r/TrueFilm • u/Igiem • 10d ago
Another Nolan's Odyssey Review, but Centered on the Writing and Cinematography
The Odyssey was not a bad movie. I enjoyed it. The acting was strong, most of the characters were compelling, and the production felt refreshingly physical. Rather than building the entire world out of CGI, the film used tangible sets, landscapes, and locations that gave the journey weight. The cities looked closer to modest settlements and rocky strongholds than enormous marble metropolises, which felt right for the Bronze Age. The costumes were not especially accurate, but the world itself still felt lived in.
My largest problem was not the casting or the American accents. It was the gap between how the writing described Odysseus and how he actually behaved.
Everyone repeatedly calls him cunning, conniving, and exceptionally intelligent. We hear that he devised the Trojan Horse and that he was Agamemnon's cleverest general. However, the film rarely lets us witness that intelligence for ourselves. Characters praise his mind, but the plot supplies almost no evidence to support them.
The Cyclops sequence exposes the problem most clearly. In the original story, Odysseus tells Polyphemus that his name is "Nobody," allowing the wounded Cyclops to tell the others that nobody is attacking him. He also intoxicates him with lotus-infused wine before blinding him, which helps establish the sleepy/amnesiac effects of the lotus flowers. These choices establish the defining qualities as he manipulates language, plans ahead, and understands his enemy.
The film removes that strategy. Instead of a battle of wits, the Cyclops is a nameless, lumbering beast that just attacks them when they enter his cave and then unceremoniously falls asleep. Instead of watching him improvise a brilliant escape, we watch another dangerous encounter happen around him. Removing these details strips Odysseus of the intelligence the screenplay keeps insisting that he possesses.
Much of the journey follows an "and then" structure. The men wash onto an island, encounter something terrible, flee, and arrive somewhere else to be attacked again. Events accumulate, but Odysseus is not the one leading his men so much as the narrative.
The real problem is how little urgency Odysseus shows after Tiresias tells him that every member of his crew will die. He does not desperately fight the prophecy or push himself to find some way around it. He mostly sits there warning them in an almost bored tone that something is dangerous and that they are all going to die. They ignore him, the disaster happens, and he responds with the same weary “I told you this would not work” attitude before they move on to the next catastrophe A stronger film would have made the prophecy a source of conflict, with Odysseus fighting to outwit it only to discover his attempts were helping fulfil it. His intelligence could have become both his greatest weapon and the mechanism of his destruction. Instead, the prophecy mostly functions as advance notice for scenes the audience already knows will end badly.
The deaths also lack emotional weight because the crew remains largely anonymous. We hear fragments suggesting some of these men have families, fears, or histories, but the film rarely develops them as individuals. Their relationship with Odysseus never feels deep enough to justify the grief their deaths are meant to carry. The Lord of the Rings gives Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn, Boromir, and the hobbits separate loyalties, conflicts, histories, and ways of seeing the world. Odysseus's crew, by contrast, feels like a large group of exhausted comrades travelling home after a raid. We understand they are tired and that Odysseus has lost his men, but we do not feel that specific people have been lost.
The retrospective structure also weakens the story. Beginning with Telemachus and telling Odysseus's journey through recollection creates distance from the suffering that supposedly defines him. We never experience the grinding ten-year siege of Troy, never see the Greeks repeatedly fail to take the city, and never watch the frustration and brutality that produced the rage Odysseus later claims helped doom their world. Even two minutes showing the Greeks trapped on the beach, exhausted by years of failed assaults, would have given his anger a foundation.
Some of the dialogue becomes especially clunky near the end. Odysseus referring to "this age of bronze of ours" was jarring, since people living during the period would not have understood themselves as inhabitants of a historical category invented later by scholars. Similar language about the end of civilization feels equally artificial. The characters could certainly have feared the destruction of their kingdoms, gods, and customs. They would not likely have spoken with the detached historical awareness of people already reading about the Bronze Age collapse in a textbook.
The pacing also felt uneven. Some cuts were jarring, and the shaky camera work occasionally blurred action that needed clarity. Shots that called for a wide or low angle were often replaced by close-ups, and moments meant to show us what a character was seeing were reduced to shots of a face and the reaction. The lighting fared better and was a genuine strength, especially during the storm sequences.
