I suffered through watching The Odyssey so you don’t have to. Here’s what I saw, and why it’s important.
All of my previous apprehension about this movie turned out to be correct, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad. The plot is meandering, weirdly written and badly paced. It reminds me of Dune, except worse. The editing is frankly bizarre, with rapid Bourne Identity style shots so no one character speaks into the camera for more than two or three seconds. If an actor wanted to make a demo reel from this movie, it would be a very frustrating process because there is no on-screen evidence that anyone actually memorized his lines and wasn’t just reading off a teleprompter. Furthermore, the first 30 or 40 minutes has Tenet style nonlinear storytelling, which makes the plot annoying to follow even for people who already know the Odyssey. Imagine being someone who hasn’t read it or seen other film adaptions, Nolan’s version wouldn’t even be a good introduction. I wouldn’t show this movie to a child, for example, though there are other reasons to not show it to him (mainly because it is boring and dumb).
When I first saw that Matt Damon would play Odysseus, I was apprehensive. He’s fine as an action hero, but Odysseus is supposed to be highly intelligent and clever, attributes I have never seen in a Matt Damon character. But even a just a few minutes into the movie I understood what he was selected for. Odysseus is tired and that’s basically his only attribute. When the various strong empowered women give him lectures about the patriarchy, rape culture etc. etc. etc. he just looks back at them with a tired, blank look on his face. Much like the audience. If you’ve had the misfortune of watching the 2018 Lost In Space remake on Netflix, he’s portrayed very similarly to John Robinson. And that’s the typical way modern movies critique patriarchal figures. Robinson is the patriarch of his family on his space adventures, and Odysseus is the patriarch of his family and the king of the island (which is the same patriarchal title, just extended to include all your second and third cousins). When a woman talks, the only ideologically correct response for the man to listen silently like a stupid muppet.
Odysseus is never shown to be a strong tough guy, he’s not particularly smart, or a good leader, and doesn’t seem to have any interesting skills at all. The first two thirds of the movie is mostly him and his troops on a beach running away from various creatures. It feels really repetitive, like Nolan followed the Stephen King writing template of “the characters find a (noun), and it kills people.” It doesn’t help that, despite the massive price tag of this movie, almost every scene is on an identical murky beach. The best plot twist for this movie would have been for the characters to wake up at the end and realize that all the adventures were a hallucination from taking too many drugs and their boat is still parked outside Troy (that’s almost the actual plot twist, by the way). The end result, besides being really boring, is to dismantle Odysseus as a heroic character.
A purported purpose of the re-imagined Odyssey is to empower women, but this really isn’t true. The easiest and most effective way to empower women is to empower men. Because the power levels of people is entirely relative to other people, and defined by their relationships with those other people. If Odysseus was a proper hero, then Athena, Circe and Calypso could be assessed as powerful based on their respective interactions with him. But since Odysseus is portrayed as a defeated whipped dog, it is impossible to determine if the women around him are powerful or not.
Speaking of Athena, her role in the movie is to sit next to him in the passenger’s seat and make annoying remarks while he’s stressed out. Like a wife without any of the benefits. Then at the end there’s the reveal, that’s supposed to be a huge plot twist, that Athena isn’t real and was just in his head the whole time. But it doesn’t work as a plot twist because anybody with half a brain can deduce that he’s imagining her within the first 30 minutes of runtime; mainly because none of the other characters are explicitly supernatural gods, and Athena doesn’t do anything besides make snide comments and doesn’t interact with anyone else. And yes, I guess Nolan was trying to be like the Brad Pitt Troy movie and depict Homer tales in the “real world” without gods. The various creatures can be explained as just undiscovered species, nothing supernatural. Even Circe’s trick of turning men into animals is portrayed as a grotesque act of physical violence (something something a bold analogy of rape through the feminist lens or whatever), rather than supernatural magic. But there is that scene when Odysseus visits the land of the dead and very clearly interacts with people who are dead. Oops. I guess Nolan forgot to stick to his own in-universe rules, or was too lazy to care.
