My review of Nolan's Odyssey in GQ Australia

with spoilers

More significant than all of these changes, which might have worked well with another director, is the fact that this is not a great movie. Nor a good one. It is a sub-HBO, three-hour TV special. It feels more like a mini-series than a film. Nolan’s cinematography has no elegance or beauty: he is a crude cameraman. The camera frequently cuts after one or two seconds, sometimes after as long as seven seconds—and for no appreciable gain in tension or atmosphere or narrative. Shots sit wide and empty without capturing the scale of the epic.

The space is filled with familiar scenes and furnishings: Calypso has wavy netting and beach-house style clothes; Circe is a TV witch; the suitors fill up the screen like the feasting scenes in Game of Thrones; Agamemnon strides around in black armour like Darth Vader. To compensate for the lack of anything visually memorable or striking, the music is always spooky or dramatic. In Hades it sounds like lasers (and is so loud you cannot hear Teiresias’ prophecy). At the end, when Odysseus kills the suitors, it gets faster and faster and faster for so long that it simply loses its scare factor.

The overall effect is flattening. The killing of the suitors is a prolonged argy-bargy of throat-slashing and sword-swinging; the war at Troy, is a constant barrage of women screaming while their throats are cut, soldiers spinning to their death (after getting their throat cut), towers belching fire before collapsing (three times, or four?). It is so relentless that the final third feels like a lot of squelch, crunch, splotch, snap, interspersed with shots of Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway looking at each other meaningfully.

And this.

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.

Nolan’s warning is that we risk living in the Iliad, that we are going to become more and more tribal, more distant from “Zeus’s law”, that we are going to put our own civilisation at risk. As this film implicitly acknowledges, nothing Nolan can do will alter that. We will forget the past. Reading the news, it seems apparent that we already have. We are, alas, midway on the waves. Nolan’s conversion of the Odyssey into an action film did not smother the underlying story, but it fits the pattern he warns against all too well. If Troy is going to burn again, watching this film will be little more than a distraction while the ships set sail. If Nolan really wanted to issue a warning, he might have made a film about our own civilisation, a song that will be all they have to remember us, a song of all the promises we failed to keep.

The piece was edited and one thing that got cut was the phrase “grim-dark”, which is what most of the fighting seems to be aiming at. You can read the full piece here.