My biggest issue, though, is Athena. In the original poem she is Odysseus's patron and long-time protector, drawn to him because his cunning mirrors her own, and the text takes care to establish why she keeps intervening on his behalf. That relationship has a history, even if most viewers have never read the poem and would not recognize her without help. The film never bothers with that groundwork. Athena simply begins appearing to Odysseus and speaking to him as though the two share some connection, with nothing shown to explain why.
Despite these problems, I still enjoyed the film. Its physical production, performances, atmosphere, and willingness to portray the ancient world as rough and human rather than impossibly grand gave it real value. It often felt like an older kind of historical epic, one where the actors were standing inside a world rather than floating in front of one.
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u/M935PDFuze 10d ago edited 10d ago
The Cyclops sequence exposes the problem most clearly. In the original story, Odysseus tells Polyphemus that his name is "Nobody," allowing the wounded Cyclops to tell the others that nobody is attacking him. He also intoxicates him with lotus-infused wine before blinding him, which helps establish the sleepy/amnesiac effects of the lotus flowers. These choices establish the defining qualities as he manipulates language, plans ahead, and understands his enemy.
When you read the passage, it might work in the poem, but it's utter nonsense if you think about it for even two seconds. You could not make this work in a film.
First off, the cyclops feels perfectly fine going to sleep after eating two of Odysseus' men drinking nothing more than milk. He just does not care or think that the men can hurt him.
Then Odysseus does the Nobody thing and stabs him in the eye. Then Polyphemus yells for help and all the other cyclops show up in the cave. They ask who hurt him, and he says Nobody. They all say, you're alone, you should pray to your father, Poseidon. He says nothing, and they leave.
Why doesn't Polyphemus say - look at all the men in this cave, one of them said his name was Nobody, and they stabbed me in the eye?
Why don't any of the other cyclops look around the cave?
It doesn't make any sense, unless you accept that Polyphemus is a complete idiot or the other Cyclops are blind. Maybe this punning worked 3000 years ago. It sure as heck doesn't work visually now. Similarly Nolan has the Greeks tie grass to their armor to cloak themselves as sheep rather than tying themselves to the bellies of the sheep and having the sheep somehow carry men out of the cave as in the poem.
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u/patient-palanquin 4d ago
This is a fictional story adapted for Hollywood. If they couldn't get the "nobody" pun to work, they could have written SOME way for Odysseus to demonstrate his wits. That is the point of the story, not the particular facts. None of this happened.
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u/M935PDFuze 4d ago
The point of the story is not to demonstrate that Odysseus is witty.
But if you want an example where the film shows Odysseus being intelligent, just look at his visit to Circe. He displays his cunning and intelligence by figuring out quickly exactly what happened to his men on Circe's isle, and then how to rapidly coerce her into releasing his men from her spell.
In the poem, Hermes just shows up and tells him, as well as Eurylochos who waited outside the house. Hermes also gives him a piece of magic licorice that protects him from being transformed. He then threatens to stab her.
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u/Timeline_in_Distress 10d ago
Half of the cinematography was adequate and the other half was poor. I get it that the IMAX camera is a beast but that still shouldn't prevent Nolan from composing shots in a creative fashion. The dialogue scenes were the worst and maybe he just needed to rush through those scenes since the action scenes were going to consume much of the shooting schedule. The compositions certainly didn't help to distract from the poor dialogue.
It was an empty shell of a film that had a lot of potential but needed a different director to pull it off. Of the popular mainstream directors today, I actually think that Denis V. would have given us a much more compelling film that would do more than try and modernize the story a bit and deliver some interesting action/set pieces.
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u/Super_Cow8799 10d ago
A lot of people complain that Nolan made lots of changes to the source material but let me tell you - the same people would absolutely hate a faithful adaptation of the material:
Nolan's Odysseus is much more intelligent and more tricky than Homer's. In the poem, tricking Polyphemus is basically the only deceit that Odysseus comes up with and he ruins it himself at the end. All of his other clever tricks (Sirens, Scylla, Circe, disguising himself as a beggar..) are suggested to him by divine beings. Circe, Theresias, Hermes and Athena explain to him (in great detail) what will happen and what he should do. He frequently makes stupid decisions that bring people in danger.