While watching this, I had the feeling that Nolan took several popular internet memes about the Odyssey to trick the audience into feeling intelligent. There’s the side quest with his dog, which is cute and true to the source material, but way too long and adds almost nothing to the plot. Then there’s the sea people trope, which for some reason had to be mentioned every five minutes of the runtime. And like the Athena gimmick, the sea people “reveal” is very obvious and predictable. Odysseus’s men were the sea people all along, and brought about the end of the Bronze age civilization by being mean to the Trojans. So yes, you slog through a three hour movie to be told stuff you knew almost at the beginning. “Tell, don’t show” is the rule of the movie, mainly because the propaganda goal is so important, the plot literally just tells you the correct interpretation of every scene.
I do want to bring up a specific complaint many people had with the trailers and were confirmed in the movie itself, and that’s the casual modern slang thrown around in the movie. Telemachus refers to his father as “daddy,” Sinon says “and throw in some other stuff,” a suitor tells Odysseus to “f*ck off” and so on. Nolan fans, including actor Tom Holland, claimed that the slang doesn’t matter because the movie is in English, not Greek. That’s interesting, but also irrelevant.
There is such a thing as formal and informal language, and a person’s speech is shaped by his class and culture. In the society allegedly being portrayed by this brain rot of a movie, Odysseus is the absolute patriarch of his family, and he’s the king, no less. His son wouldn’t refer to him as “daddy” except maybe in private to his mother, and definitely not to some stranger in public. There is also the concept that the family glory is passed from father to son, making the son an extension of the father, so disrespecting his father is disrespecting himself.
I think such mistakes are in the movie because our hyper capitalist elites have lost all sense of social class. They’re literally too stupid and uneducated to understand why an elite of the past, a person groomed to be an elite from birth, wouldn’t say dude, bro and daddy in conversation. Capitalist democratization made everyone stupid, even the people at the top.
One could spend all day hypothesizing why Nolan’s $300 million movie is so bad, but I think the simplest and most correct answer is that The Odyssey is a vehicle to push blatant regime propaganda and no other goal matters, like being fun, interesting or a good movie. Indeed, this is an example of the difference between Anglo Saxons and Europeans back on the continent, which was best explained by George Orwell. Germans and Russians think propaganda means imagery of national excellence with a classical musical score. It was the British (and by extension the Americans) who figured out that the true essence of propaganda is to electrocute someone’s balls until he agrees with you that 2+2 equals 5.
Though I already knew this, I continue to be amazed at how the American entertainment industry is so singularly focused on propaganda even at the expense of entertainment value. It’s probably a correct statement that the USA is the most propagandistic regime in world history. Even Nazi Germany’s film industry was less propagandistic in comparison. The nazis of all people recognized that it is useful to give the nation lighthearted entertainment to distract them from the troubles of war. But the US media seeks to agitate and propagandize their audiences in every product without exception or reprieve. Ironically, the Soviet Union, which is constantly accused by US media of being propagandistic, was barely concerned with propaganda at all in comparison. And even when it was propagandistic, Soviet messaging usually delivered common sense morals, like it’s bad to steal or be lazy. Soviet movies consistently portrayed historical and mythological figures at least somewhat faithfully without the need to rewrite them for the purpose of reprogramming the audience, which is the explicit goal of US media.
In this particular movie, the propaganda points could not possibly be made more blatant. The endless repetition of the law of hospitality to guests is an obvious argument for open borders mass migration to western countries, further driven home by showing ancient Greece as more diverse than downtown LA. As I alluded to already, strong empowered female characters give lectures about patriarchy and rape culture. But the main purpose of Nolan’s Odyssey is to attack the cornerstone of western civilization, which he symbolizes with the Trojan horse burning in the last shot of the movie. Though Nolan is Catholic, his movie feels very zionist-coded. With the timing of everything happening in the world right now, and western popular support for Israel collapsing so fast it’s almost in freefall, it’s hard to believe The Odyssey isn’t a zionist propaganda initiative.
Like it or not, European monotheism did not originate in Europe, but in the Middle East. “You have to support Israel because Jesus was a Jewish rabbi” is an argument you’ll see again and again in internet threads debating the war with Iran. Though it was Christ’s apostles and Paul, not Christ himself, who brought Christianity to Greece and Rome, and that’s where Christianity became the basis of western civilization. But Israel’s propagandists still managed to make the so-called “Judeo-Christian values” into western academic consensus, and there is a kernel of truth to it.
But what the Judeo-Christian values can’t touch is the pagan traditions of ancient Greece dating back 3,000 years to Homer’s times. Those brutal people in a brutal reality and their ideas of virtue, glory and justice that became the basis of all western civilization.
Ian Kummer
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