Saw it today and I have thoughts. As one should.

Spoilers later on, although I’m not going to count anything in the original poem as a spoiler. If anything, 2800 years should be enough to have read it if you ever planned to.

Here’s something you might want to know: Parts of the movie were shot in the occupied Western Sahara, giving legitimacy to the occupation, which is problematic in general, but especially considering the themes of the movie. This is also making us complicit. On the other hand, this is an ambitious project which only Nolan could pull off these days. This isn’t lowest common denominator shit you’ll forget in a few days, this actually has value. It will be a big player at the Oscars next year, likely getting more nominations than anything else, and probably sweeping the technical categories (depending on how good Dune 3 is). So, make your own decisions. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but there are still shades. I might have boycotted if I’d known beforehand, but I only found out this morning after having seen it yesterday.

The tickets for this movie have been available for a very long time. I guess for about a year in specific theaters (premium ones). So, at least the studio had a lot of confidence on this. And why not? Oppenheimer was a huge hit for them. The problem is that Oppenheimer was a $100 million movie, while The Odyssey is a $250 million movie and this summer has not been good for those big movies (outside of Toy Story 5), so the pressure is on.

I also have to talk about the “controversies” that came up before the film came out:

First, Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra. There was a certain anti-woke segment of the Internet who were convinced she is too black for the role. Okay, let’s disregard the obvious racism for a second: How do these people imagine Ancient Greece? It was not an insular place. They knew how to build ships, so they used those for trade, including Africa. Now, both Helen and Clytemnestra are married to kings, Menelaus and Agamemnon (who are actually brothers). The movie makes it clear that these men see their wives as their property, and it is also made clear that this is not a good thing. However, if you were a king with unlimited resources, you might want a status symbol. You know, a trophy wife. I guess the ultimate trophy wife in this case. So, in that case something exotic would fit the bill. In this case someone with darker skin than anyone around them. So, even if you want realism from your fantasy movie with Cyclops, Circe and Sirens among many other things, that realism is there in this specific case. Of course, beauty is subjective, but under our current cultural standards, yes, Nyong’o is very, very beautiful.

Second, there was a discussion of anachronism in the language used, but you know what? Ancient Greek didn’t speak English. In fact, most translations take freedoms. The first Finnish translation in the mid-19th century changed the meter of the poem, because that fit the rhythms of Finnish language better, so you shouldn’t care about this.

Third, Elliot Page playing Sinon. Just get over it already. I find it cool that we are culturally finally in a place where a trans man can play a cis man role. This is a good thing. Additionally, while the Ancient Greek didn’t separate between sex and gender, they were fine with trans people. I don’t know of any examples of female-to-male transitions, but I do know male-to-female happened.

Now, it’s been a long, long time since I read the Odyssey, so I might not remember everything from it. They definitely did remove some of the more problematic parts of the original story. Like, Odysseus (ooh, early spoiler) doesn’t murder all the rape-victims in his household for “betraying him”. They give kind of a nod to this by having one of the servants betray the queen and getting punished for that, but I don’t even know what happened to her in the end. Also, Odysseus doesn’t think of his wife as his property, like the other kings he went to war with (see above). Their relationship is depicted as loving, as a modern story would. Also, isn’t Laertes, the former king and Odysseus’ father ousted by Odysseus, a character in the poem? Not here.

The movie is an epic more in line of the original sense of the word than the modern usage. Now “epic” is basically the same as “extreme”. You have epic stunts, epic action scenes and so forth, but originally it just meant basically cobbling a narrative together from distinct pieces. So, basically Nolan does his usual non-linear thing, but it has a precedent here, although the different stories are more mixed.

Okay, finally, onto the movie itself.

Odysseus has been stuck on the beach outside of Troy for a full decade when they finally figure out how to take the city (with the horse, which is much more elaborate here than it usually is). We see Sinon, a figure not in Odysseus but does exist in the larger context of myths around these events, alone on the beach next to the horse, left there to present the horse to the locals. He dies before being able to explain what’s going on.

After that, we see what’s going on back in Ithaca. Penelope has been trying to avoid choosing a new husband, and she is manipulating the situation to her own ends. We learn a lot about the customs that come up over and over again later in the film. We also meet Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, who wishes to get rid of the suitors, but lacks the power to do so.

