It’s funny how things work out sometimes. You wouldn’t think that Disney and Nolan releasing movies back-to-back would make for an interesting double feature, but there are some unavoidable similarities between their latest tent pole blockbusters. Both are oceanic adventures that are adaptions that are heavily influenced by mythology, albeit from vastly different cultures, and the biggest difference seems to be that one was an overwhelming success while the other is slowly crawling its way to making its budget back. Can we figure out why one succeeded where the other failed, or are the audiences as fickle as the whims of the gods in these movies? Let’s find out!!
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The Odyssey is owned by Universal Pictures
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Following the Trojan War, the king of Ithaca Odysseus (Matt Damon) must make a long journey back to his home where his wife and son, Penelope and Telemachus (Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland), have been waiting for some time. The path proves to be treacherous, however, as Odysseus and his crew are thrown off course and must face a series of terrifying trials and outlandish endeavors if they have any hope of getting back to their island in one piece. In that time, a series of suitors have attempted to take Penelope’s hand, chief among them the duplicitous Antinous (Robert Pattinson), which has brought Odysseus’s family and the island itself to brink of violence and ruin. Can Odysseus fight against the elements, the creatures, and even the Gods themselves that stand in his way, or is the fate of Ithaca no longer in his hands?
I find Christopher Nolan to be a frustrating director as he makes interesting movies with an astounding level of craftsmanship, but he never seems able or willing to move his audience at an emotional level. He wows them with his spectacle and imbues his characters with pathos and motivation, but at the end of the day, he leaves us with something that feels cold and mechanical; a beautifully crafted tin-man who’s dying for a heart. The bombastic nature of Greek Mythology has at least given him a strong foundation to tell an epic story, but Nolan seems uncomfortable with Homer’s more unsavory aspects and has drained a lot of the hot blooded machismo out of it which is frustrating, but also winds up being very funny. There are several points I found myself laughing at this movie when it was clearly trying to be serious and portentous with material that is unavoidably shlocky. I suppose this gives it something of a unique flavor as Nolan and humor are rarely found at the same table, but I never found myself swept away by the action or drama given how drained and morosely it all plays out. For a film that’s as long as this is, it settles into its groove far too early and rarely surpasses the excitement of its earliest encounters.
As for mythology nerds, he does capture the individual adventures with a panache that will surely make this fun viewing for high school English classes, and there was at least one sequence involving a forest that took my breath away, so I wouldn’t call it boring even if it does feel rather one note. I’m also mixed on the ending which at least shows some ambition from Nolan to put all of this in a modern context and try to make it relevant for today’s audience, but I don’t think he pulls it off and it ends up highlighting the movie’s biggest flaw which is that I don’t find this version of Odysseus compelling. Sure, it’s a very flexible character and can played many different ways, but the film tries a little too hard to make us sympathize with him which ends up clashing with Nolan’s ideas for the broader story. You can say what you will about the problematic nature of Homeric violence, but the story was crafted with that framing in mind, and trying to turn fights with soldiers, battles of wits with monsters, and faring the treacherous seas into a melancholic exploration of man’s inhumanity to man puts a huge damper on the movie. It leaves us with a character that is far more upstanding if you were looking for a good role model, but far less compelling if you wanted an engaging character. I can’t put this on Damon who is giving Nolan exactly what he wants from this idea of the character, but his well-rounded dad performance leaves us without any interesting sharp edges. Thankfully, the rest of the cast doesn’t feel as locked into Nolan’s vision and have a little more room to play with their roles. Pattinson continues to be one of the best actors working today and is a lot of fun as a sniveling schemer, while Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway equip themselves admirably for the larger than life operatics that a story like this calls for. Frankly, all the Ithaca stuff ends up working far better than the journey itself, but I guess that means we have a decent balance between engaging interplay between characters and spectacle driven adventures; though it’d be nice if the latter had a little more of the former.
