Review: Christopher Nolans 'The Odyssey' is a mighty Trojan horse of his thematic obsessions
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Set us as preferred Tell me, Christopher Nolan, when did it first rosy-fingered dawn on you that your favorite type of protagonist — a tormented sinner-hero — was a specialty of the ancient Greeks? Millennia before Matthew McConaughey’s astronaut sobbed over abandoning his family and Cillian Murphy’s Robert Oppenheimer gasped that he had become the destroyer of worlds, the Greeks spun cautionary legends about Odysseus, the Trojan War tactician who outsmarted his own plan to sail smoothly home.Nolan refuses to tremble before the canon.Grabbing mighty scissors, he cuts and rejiggers Homer and a bit of Virgil to transform these classical texts into his type of tale: one fixated on memory, self-identity, destructive genius and the slippage of time.
As ever, it’s light on sex, heavy on wine-dark angst.Once you endure its opening stretch — an expositional barrage with the pace of an obnoxious cop show — “The Odyssey” ascends as a monument to movie craft with shuddering ships, rough-hewn landscapes and practical monsters who snatch and grab men at random from above like giant skill cranes.Unlike in most mythological tales, the white Corinthian columns have been swapped out for brutal stone architecture.
The Parthenon won’t be built for another 800 years; likewise, Athenian democracy is centuries away.Movies Christopher Nolan explains ‘The Odyssey’: The director discusses how he made the epic new film starring Matt Damon that was shot entirely on Imax.Nolan has anchored his “Odyssey” at the fall of the Bronze Age, a once-great era toppled by wealth-hoarding, diminished trade and climate catastrophes.
Fearful of invading marauders, humankind has turned distrustful and stingy, ignoring Zeus’ command to show generosity toward the poor and foreign-born, a cornerstone of faith that would later be repurposed...