After that, we keep skipping between the journey and Ithaca. The journey, of course, happens during a span of ten years, but we see Ithaca in the present of the movie, as well as before Odysseus left to set up certain events.

So, yeah, it’s a modern version of The Odyssey. This is Nolan. It’s bombastic, it’s epic in both senses of the word, it’s shot well and the sound is either great or overbearing, depending on your taste.

Odysseus is the hero, but unlike the original poem, he isn’t just hero by default. There are grey areas here. He and his men are seen as raiders by people like Circe, and for a reason. They are. They would have robbed her if she didn’t volunteer to give them food. He does stupid things along the way and the movie doesn’t excuse them as “heroic” acts.

There is a lot of horror here. The sequence with Circe goes into full body horror at one point, and the way the Cyclops is depicted could easily be from a monster horror movie. I think that’s appropriate.

The last act where Odysseus has returned to Ithaca and is trying to figure out how to reclaim his throne, feels pretty convoluted, as the movie tries to modernize it, but can’t get away from many of the clunky elements here (like Odysseus feeling the need to hide his identity from people he made shouldn’t).

Spoiler territory.

Nolan gets very political here.

While I need to remember that a project like this has been in production for a long time, it is hard not to draw comparisons to things happening in the real world right now.

The ringleader of the suitors back in Ithaca, Antinous, is a draft dodger (his family actually paid to get the aforementioned Sinon to go instead of him) and a coward who chooses to manipulate others to do his bidding. Who do we know who dodged the draft, but is still very willing to send other people into wars?

Also, and I found this to be an interesting take, the Sea Peoples get mentioned on multiple occasions, including a threat that would require Ithaca to get its shit together in case the Sea Peoples attack them. Now, Sea Peoples were a somewhat mysterious group of people and probably not a people as such, who raided various cities, thus bringing the Bronze Age to an end. Again, we don’t really know what happened here. One could argue that the Sea Peoples were actually the result of Bronze Age coming to an end, because people would have been forced to leave their homes.

Anyhow, when Odysseus finally wins, he tells Penelope that in fact he and his men and the other kings and their men were the Sea Peoples. They were the ones raiding Troy and various other coastal settlements on their way to and back from the war. He even states anachronistically that they heralded the end of the Bronze Age. He leaves the kingdom to Telemachus and leaves with Penelope to west where Tiresias told him in Hades to honor his dead men.

Back to Sinon again. He doesn’t get much screentime, but he is a pivotal character. To Odysseus, he represents all the men that died here with no real benefit to anyone. This was Sinon’s whole life. He was just a kid when they left and he died on the beach outside of Troy after having spent ten years there. He was the meat thrown into the grinder of this war machine.

Now, all of these leave room for interpretation, but to me the larger message is that our current society is not sustainable. We are letting the ultrarich and the powerful to sacrifice us for personal glory. Not even real benefit, just glory, because when the society falls down around us, what is there left? It won’t matter how much money you have, if there is nothing left to buy, because economy collapsed.

I’m an anarchist (meaning that I believe the means of production should be owned by the workers, rather than the state, as in a communism, or private equity, as in caplitalism), so that might affect my reading here, but the movie also talks a lot about the burden of being a king. After all, Odysseus, Menelaus and Agamemnon have all spent a big chunk of their lives, a full ten years, just there on the beach. As Menelaus admits, the point was never even getting Helen back. That was just the excuse. The real reason was to gain control over certain trade routes. And after Agamemnon, being the king of kings here, has secured that, he returns home and is immediately murdered by his own wife.

Like so many of these historical tales, it doesn’t quite know how to approach our main character, who is a king, and thus responsible for a kingdom. The movie has to approach him as an individual, but in reality, you can’t do that. If you are a head of the state, you no longer have that freedom. With power comes responsibility (as Spider-Man has taught us), and juggling that in a story like this is hard.

In the end, the fact that I’ve written over 1800 words on this should give you an idea whether it’s worth seeing. Yes, it is very good, but more importantly, the themes were presented in such a way that I have been thinking about the movie for a whole day now. On the other hand, Nolan does often use a hammer to drive the message in, when you could be a little more subtle. On the other, other hand, the Greek weren’t subtle either.