I guess I will be the first here to say I really didn’t like it. Some of the stuff I have come to expect from a Nolan film unfortunately, like the weak dialogue and awful sound mix, but this time the most egregious thing by far was the way the film was put together up until Odysseus returned to Ithaca. There was no nuance at all to the direction, it was like 90 - 120 minutes straight of endless noise, short shots, action sequences and that horrible, dissonant score. It desperately needed some actual quiet scenes and the music to fuck off for five seconds to break things up and give me a moment to process what was happening.

The first genuinely quiet scene in the film I can remember is when Odysseus speaks to Athena on the beach. I believe that was right before Odysseus returned to Ithaca, and everything from when he got back was great. It felt like I was watching an actual normal film and not a 2 hour sizzler trailer. I had a similar problem with Oppenheimer and Tenet, but this was a way more extreme example made a million times worse by the soundtrack being far worse than in either of those films.

I think the concept of the film was pretty interesting, I liked the way the trials almost felt like a horror film with the ratcheting up of tension followed by explosions of violence and fear. But it so badly needed some short reprieves and there just none to be found. There were scenes in the palace, on the beach with Calypso, and on the ocean that could have served this purpose but there was always something - the obnoxiously loud water fountain, the waves being too forward in the mix, the camera shaking, the score blasting away in the background, etc - that prevented them from working in this way.

Clearly I am in the minority, but at this point I think this guy has to be the most overrated director in Hollywood. His films have shared this problem for a while but it’s clearly getting worse and after three strikes in a row I don’t think I’ll bother with the cinema next time around. It’s like he has forgotten how to make a good film and has instead become obsessed with this quest to one-up the “experience” by making each film more an even more ridiculous assault on the viewer’s senses than the last.

Had no idea about the events or story of the odyssey so I went in very blind. It was a great story truely epic. Loved the ending so much as I thought Odysseus was going to die. Agamemnon looked fucking cool I was very disappointed to find out the historical recreation of his amour looks like crap. The cyclops part was great. I have no idea who those big armored guys on the island were but they were cool. I will have to read the book oneday because that did not feel like it was a very accurate retelling.

I went into this lukewarm on Nolan and a massive nerd for The Odyssey, so I was primed to be unhappy with any unfaithful choice, but honestly I was absolutely blown away.

One thing that stood out to me would be the general interpretation that the sea people causing the bronze age collapse was actually the declining of an honour code that is seen in the ancient greek laws of hospitality. I’d often thought about the tonal shift between the age of heroes and the Illiad onwards, how the Caledonian Boar Hunt may have been the last key event of Heroic age, and by the end of The Oresteia and The Aeneid, the early identity of the post-bronze-age collapse Mediterranean societies are visible. The sea people concept is largely debunked now, and the collapse is generally considered to be a mix of famine, climate disasters and most importantly the collapse of relationships between the east Mediterranean states.

Nolan then taking this as Odysseus’s fear of travelling home, a changed man, to a world he changed for the worse, is particularly powerful, and his take on Athena as a manifestation of this guilt at breaking Zeus law and witnessing a very real rape and pillage of the city due to his subterfuge was good. I also think that Zendaya was very likely this interpretation’s version of Cassandra too, which is neat.

I went into the film already guarded against the visual style. I’d have loved to have seen an authentic approach at bronze age style from talented art directors and production designers, and I had similar feelings about the muted and gloomy colour palette. I still have these feelings; everyone looked like a monochrome Roman, not even a classical Greek, but seeing the direction as a whole, I understand the choice. The somber narrative, editing style, soundtrack, etc, all serve the same tone that the muted and stripped by colour and art style do.

That said, I’m shocked at the lack of spears in this film. Everyone fights with short swords and no shields, which is basically a Hollywood fantasy in any time in history, but this is the iconic era of spears. I counted one use of a spear, despite several war scenes, and almost every death at the hands of a weapon would have been prevented with a shield.

As a fun side fact, people who play VR combat games like Blade and Sorcery often start using swords and default to spears and clubs, because they’re incredibly intuitive to untrained people compared to swords, which have a far more tactical skill ceiling, making them the default of soldiers right through the era of knights with swords.

Another fun side fact. Ajax, a 5th Century BCE poem about the PTSD driven suicide of Ajax the Greater towards the end of the Trojan war, was performed to 500 marines in 2008, I think by Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, and Michael J. Fox, and was remarked to resonate incredibly strongly with the audience. Myth from the Trojan was onwards suddenly really cares about consequence, particularly in regards to the human condition.

My other pet peeve is the sound design of the weapons (Odysseus’s incredible bow string sound excluded). This was a very ‘swish and pew’. Back in the early 2010s, I stumbled across a Skyrim mod that changed the bow sounds (example here) and I was amazed how much more satisfying it was, not just from a realism point, but just a pleasant resonant heavy sound, like how shooter games have hit marker sounds. Not just was every launched arrow (including from Odysseus) very whistly, but so was every sword swing. For a film with otherwise incredible sound design (so good I’d peg it for winning the oscar this year), every fight was a bland cartoony swish fest.

I also thought the massacre of the suitors was a little bit unwarranted in it’s action set piece style. It makes sense that a trained warrior king who spent a decade in a bloody war would be a better combatant and a bunch of immature suitors, but I think it just overstepped my suspension of disbelief a few times, in a way the monsterous and magical elements didn’t.

My closing thought is that this may be one of the best adaptations of Greek myth at all. It’s ability to take the tonal shift that is the Trojan war and its concluding breaking of Zeus’s Law and the sack of the temple of Athena, pointing that to the beginning of the end of Mycenaean Greece, and its neighbours, and then tying that so incredibly to Odysseyus’s character arc and PTSD is so well done. The fact that my cirques are so specific and nit-picky is a testament to the strength of this film.

Pretty good 👍

Brilliant. The movie just flew by, you could have added an hour in there and I wouldn’t have noticed.

That being said, you can’t end every scene by having Odysseus and crew running to the boat.

I think John Leguizamo was my favorite character & performance. I only really knew the lead cast so his appearance was also a surprise. I wasn’t really locked in to the film until he dropped a dog off a cliff.

Samantha Morton was a surprise. I don’t think I’ve seen her in a blockbuster since Minority Report. Her Circe was disgusting and will haunt me for years to come.

Story of course is epic.