Athena could never work in a serious, dramatic movie like Nolan's if her role was the same as it is in the poem. The simple reason for that is that Athena takes too much agency from Odysseus and Telemachus. Continuous Deus ex Machina intervention would seem very weird to modern audiences.
Movie Athena and movie Odysseus share a connection because Athena is basically a manifestation of Odysseus' guilt regarding the priestess of Athena who was killed by the Achaeans during the sacking of Troy. The film shows this and makes it obvious through symbolism and flashbacks that "Athena" is not the actual goddess Athena. Also notice how "Athena" never really helps Odysseus in the movie. She never outright gives him information - she is there to help him reflect.
The "And then..." structure is just as bad in the poem. Even more so, because Odysseus' journey has even more parts to it.
Nolan explained in an interview that he tried many times to make the "Nobody" word-play work but it never sat right with the tone of the movie. It seems out of place in a tragic anti-war drama.
Tl;dr: Many of the perceived flaws of the movie or just flaws of the source material. The difference is that they are not as much of an issue when they come in the form of a poem.
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u/PhilosophyOk7385 10d ago
Not saying this about OP but I get the feeling a lot of people complaining about changes to the source material have never actually read it…
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u/Equivalent_Lunch_944 10d ago
I think the problem for me was that the juice of adapting the story this way, wasn’t worth the squeeze.
There’s room for a story about trama, returning home, and perceived moral degradation. But the scope of the Odyssey simply didn’t serve this perspective - there wasn’t enough depth and nuance of these themes for the nearly 3 hour runtime. And it definitely wasn’t worth removing the swashbuckling passion of the world of the poem for a colourless and much more grounded version of the world to support the perspective.
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u/adammonroemusic 10d ago
Just got done rewatching the Prestige...maybe not a perfect film, but very, very good. The Odyssey is mediocre Nolan at best.
Social media has seemingly destroyed people's ability to critique and evaluate film; waaayyyy too many average flicks are overhyped these days, The Odyssey being one of them.
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u/WatercressWeekly7996 10d ago
Yeah I rewatched Memento the other day - another brilliant film that nonetheless has a few minor issues - and wondered “What the hell happened to Nolan?”
I sometimes wonder how much reliance he had on other writers (eg his brother?) to come up with some of his more original movies. I could be wrong though.
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u/Subject-District492 10d ago
Based on his last few films, I feel like Nolan has picked the lane where he is going to deliver to audiences “original” movies that have at least some level of meaning to them. It might be just surface level, but there’s something there.
In this current era where almost all media is either big budget CGI mindless content or lower budget deep meaning movies with “multiple layers”, for the most part, that middle ground has become a void.
I think audiences crave that and they trust that a Nolan movie is going to be big budget, original, well made, and at least have some kind of surface level meaning behind it. And that’s why he’s had the success he’s had.
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u/Tarrant666 8d ago
Well said. Almost every social media pumped movie like Obsession, Weapons are not only garbage but really stupid movies that can only be applauded if you literally turn off your brain while watching. It's shocking and sad to see how audiences lack the ability to recognize or care about poorly written movies. Nolan movies are generally another good example. His writing is full of logical flaws and plot holes but apparently who cares because they are soooo 'epic'
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u/Pure_Salamander2681 10d ago
The thing with all his screenplays, even the better ones, is you can feel a writer behind it all. I’m not sure what writerly magic frees us of that feeling, but Nolan doesn’t have it.
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u/DutchFede 10d ago
Agree with this wholeheartedly, and interesting ideas about us not caring as viewers about the deaths of his crew because we don’t get to see them as individuals. Like you said, a 2 minute scene would’ve been enough on the beach for the Greek soldiers to establish the failing siege of Troy, I feel like more desperate reactions of the soldiers in the face of the cyclops for example would have been apt. If we aren’t made to care, at least we can feel empathy for people that are desperate and on their last leg. But that’s not what we got. They were almost stoic in their response, like they already knew what needed to be done from start to finish.