Nolan is a great filmmaker, but he always seems to be a step behind his more interesting contemporaries. You can see quite a bit of Eggers in this, but he usually filled his movies with a dark sense of humor which this movie is lacking. There’s a good chunk of David Lowery’s Green Knight in here, but where that felt like a brilliantly realized art-film, this has too much of the blockbuster mindset to really get as strange as that was. Nolan’s just too much of a studio creature to give us the auteur edge that’s desperately needed here, and so we’re left with a handsomely put together straight-faced retelling of a classic story. In a lot of ways, it ends up being a great companion piece to Del Toro’s Frankenstein movie, but where that feels rigidly faithful out of an abundance of love, this feels stiflingly straightforward out of an adherence to rigor. Nolan certainly has his admirers who have always appreciated his po-faced approach to filmmaking, and I’m certainly a fan of a number of his films, but I could have used a little more yearning in a story about trying to get back home.
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Moana is owned by Disney
Directed by Thomas Kail
On the island of Motunui, there’s a young girl named Moana (Catherine Laga’aia) who is the daughter of the chief (John Tui) and wishes to follow the family legacy, but is torn by her desire to also sail the open seas which have become harsh and chaotic for quite a long time. The reason for this, as Moana learns from her grandmother (Rena Owen) is that the Demi-God Maui (Dwayne Johnson) stole the heart of Te Fiti and it is up to her to bring it back with his help. Can the two of them work together to save the world, or will this be a journey too perilous for their growing friendship to endure?
I don’t even know what to make of this one. The animated Moana is so recent that I reviewed it for this very website, and I’m really not that old no matter what you may have heard to the contrary. Heck, I’ve watched Moana a number of times since its release, so sitting in a theater ten years later watching this version wound up being a surreal experience. This movie’s intention is to be a shot for shot remake of the original film, and in that regard, I’d call it an overwhelming success. Every scene, every line of dialogue, and every reaction shot, is a near perfect reenactment as returning actors pantomime their previous performances and the new cast hit their marks with practiced precision. Sure, there a few updated lines here and there, but nothing so radical that I would say there’s even one new scene in the movie; let alone any new ideas, or a unique creative vision.
The fact is that the move to live action for this remake has brought nothing to the table, and that alone is fascinating to consider even if the end result is a depressing indictment of the times. See, it used to be that adaptations like this were a novelty as the move from animation to live action came with a litany of compromises that filmmakers had to find creative workarounds for. Sure, we ended up with a lot of terrible movies that couldn’t find good answers for those questions, but there were a lot of filmmakers who were up to the challenge and gave us great films that are remembered fondly to this day. Nowadays, and with this movie in particular, we simply don’t have to make those compromises anymore as the process for making live action movies is so much closer to animation than it was before. Because there’s no limit anymore to what you can do with post-production effects, why would bother coming up with anything new? It’s sad to see just how effectively they were able to simply make the exact same movie as there is so much potential worth exploring from the original movie, but with this remake and that underwhelming sequel from a few years ago, it seems that no one at Disney is all that interested in going anywhere with this world and these characters, unless it’s in one big circle.
Taken entirely out of the context in which it exists, there’s nothing particularly wrong with this movie. The songs are still good, the story is still interesting, and the characters are still fun. I’d even go so far as to say that The Rock is forced to play Maui a little differently here due to having to be physically present which gives a slightly new and somewhat interesting angle to his relationship with Moana. If you’d never seen Moana, or at least haven’t seen it on the big screen, then I’m sure you’d enjoy it and it might be worth checking out. The only problem is that, well, we can’t exactly ignore that this is an exact copy of what was made a decade ago, and frankly, it’s not as good. Lining them up side-by-side, you can see where a certain amount of expressiveness is lost and how the editing has to cover up some of the stitching between scenes, so while it’s perfectly fine, I doubt I’d ever find myself recommending it when the original is still out there for you to see; even with Maui and Moana’s interactions feeling somewhat fresh in this. I hate to come off so negative about a movie that’s well made and tells a good story, but it’s simply impossible not to look down on it for how blatantly it’s copying its homework. I can’t give you an A if you didn’t even try to do the assignment.
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