As we’ve established elsewhere, I don’t much like tricksters, and The Odyssey is the story of the trickster Odysseus. But I would much have preferred the actual story of the trickster Odysseus to whatever you want to say Christopher Nolan gave us instead.
Like, okay, yes, war is bad. We have movies about much more recent wars that tell us this. Lots of them. (Even one famously starring Matt Damon.) I go to the movies to be entertained. This movie was the opposite of entertaining. By my count, in the entire 3 hours, there was exactly one blink-and-you-miss it quasi-joke (“a week’s rations for the first ‘yes, sir'” when the crew’s ears are full of wax). And speaking of blink, I had to close my eyes during at least two of the scenes (cyclops getting blinded, men being transformed into pigs) because they were too gross, and I didn’t actually watch all the battles either. Sigh.
Nonlinear storytelling (somewhat similar to the original) made the plot plot-shaped rather than straightforwardly episodic. But also, according to one review I read, the fact that the story is told in flashbacks opens the door to the idea that maybe all Odysseus’s “memories” are hugely distorted. In Nolan’s version, Odysseus is a war veteran seemingly suffering from some sort of PTSD, so he could very well be an unreliable narrator. (I don’t like unreliable narrators.) In fact, maybe there’s nothing magic or supernatural in his world. Maybe he just imagined giants, witches, monsters, and conversations with dead people. And what about the gods? The characters refer to them a lot, but Athena is the only god who actually appears, and only Odysseus sees her, and she’s more like an embodiment of his guilty conscience than a deity.
So basically Nolan gave us Life of Pi: one person survives a traumatic experience at sea, then tells a fable about it, but you don’t know it’s a fable until afterwards. Well done, thanks… I hate it.
One positive thing I can say about Nolan’s Odyssey is that it contributes to the meta-joke that for some unknown reason Hollywood has given us multiple movies in which Matt Damon is desperately trying to get home.
For me personally, maybe the best thing to come out of watching the movie is an enhanced inclination to re-read The Odyssey. I think I probably read it in 9th grade, but I’m not sure; we might have just read parts of it, or some kind of retelling, in which case I’ve never actually read it (whereas I’ve read The Iliad three times, haha).