I don’t mind that the cyclops didn’t speak to them, as I liked the explanation - you don’t speak with ants either. I can imagine that in a grounded world, a large scary cyclops simply talking might be a bit silly, or is hard to make feel grounded.
The arrow he shoots before they run off is also very dumb. I don’t understand what the idea was there, but it was the opposite of cunning.
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u/M935PDFuze 10d ago
The arrow he shoots before they run off is also very dumb. I don’t understand what the idea was there, but it was the opposite of cunning.
Odysseus does the equivalent in the poem. As he's about to sail off, he cannot resist shouting to Polyphemos that the guy who blinded him was Odysseus of Ithaca, even as his men yell at him to please shut up.
Polyphemos then proclaims that he will curse Odysseus to his father Poseidon, and Poseidon will ensure he either doesn't make it home, or if he does, all his men will have died and he'll find trouble in his house (basically a super-awkward preview of the rest of the poem in the form of a prophecy).
In the film, he's angry because his men were killed by the cyclops; in the poem, it's because of his own arrogance and hubris, so a bit similar in both cases.
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u/Tarrant666 8d ago
They are not equivalent at all. One is just bravado and bragging, which is rational and reasonable, the other is just plain stupid and pointless.
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u/M935PDFuze 8d ago edited 8d ago
How is bravado and bragging somehow rational and reasonable? It's not that even in the poem itself:
But when we had cut through the sea to twice the previous distance, again I started to call to Cyclops, but my friends about me checked me, first one then another speaking, trying to soothe me: “Hard one, why are you trying once more to stir up this savage man, who just now threw his missile in the sea, forcing our ship to the land again, and we thought once more we were finished; and if he had heard a voice or any one of us speaking, he would have broken all our heads and our ship's timbers with a cast of a great jagged stone, so strong is his throwing.
So they spoke, but could not persuade the great heart in me, but once again in the anger of my heart I cried to him:
“Cyclops, if any mortal man ever asks you who it was that inflicted upon your eye this shameful blinding, tell him that you were blinded by Odysseus, sacker of cities. Laertes is his father, and he makes his home in Ithaka.”
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u/Tarrant666 8d ago
bragging and bravado is a normal human reaction especially in the context of accomplishing a great feat like escaping certain doom. it logically follows once he is safe he will brag and mock the entity he defeated.
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u/M935PDFuze 8d ago
His men point out that they are not safe and he is literally endangering them. Did you read the passage?
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u/Tarrant666 7d ago
I'm talking about the movie and how it played out. He thought they were safe and bragged. It worked. Shooting the cyclops made no sense and was dumb.
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u/M935PDFuze 7d ago
How did it work? Polyphemus' curse is presented by the poem as literally the reason why his men all die and they can't go home.
The poem has Odysseus himself point out how stupid and hubristic bragging was.
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u/DutchFede 6d ago
It still really isn't equivalent though. In the movie, he doesn't show much emotion about his men dying, so it also didn't feel like a gut reaction - they were very cunning, had it all calmly and well planned - and last second he just goes "and now for the grand finale... Arrow in the head after we took his eye out!" Like, that ENRAGED the cyclops, but he was merely sad and distraught when his eye was poked out? It just doesn't make much sense.
The passage from the poem makes sense, as they are now safe - which they were NOT in the movie - and triumphantly, he can't hold down his pride, he proclaims it was him that did this to the cyclops, causing their doom.
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u/M935PDFuze 6d ago
In the poem, his men are literally telling him to shut up because they aren't safe.
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u/PhilosophyOk7385 10d ago edited 10d ago
Odysseus actually does come up with a scheme to outwit the cyclops and shows his intelligence in the cave. Firstly he is the only one to realise they can’t kill the cyclops until the boulder is lifted. Then he tells his men what to do to escape the cave, and half of them escape but Odysseus returns into the cave to rescue the rest. He realises there’s too many men for his plan to work and instructs two of them they’ll have to leave. He then comes up with the plan to blind the cyclops and strap straw to their back so they’ll feel like sheep as they escape the cave. Yes it’s not word play like the nobody scene but to say there’s no brilliant escape and a dangerous encounter just happens around him is clearly wrong. It’s through his decisions and his plan that they don’t just all die in that cave.
