Nolan’s Odyssey

Since PVR Priya had the only decent IMAX screen nearby, I had to book a 1145 pm show on a weekday for the ‘Odyssey’. The movie was disappointing and failed to move me. Nolan just kept moving from episode to episode without any deep engagement with the personality of Odysseus, that Homer wrote about. Apart from the PTSD and his longing for Ithaca, there were no traces of the crafty, cheeky, wily Odysseus of the epic. I understand adaptations can take creative liberties but only to the extent that they add freshness.

Odysseus spent a year being intimate with Circe and seven years romancing Calypso. When he leaves Calypso on a raft, he encounters the fury of the Gods, loses his clothes and gets washed ashore. And then in a dramatic moment, encounters the young Nausicaa, and begs her for clothes standing stark naked in front of her. Nolan didn’t find any of these worthwhile to include in the movie. The most damning omission in my view was Odysseus’s cold-blooded murder of the twelve maids of Penelope. After making them scrub away the blood from the floor, he hangs all twelve of them from a rope. Margaret Atwood made this one of the central themes in her feminist reimagining of the Odyssey – The Penelopiad.

Zendaya’s incredible talent was underutilized and the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen was beyond me.

Now coming to what stuck with me: Agamemnon’s armour and screen presence was dramatic throughout. Nolan includes his murder by Clytemnestra and Menelaus’ advice that husbands returning home after decades of absence must not rush to their wives made me chuckle. The gifting of the Trojan horse and its transport were sheer cinema. Anne Hatheway was also impressive as Penelope.

Leaving you with these lines from Henry Oliver’s review in GQ magazine:

There are Iliad people and Odyssey people, but the modern world is Odyssean: great migrations, gap years, road trips; we have lived with Odyssean technology for centuries: trains, planes, and automobiles; we all have careers, which means ‘journey through life’; our highest aspiration is still to undertake the new quest in space. The basic idea of the Odyssey is inescapable. People talk about their side-quests and being the hero of their own life, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once joked that she put on her bonnet just as knights used to put on their helms. Odysseus echoes in every advert where the father comes home and his children run to greet him. To be an individual is to be Odyssean, even if our journeys are small, infrequent, and domestic. We all quest, no matter the scale of our lives.

My previous post on a recent re-reading of the epic can be accessed here.