Dylan Masvidal | Staff Writer
“Tenet”, “Oppenheimer” and now, “The Odyssey”: Christopher Nolan’s “vanity trilogy” has reached its conclusion.
The crackpot craftsman who was once labeled as film bro fodder — for reasons yet to be properly identified other than a surge of online boredom — is experiencing a reputation renaissance of sorts thanks to a storybook awards campaign and friendly competition with Tom Cruise for the title of Mr. Movies.
This change in attitude amongst cinephiles struck an all too familiar chord with me; a reminder of when X users hopped back on the M. Night Shyamalan train after “Trap”.
If you’ve been following Nolan’s work up until now, he’s still the same lovable freak. An auteur whose obsession with pushing the limits of what can be achieved by hand on camera bears an extraordinary resemblance to the brilliant leads in his stories who have been damned, both by themselves and the public, for their ill-fated egos.
“The Odyssey” gives this motif the encore of a lifetime.
Right from Travis Scott’s booming bard opener, there’s an immediate tension gluing your body onto your seat and your eyes onto the gargantuan 70MM IMAX screen.
Nolan utilizes atmosphere like some kind of incantation, recreating the epic poem’s arresting quality through landscapes and sounds, his two favorite tricks.
Despite its near three-hour runtime, Zeus’ Law — or the contributions of Hoyt van Hoytema and Ludwig Göransson — keeps all players dialed in.
Manning the camera, Hoytema shoots the bluest water ever captured on celluloid, adds dazzling contrast to the mucky underworld with the presence of glowing, orange lanterns and flaunts every inch of Polyphemus’ 60-foot stature to ensure audiences wet themselves at the sight of him.
Each astonishing set piece is complimented by Göransson’s relatively subdued compositions, until of course, it throws all caution to the wind in typical fashion.
Instructed by Nolan to throw out his electronic toolkit in favor of Bronze Age instrumentation, Göransson goes full-on minimalist, using literal scrap metal and banging on walls to shape his throbbing percussion section.
Others will point to Odysseus plucking his bowstring as what makes this score sing, but for me, it’s the triumphant hymn during his final trek back to Ithaca where the music makes contact with the gods.
While his stylistic conviction is admirable, attempting to tame a narrative leviathan at every available opportunity is not without its pitfalls, some that are all too familiar in Nolan’s catalog.
His inclination towards fragmented timelines can undercut key characters and performances, with Anne Hathaway’s Penelope getting the short end of the stick.
Hathaway unsurprisingly makes barbecue chicken out of her handful of scenes, most notably a third act blow up where her true feelings come bubbling to the surface and her fury consumes the entire frame.
What’s more frustrating is the cluttered hand-to-hand combat nearly putting a dampener on Nolan’s most gratifying finale since “Interstellar”; think Paul Greengrass’ Jason Bourne movies but with less depth of field and an odd absence of brutality for an R-rated film.
Both of these shortcomings were addressed in his last two outings, meaning I can only wonder if in his quest to fully translate Homer’s sense of scale, he made an oversight or two.
That pen of his has yet to cool off since “Oppenheimer” though. I’m starting to believe he swapped ink for kerosene.
Odysseus, played with unreal poise thanks to Matt Damon’s veteran acting chops, and the effects of the Trojan War are put under a microscope for all to witness.
Nolan isn’t looking to ground the myth, that would be a cop-out. His true focus is recontextualizing the contents of the legend to have it connect with the overarching theme of his previous work, and boy does it fit to a T.
The cunning war strategist responsible for Troy’s collapse is sub-consciously looking for an excuse not to return home.
When Eurylochus, equipped with Himesh Patel’s sympathetic rationality, questions Odysseus for choosing to attack Polyphemus despite already having escaped his clutches, he snaps back like a brute.
Eurylochus discovers a crack in his commander not revealed before; An archetypal stoic he is no longer.
Throughout Nolan’s smorgasbord of genre sequences, Odysseus watches as Samantha Morton’s psychologically tormented Circe reverts his men from pigs to humans in traumatic fashion, loses six of them when ambushed by the Lovecraftian Scylla monster and is the only one of his crew left alive after a vengeful Poseidon swallows them whole with suffocating waves.
And yet, all of these pale in comparison to Elliot Page’s searing monologue as Sinon directed right at his soul, confirming Odysseus’ worst fears: he is the sea people. What was hailed as human ingenuity inadvertently kickstarted the end of civilization as we know it, reverberating across generations.
Zendaya as the goddess Athena appears as though to be an imposing calm on his mental state, but once we’re presented with that last act twist, it turns out to be a painful reminder of the cruelty he condoned.
All of the knockout performances I’ve mentioned — along with others such as James Remar’s world-class knack for relaying exposition as Tiresias, Tom Holland’s ability to go from endearingly forlorn to scrappy and snappy when all hope is not lost and Robert Pattinson’s Antinous being a walking, talking colostomy bag who gets his comeuppance to thunderous applause — dovetail fabulously with the thematic relevance resting at the center of “The Odyssey”.
The clear difference between Odysseus and Nolan’s J. Robert Oppenheimer is the former finds solace in doing right by his family and his fallen soldiers while the latter wrestles with his guilt until he croaks.
Then again, “The Odyssey” ends on a deceptively heartwarming note, dragging the viewer back to the moment responsible for humanity’s gradual lack of empathy.
I have not the slightest idea of what Nolan will create next, all I’m certain of is his continued desire to preserve the mystical nature of the Hollywood blockbuster.
9/10
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