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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