It's Complicated - on Seeing Nolan's Odyssey
July 28, 2026Reading time: 3 minutes
Short answer - I loved it, though I could have done with about twenty minutes less in the middle. But this film has sparked a lot of wildly differing reactions, so I thought I'd add my tuppence worth.
First of all, Homer it ain't. No poetry, for one thing, but more crucially, none of what we've grown up thinking of as Classical nobility and dignity. Myself, I didn't find much of that in Homer in the first place, I found it all a bit domestic and personal compared with the post-Renaissance versions of the story. I studied the development of 'the hero' concept through the middle ages for my Masters degree, and frankly there wasn't much nobility in any of them until about the fourteenth century. Our heroes had tantrums, sulked like weans when slighted, and the fair ladies were quite likely to throw chairs at people who annoyed them. But that wasn't the Greek take, which was more like 'life is weird, the gods are unpredictable, what can you do but keep on keeping on.'
In the Middle Ages, too, the Greeks weren't the heroes, not even the good guys. Hector was one of the Nine Worthies, but Achilles wasn't, and as for Odysseus - just no. Cunning, deceitful, treacherous, a byword for who you didn't want to be. Europeans prided themselves on being descended from Trojan survivors, the ones who kept the faith. And Nolan captured some of that.
But what Nolan did, was something different. To be frank I wasn't expecting much more than Jason and the Argonauts style spectacle, and Nolan to me is the Batman films, so I approached this one as yet another superhero battling the monsters. And this is where he scored big time, as far as I was concerned. The shock and spectacle was restrained, the horror was hinted rather than flaunted, the violence was dialled back and the movement of the story wasn't compromised while the animators got to show off. The story-telling was woven together in a more subtle and sophisticated way, so there was none of the jerkiness and disconnection of the usual jumps to other characters to keep the tension up.
Emily Wilson suggests that Odysseus is 'glorified' for realising how bad the Greek behaviour was, but I don't think he is. He is a study of the moral damage of war. He isn't just traumatised, he has been turned into something else, and he is no longer fit for ordinary civil society. Much as Penelope and Telemachus might love him as a person, they have to let him go, and work out how to create a society without the enhanced people, the overblown masculinity, or the pragmatic selfishness that moved into the vacuum the absent ruler left. Nolan doesn't take this argument far, but in the world we are seeing develop all around us, it's a start. I think it might just be the start of of new generation of hero tales for our times.
Also the music. I saw someone complaining about the sirens' song. I think he was expecting the music at that point to represent the allurement and magic we think of, but it didn't. Instead, it did to my brain what the actual siren call might have done - it was weird and disturbing and nothing like anything else. It was stunning.
Posted by Admin
Tags: |
Newest Post Previous Page: Funding to Study the Arts >>