Odyssey review – Nolan rises to the level of gods with a breathtaking epic of men, monsters, and moral transformation | film

CChristopher Nolan reinvents the Homeric myth as a massive origin myth story of post-war disillusionment, an epic ordeal of pain witnessed by the dead and presided over by fickle gods who participate almost as equals with mortals. It speaks to the generational pain caused by PTSD. Many soldiers return home personally after any war quickly enough, but returning to their pre-war emotional or spiritual state may take years or decades and may never occur at all. This invisible journey of pain is punctuated by episodes of flashbacks, hallucinations, and confrontations with abusive gods of dysfunction. All the time, spouses and children cannot move on with their lives.

It is a film full of exciting ambition, boldness, earnestness, generosity and taste. There are some generic moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are implemented with strong flourishes. It has impressive Imax-sized landscapes of the unit shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema — who, by the way, avoids the cliched traditional sea color — and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the beating and pounding of drums.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, his boyish, almost angelic face transformed into a careless mask of sadness. He’s the military commander from Ithaca appointed by the Greek King Agamemnon, played by Benny Safdie, his face always vaguely masked in a Batman-type helmet. (Another echo of Nolan’s earlier works can be detected in the troops’ endless wait on shore, as in Dunkirk.) Odysseus reveals to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), the wife he is about to leave and whom he advises to marry again if he dies in battle, that the theoretical reason for the impending war with Troy—the elopement of Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) with the Trojan prince Paris—is a pretext. It’s a regular trade competition for trade routes.

The Greeks’ ultimate victory was achieved after a brilliant tactical deception: an elite fighting unit hid in a colossal horse statue, not rolled into the fortified city on wheels as a gift, but drawn in by its victims as a precious object from the waves, half hidden in the sand. It is a trick that involves Odysseus having to deceive his companion and cousin Sinon (Elliot Page), a blood sacrifice over which he feels endless guilt. Nolan recreates the Trojan Horse as a cross between the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes and Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias.

The point here is that the war, its supposed aims, its historical strategic success and its supposed results, are insignificant compared to the long and strange chaos that ensued in its aftermath, and the gigantic toxic effect that follows the forgotten cause, which is no less depressing than the decline that follows the disaster. Agamemnon returns home to be killed; His brother Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) is reunited with Helen, with Nyong’o also playing Agamemnon’s killer, Clytemnestra. Meanwhile, Odysseus and his men, tormented and confused by hunger and loss, embark on a chaotic sea voyage for survival, where they encounter Harryhausen-type monsters such as the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, Circe (Samantha Morton), Calypso (Charlize Theron) and the attractive Sirens, but also the grieving goddess Athena (Zendaya), an ally of Odysseus.

At home, in order to stall and contain the potentially violent power vacuum contingent on Odysseus’s presumed death, Penelope is forced to host dozens of potential marriage suitors as guests in an ongoing, humiliating greed-fest. Most notable is the fearsome Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson, who is cruel to Odysseus’ blind servant Eumaeus, a sentimental and sympathetic portrayal by John Leguizamo. Odysseus’ psychologically wounded son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), must now embark on his own journey to find his father, or his father’s body.

When Odysseus is forced to descend into the underworld to speak with the dead, it’s a strange and unforgettable scene: Nolan has shrouded souls humping above the ground like the witches in Macbeth. The dead, like the gods, can be approached on almost flat ground; This is the strange pagan rule of the Odyssey, as mysterious and immoral as the secular symptoms of psychological breakdown. However, when Odysseus finally approaches Penelope’s home, which is now under a brutal siege of suitors parallel to the siege of Troy, he does so disguised as a Christ-like beggar. In the final movement of this story, Odysseus begins his mysterious transformation into a god.

One part of Homer’s original novel that Nolan does not include is the hero’s evil grandfather Autolycus, whom he named and is why he gave this story its title. Odysseus means “victim of hostility” – although various translations have subtly and insightfully rendered this as “giver or initiator of hostility and hatred.” However, it is perhaps the most difficult name an action hero can have: energetic, elemental, existential. He is not the victim of one hostility, except Antony’s, but rather the victim of hostility everywhere, an ecosystem of hostility, a hostile terrain through which he must pass to reach the most hostile terrain of his homeland.

The result is a giant, shimmering mirage, a three-hour shadowy vision of maddening episodes that yields neither wisdom nor contentment, but only a grim resolution to keep fighting, to make sense of a shattered life, to return to the scorching battlefield of loss.