The Odyssey
Having won the Trojan war, King Odysseus (Matt Damon) goes on a voyage of several years to get home. Back home in Ithaca, his wife (Anne Hathaway) begins to think he has gone missing and has to fend off numerous potential suitors.
When did good old 35mm stop being enough for film? I’ve never liked the aspect ratio changes with IMAX, so on paper it’s cool to see a project that uses it all the way through. What strikes me however is that the cost and risk and effort is not worth the reward. There are several occasions where you can feel that the size of the camera and the difficulty moving it is a hindrance. Scenes of dialogue and exposition are a bit of a drag in this film, and one has to wonder if it’s just a fundamental weakness of the medium.
It’s a shame because it kills the pace a bit in what is an otherwise astonishing spectacle. You’ve probably heard it’s all practical effects and real boats and real monsters, well all that stuff really pays off. When Odysseus gets on his boat and they unfurl the sails and set off, it feels like they are really going places, and you want to go with them.
I’m not 100% sure on the decision to use a modern language style and all American accents. It lends it an old Charlton Heston huge blockbuster vibe which I liked, but Nolan wants to give it more gravity than that and the way the script is written doesn’t jive with it. Plus frankly, the scale just isn’t there in terms of physical people in the frame. If you want David Lean, you are going to need 20x more extras involved.
The casting only kind of works. Matt Damon has his moments but I think again is let down by a script that doesn’t quite match his style. Same with Anne Hathaway. Tom Holland was a poor choice. The standout was Samantha Morton, who dare I say was a little glimpse of what we could have had if it wasn’t just all A-listers.
Why am I being so down on a film that I ultimately liked? I guess that’s the thing with Nolan films, they all feel a bit lacking in emotional weight but live in the moment. You have a bloody good time in the cinema then when you come home to write about it, you can only think ‘wow that was a cool scene’ over and over again.
So to be positive: I loved the final flashback to Troy. I loved the Samantha Morton animals scene. I loved the cyclops. I loved the production design and the way it treads a line between realism and fantasy. I was into his vague depiction of the gods, and also into the slightly too literal reading of the text. The non-linear structure worked for me too.
Nolan lends such weight to the main themes of the story. Homecoming. Family responsibility. The horror of war and the guilt that ensues. In spite of the casting and the writing, it does successfully wrestle with these ideas.
More than worthy of your time and a cinema ticket.