I watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in the IMAX here in Kochi, and I liked it.
It was very expensive at ₹750 for a seat in the second row from the front. Nonetheless, I had anyway decided to watch it because it was a Christopher Nolan movie. I appreciate his work and have loved many of his previous films. I had travelled to Chennai to watch Interstellar in IMAX. And Bangalore for his Oppenheimer.
The Odyssey wasn’t as mind-bending or complicated or inventive as Inception or Memento. But it was a good film. The cinematic experience was good because something happened while I was watching it that I had never noticed before.
My Smartwatch Thought I Had Fallen Asleep
I had my smartwatch on while I was watching the movie. The next day, when I synced it to my phone, it said that at around 7:45 PM, I had fallen asleep. Curious. Because I wasn’t sleeping.
7:30 PM was the supposed show time. After the commercials and everything, it actually started around 7:40. That is precisely when my smartwatch said I fell asleep. Then around the intermission time I went to the loo, walked around talking to my parents and went back into the theatre. My smartwatch reported all this as if I had woken up from my sleep. As soon as I got back into the theatre, it again thought I had started sleeping.
Curious why this was so, I checked the heartbeat it had tracked during these times. My heartbeat had a steady rhythm throughout the time I was watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Maybe that is why I have always loved films. I don’t know if this is a consistent pattern. I’ve never paid attention to my heartbeat while watching other good films. But maybe when I’m watching a good movie, putting myself in the hands of filmmakers who know their craft, my body and mind relax. I was completely immersed in the movie even when my mind occasionally wasn’t.
It also reminded me of something my parents have told me. Even when I was a baby, around one year old, they could take me to movie theatres because I would sleep peacefully inside them. I wouldn’t cry or wake up. I would just sleep through the movie. So perhaps there is something about films and me that goes back a long way.
Feeling Inspired Watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
The other thing I felt while watching The Odyssey was that it was inspiring. I’ve always loved Christopher Nolan’s work, but seeing the effort that went into it made me want to make my own film.
So this isn’t really a story about me disliking The Odyssey. Quite the opposite. I liked it enough to want to understand why, despite being so immersed in it, I felt pulled out.
Getting pulled out of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
Many a time I felt my attention getting pulled out of the movie. For example, when the characters talk about their civilisation ending and the Bronze Age ending, it felt strangely retrospective to me.
Contemporary-feeling Dialogue
If we are living through the end of the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of an AI age right now, we probably wouldn’t know that we were living through such a transition. We might make assumptions, but we would only really know what happened when we looked back at it later.
I felt that retrospective perspective in Christopher Nolan’s writing in The Odyssey. It didn’t feel like Odysseus living in 1,100 BCE would say those things. This isn’t necessarily bad. It just pulled me out a bit from the movie as I watched it.
The dialogue also sometimes felt more 21st century than I expected. Tom Holland’s character calling Anne Hathaway’s character “mum” was one example. Or as pointed out in the YouTube video review by The Critical Drinker, when Matt Damon’s character Odysseus tells his men it’s time to f*ing get off the beach of Troy after ten years of stalemate.
Of course, these characters were Greeks. They wouldn’t have been speaking English at all. And even if they were somehow speaking English, historically accurate English from that period would be impossible for any of us living today to understand. We can barely make out the English that was being spoken by people just 200 years ago. Let alone 3,000 years ago.
So I understand why Christopher Nolan and his writing made the choices they did in The Odyssey. But I still feel something could have been different or better done. And not sound like people today pretending to be people who lived a very long time ago.
Time Accurate Feeling Everything Else
And yet the film had paid enormous attention to other historical details. The clothing, the vessels, the weaponry and other elements felt convincingly of the period, at least as far as I could tell. I’m not a history expert, so I don’t know how accurate all of it actually was. Some things, like the king’s armour and headgear, were stylistic, but when he walked in, you felt his presence.
Even the crooked teeth stood out to me. There were no braces (obviously) or modern dental treatments at the time. So seeing actors with imperfect teeth felt authentic. That made the contrast with some of the other things even more noticeable.
The Actors Sometimes Remained the Actors
The casting was another thing that kept pulling me out. Seeing Tom Holland reminded me of Spider-Man. Seeing Zendaya reminded me of Spider-Man again. Lupita Nyong’o, the actress playing Helen, reminded me of Black Panther. Robert Pattinson reminded me of The Batman.
It sometimes felt like Christopher Nolan was having a good time bringing a couple of his friends together to make a movie. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. But for this particular story, I wondered if different casting might have worked better for me.
Genuinely Good Acting
I don’t believe the problem was actually with the actors or their acting. Robert Pattinson, for example, was convincing as a disgusting sort of bad character. I actually liked his performance. I wasn’t expecting that from him, but he did it well. The problem was that, somewhere in the back of my mind, Batman was still there.
Matt Damon also seemed fine to me as Odysseus. I have seen him in many movies, but I could accept him in this one. Anne Hathaway acted perfectly well. There is nothing to complain about her acting. I just couldn’t quite accept her as a Greek queen. I don’t know enough about the facial structures or historical populations of Greece and Turkey to make a serious judgement about that. And I don’t think that aspect is particularly important. I couldn’t completely let go of the associations I already had with her.
I think this has to do with the audience’s willful suspension of disbelief. Or the creative’s team’s ability to enable the audience to willingly suspend their awareness that these are actors playing a role, that you are watching a movie.