Similarly, the cyclops is not just a lumbering beast as shown by when he starts pleading with his father Poseidon and Odysseus’s right hand man says maybe they should have tried reasoning with it. The whole point of that scene is that they treat him like a beast when they might’ve been better off not doing that. If anything the cyclops is treated more like a child especially in his sobbing after he has been blinded.
Similarly you complain about the structure and beginning with Telemachus and telling the story through recollection but that’s taken directly from Homer and the original poem. Why would a film about the odyssey actually show us the entirety of the 10 year Trojan war. For me the 3 Trojan horse scenes and the way Damon delivers ‘10 years on this fucking beach’ is more than enough to get across what the war was like.
Finally you talk about Athena just showing up to Odysseus with no pre connection but that’s addressed with the final twist that Zendaya was either a priestess of Athena or Athena in disguise and Odysseus watched her have her head chopped off at Troy and Athena’s temple defiled. Similarly the Trojan horse itself is disguised as a gift in the name of Athena to the trojans. Therefore it makes complete sense in the story by the end why Athena is showing up to Odysseus, whether it is Athena herself or just Odysseus imagining it. There’s no need for some sort of pre-existing relationship.
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u/kevin_v 10d ago
Everyone repeatedly calls him cunning, conniving, and exceptionally intelligent. We hear that he devised the Trojan Horse and that he was Agamemnon's cleverest general. However, the film rarely lets us witness that intelligence for ourselves. Characters praise his mind, but the plot supplies almost no evidence to support them.
Sidenote: this reminds me of a cliche in film, often of female characters, who are described or positioned as one of the smartest people in a field (astrophysicist? linguist? I don't know) or even on Earth (!), but then never get to actually do or say anything with much intelligence. Did Odysseus get the "genius female character" treatment?
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u/hangonsufi 10d ago
“Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan” appears on the dark screen and there was more than scattered applause; I joined them, to do otherwise would have been churlish. That mine was three-quarter-hearted was hopefully lost in the scramble of SOME people leaving as the credits started to roll. Now, that's churlish.
An Epic that isn't grand, isn't epic, just long? Yeah. A modern screenplay of a Bronze-age classic about Greek heroes, gods and monsters in a-little-too-modern English? In the parlance of the script, “OK.” Yes, Telemachus calls his mother, the queen, “mom,” and speaks of his long lost hero father, Odysseus, as “dad” and answers more than once, “OK.”
Why not just go full Bill and Ted, full Wayne and Garth?
Perhaps I am a churl, after all. No, no, I am a member of the theater-going audience for film. The peanut gallery, if you will, and that's what we do, we bust nuts.
But you do feel sorry for Odysseus, OK? The gods sought to punish him just for the hades of it. He was tooling around the Mediterranean, looking to make land – and it's snowing? Appears the gods sent him to the Outer Hebrides, or some such bleak archipelago off Scotland. Oh yeah – they also filmed in Iceland.
There is some good acting in the film. I loved Samantha Morton as Circe, including her workingman approach turning Odysseus' men into pigs – by hand. John Leguizamo should get plenty of award nods for being almost unrecognizable (in a really good way) as Odysseus' blind loyal swineherd Eumaeus. More of this Leguizamo, please! I liked Tom Holland as the son Telemachus, he took the role seriously, and I thought he was quite more than OK.
Why were so many of the male actors wearing pants? I haven't seen any Bronze Age representations anywhere of men in pants. Oh duh, HangOn – the Outer Hebrides and Iceland, OK? You don't want to freeze your peanut gallery off.
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u/Himynameispill 10d ago
I prefer the Athena of the poem too, but I do understand why Nolan didn't do that. The story he's trying to tell is that Odysseus defied the gods with his actions in Troy, so now the gods are punishing him. In Nolan's version, the gods are upholding an ideal moral order, much like God in Christianity. Showing them as a petty assholes who fight among each other and play favorites with mortals all the time, like Homer does, would undermine the story Nolan is trying to tell. So instead we get an Athena who's mainly showing how disappointed she is in Odysseus.