‘The Odyssey’ has stormed the cinemas like Ulysses storming Troy: sweeping everything aside. With $264.1 million, it stands as Christopher Nolan’s best-ever opening. All signs indicate that by the end of its run it will match the box office of ‘Oppenheimer’ and may even surpass the last two installments of his Batman trilogy: ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘The Dark Knight Rises’.
The Best of ‘The Odyssey’
1. Its very existence. Auteur-driven blockbusters are increasingly scarce. And outside of franchises, they are almost a miracle. Neither Spielberg, nor Scorsese, nor even Cameron (you’d have to see Disney shelling out more than $300 million for a film unrelated to ‘Avatar’) possess today Nolan’s power. He is the only director capable of combining original projects, epic budgets, total creative control, the authority to impose exhibition terms, and the ability to turn almost any subject into a global blockbuster.
2. The awe-inspiring journey of Odysseus. The portion devoted to Odysseus’s attempts to return to Ithaca is a marvel. All episodes are fabulous, with a sense of adventure and spectacle that are extraordinary. But there are two that stand among the best Nolan has shot: the sequence in which Circe (the magnificent Samantha Morton) turns the hero’s companions into swine, a disturbing blend of seduction, grotesque humor and bodily terror; and the descent into Hades, a prodigy of atmosphere, dramatic depth and visual power.
3. Troy on Fire! Its dialogue with the present (and with its own filmography). Nolan cleverly and dramatically interweaves an anti-war sermon through the two flashbacks about the destruction of Troy. When the city burns, the film ceases to be merely a mythological adventure and becomes a meditation on war, guilt and its consequences. As in ‘Oppenheimer’, the protagonist does not appear as a triumphant hero, but as a man haunted by what he helped unleash.
The Worst of ‘The Odyssey’
1. The arrows aimed at Nolan were very poorly directed. Whether Helen of Troy is Black, whether Achilles is trans (Elliot Page portrays the soldier Sinon), whether the armor is correct, whether they speak English with a Boston accent, and why everything looks so dark… All these petty complaints that accompanied the film’s release ended up masking the real controversy that should have set social media alight: ‘The Odyssey’ can only be viewed in its full framing, in IMAX 70 mm, in 41 cinemas worldwide. In the other venues, that is, for more than 99% of viewers, a substantial portion of the image is cropped from the top and bottom. Nolan, can you be more elitist and deceitful? Either you release the film exclusively in those 41 cinemas, or you craft a multi-screen version that doesn’t look like a cropped cut of the original work.
2. The final fight (in search of the framing). It directly ties into the above. Although the confrontation in Ithaca’s palace seems poorly resolved from the start, it is in this sequence that the loss of vertical information is most evident: the spatial geography never becomes clear, it is hard to follow the characters’ movements, and both the editing and the music (composed by Ludwig Göransson) seem to confuse “build-up” with dramatic intensity. What should be a cathartic eruption ends up a rushed fray that is unexpectedly anticlimactic.
3. Penelope and Telemachus register only a passing interest. Overall, the Ithaca section comes off far less effectively than Odysseus’s journey. Nolan appears far more drawn to monsters, journeys and the hero’s wounds than to Penelope’s waiting or Telemachus’s maturation. Their scenes are more conventional, the dialogue occasionally veers into sentimentality, and the conflict with the suitors drags on without reaching the film’s other dramatic strengths. Rather than a parallel plot with its own entity, it feels more like a necessary checkpoint to reach Odysseus’s return.
