue, so it's a huge step down. And that's the most original thing about this adaptation.
I should probably mention some things I like. Agamemnon's portrayal, while weirdly non-canonical, was kind of awesome (until we heard his voice at least). Lots of the sets were nice - I don't have much historical reference for this, and Homer doesn't bother setting the visual scene, but I'm fine accepting Nolan's sets were somewhat accurate and served the story well enough. A few of the shots stood out, especially those of the sea. Anne Hathaway was spot on (in terms of casting and performance). Zendaya has the right name, and the right mystique, for Athena. Menelaos is supposed to have red hair, I think, but otherwise that guy from The Accountant was appropriately brutish. While I didn't like the casting of Matt Damon, and I didn't find his Odysseus inspiring at all, I appreciate that they held true to the "man of many turns" by exposing his flaws and mistakes, such as the folly of striking back at the Cyclops after they should have been home free, and such as his alternating reason and passion, rationality and rashness, forgiveness and rage. If this were a really satisfying adaptation, I might have rather they remove the rougher edges of his character, because he's supposed to be nearly blameless in Homer, and some of these rough edges weren't rough edges in Homer; so to keep him blameless, you have to slightly adapt his morality, essentially adjusting for inflation. I'd rather his "many turns" were almost exclusively heroic turns, which is mostly how Homer treats him, polar though he reads to modern minds; Nolan's Odysseus is actually less heroic than I'd like; he's too proud and vengeful; his pride actually compromises his brilliance, and Homer makes it clear that Odysseus' brilliance can't really be compromised except by a god. Nevertheless, I appreciate that Nolan accurately conveyed some of conflicts of his hero, because if his portrayal is to be bland, I'm glad to at least see that canonical conflict. I'm sure what I just said is not at all what Nolan was going for, but it's a concession for me.