Somewhere here and there, I felt I wasn’t looking at the characters. I was looking at actors I had seen playing other characters. And I don’t know how much of that was actually the casting. I felt like people from other movies had walked into The Odyssey. Maybe some of it was simply my own association with these actors and their more famous roles.
The Missing Grace
Take actress Zendaya playing the role of the goddess Athena. I didn’t even realise she was playing the goddess until I looked at the cast credits on Google. For me, she didn’t quite come across with the grace I associate with a goddess.
I was reminded of the role of god Krishna played in the Malayalam movie Nandanam. Or that in B. R. Chopra‘s Mahabharata, where Nitish Bharadwaj played Krishna. When Nitesh Bharadwaj appeared on screen, you felt like you were looking at Krishna.
I don’t think that is simply about beauty. Zendaya is obviously beautiful. Nitesh Bharadwaj is handsome. There is something else. Something that makes you feel like you’re looking at a goddess or a god. Charlize Theron had that grace. She felt more like a goddess on screen. That quality was missing from Athena.
And that made me wonder whether the problem wasn’t actually Zendaya’s casting. Maybe the problem was Christopher Nolan himself, and his vision for the story.
The Cyclops Was Where I Felt It Most in The Odyssey
The Odyssey is supposed to be a mythical story of magical proportions. I felt at some points Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for me lost some of the magical nature.
This is a story from a time when people had very limited knowledge of the world around them. They didn’t know India or China existed. They knew only the places around them. And could travel only so far out into the sea. Beyond what they knew was the unknown. And the unknown could be scary. It could be magical.
When I imagine the world from which this story came, I imagine that unknown carrying a different kind of magic. There could be one-eyed beings. Enormous human beings. There could be things that existed beyond the world they understood. That magical essence is what I guess Christopher Nolan’s very realistic storytelling may have lost for me.
There is a scene where they encounter the Cyclops. He’s a one-eyed being, the son of Poseidon, and he’s enormous. But the characters seem to accept it fairly quickly. They are surprised. Shocked. But I didn’t feel the sense of awe that I expected from that moment.
Then again, there is an argument to be made that these characters were warriors. They are used to survival. Perhaps they wouldn’t stand around being amazed by a strange creature. Maybe they would. I don’t know. The characters may have reacted perfectly plausibly. The problem was simply that, as an audience member, the moment didn’t create the feeling in me that I expected it to.
The Missing “Awe”
Take, for example, S. S. Rajamouli’s RRR or Baahubali. There are moments in those films that are flamboyant, surreal, magical or simply make you go, “wow.” I’m not saying The Odyssey should have been made like RRR or Baahubali. Those films just came to mind because they give me some of the feeling I’m struggling to describe.
In The Odyssey, some of those awe-inspiring moments seemed to have been turned into plausible, practical, realistic scenarios. Maybe that is exactly the story Christopher Nolan wanted to tell. From some of the interview snippets I saw, that seems to be the case. Or maybe not. I don’t know.
But for me, something felt diluted. And perhaps that is also why Athena came across dressed in a fairly plain robe. Perhaps it is why, towards the end, the film grounds her in reality by showing that she wasn’t actually Athena, but a priestess or somebody inside Troy whom Odysseus watched being murdered.
Again, maybe that was the story Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was trying to tell. But in all of that, I felt something was lost.
So What Was Actually Missing in The Odyssey?
For a while, I thought the problem was the casting. It did get a fair amount of criticism when announced. But all the actors did do a good job in their respective roles. Then I thought it might be the language. Then I wondered if it was the historical details, the cinematography, or simply my own associations with actors. Maybe all of those things contributed.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if what I was actually missing was magic and awe. Not fantasy for the sake of fantasy. Not historical inaccuracy. Or flamboyance. But the feeling of being alongside characters going on adventures, encountering magical creatures and travelling alongside them from the safety of a theatre.
The film’s realism makes the world believable. But perhaps, for me, there were moments when that realism also made the world feel a little too explainable.
Still Unmatched Technical Perfection of The Odyssey
I don’t believe this is a criticism that takes away from how good the movie is. If I were to rank the movie across ten different areas, it would probably be around a 9.5 throughout. The technical perfection, the acting, the costume design, the set design, the cinematography. All of it is beautiful. World-class. Top-class.
The climax, when Odysseus comes home and takes on the suitors, was satisfying to watch. When he finally strings the bow, the applause from the audience was much deserved.
There is also the usual Christopher Nolan intercutting. It is much more toned down here than in Interstellar or Inception, but you can still feel his DNA in the way time, space and locations are intercut even in what is otherwise fairly straightforward storytelling.
And, of course, there is the old Hollywood joke about having to spend millions to rescue Matt Damon. In The Odyssey, it is refreshing to see Matt Damon finally pull himself out of his own pit, building a boat out of planks of wood and rescuing himself. It was nice to see him save himself for once. Haha.
All I felt missing from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is nitpicking. I did enjoy watching the cinematic spectacle. It was worthy of the theatrical experience.
And perhaps the only reason I can sit here and nitpick these small things is that everything else is so well done. With a lot of bad movies, you don’t get anywhere near the technical perfection, storytelling, or heart and soul that has gone into this film. You don’t get the space to notice these smaller things. Here, you are in the hands of somebody who knows what they are doing. You are lulled into the world. And because so much of that world works, you can start noticing the tiny things that don’t quite work for you.
For me, one of those things was that somewhere along the way, some of the magic and awe of The Odyssey seemed to have been turned into something a little more practical and realistic. Maybe that was exactly what Christopher Nolan wanted. I don’t know. But that was what I felt was missing.
