My wife and I saw the film The Odyssey at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany a couple of weekends ago, and I somehow neglected to write about it. Busyness has its costs.
I’ll admit to never having read the book/books; he also referenced Homer’s The Iliad and other period pieces. So I have no feeling about whether Christopher Nolan was “faithful” to the source material, though I find the debate endlessly fascinating. It’s a three-hour movie, not thirty.
The movie is vast and often impressive, especially visually. I thought the first palace-intrigue, extended scene dragged a bit, though the pacing improved after that.
The action scenes are memorable. Because of my lack of foreknowledge, the Cyclops, many of the storms, and the Circe’s magic narrative took me by surprise. What was particularly striking was the treatment of Circe’s magic; someone suggested correctly that it recalled “the unsettling body horror of David Cronenberg rather than traditional fantasy spectacle.”
Yet I thought the recapitulation of the Troy was what I found most unnerving. It was the point that Odysseus (Matt Damon) seemed to grasp the consequences of the “battle.”
A lot of the debate about the film centered on the religious content. A story from Religion Unplugged pondered, “No Divine Powers: Where Are All The Gods In Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’?” Yet my wife and I spent the ride home very conscious of the film’s faith basis. “Many have noted that [Nolan] conflates aspects of Homer’s religion with Christianity and modernity.” This is a fair point.
Still, it rated a 93% (critics)/97% (fans) positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I didn’t love it, but I was glad to see it in the theater, at least until…
Technical difficulties
The real problem, though, was technical – not Nolan’s fault but the Spectrum’s. If you’ve ever played a DVD in a player and it momentarily sticks, you’ll get some idea. It happened a couple of times about 2/3s of the way through. But in the extended consequential fight scene, it happened frequently, not severe enough that we couldn’t make out the dialogue, but it was mightily distracting.
I mentioned this to the ticket seller after the film, and he said he’d let someone know. Meh.
I recently saw an interesting piece in the Boston Globe (behind a paywall): ‘The Odyssey’ and the death of the Hollywood epic. The year’s most celebrated film is destined to be forgotten. “From opening title card to closing credits, “The Odyssey” is a nearly three-hour barn burner, racing from event to event with whirlwind kinetic energy. Blink, and you’ll miss some roaring fire, raucous tempest, or piggy sorceress on the spinning carousel of adventure. Nolan’s film zooms along as though locked into a high-speed drag race with the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise.
“That’s why it’s so forgettable.” This was not my experience, but time literally will tell.
Even before seeing the film, I enjoyed the story of thirteen-year-old Mason Cufari, from Rotterdam, Schenectady County, who played young Sinon.
