Travel the world, and get killed by interesting people!

This review will contain many spoilers for a 2800 (ish) year old story, so if you don’t want to be spoiled (in more ways than one), cease your reading!

I saw The Odyssey on a standard (not IMAX or film) digital screen, and I was… not excited. If I needed to see it in IMAX to get excited, then it was just an ad for shooting in IMAX, not a film, right?

The Good

 

I was very impressed with the practical effects. Especially the ship and its time at sea. Cyclops was seamless, and 99% of the costumes were impressive for their apparent accuracy. I’m no expert in era correct clothing, but all but one costume felt correct for the represented time. The pacing was also pretty impressive. There were times when I was about to get bored, then WHOOMP! here comes a battle, or a murder, or something else to lift the action back up. I was fully aware it was going to be a three hour movie, but I never really felt the length. Generally, with a couple of exceptions, the acting was solid, everyone had the proper gravitas, with John Leguizamo a stand out. There was decent tension between characters, the resistance of the ship’s crew was believable. I also felt the struggle of Penelope’s situation through Anne Hathaway’s performance. Robert Pattinson was properly cast as the overall heel of the film. The music generally did its job without becoming too distracting.

 

 

The creatures – the Cyclops, the silver warriors (the Laestrygonians), and Scylla (the hydra-like creature) – were all interesting. Especially Cyclops and Scylla, who had a very creepy appearance, much different from other depictions of similar creatures in the past. Overall, therefore, I have little to complain about from the perspective of effort and execution by cast and crew (although there is a little, which I’ll get to).

 

The Less Good

I really don’t like Odysseus. This isn’t the fault of the movie, but to me, he’s basically a tech bro, but from Greek mythology. He just moves fast and breaks things, which really angered me throughout most of the film. The only reason I don’t hate The Odyssey is because, in the end, he seems to have learned a lesson, and comes home humble. At first, I thought it was a strategic choice, but I think I got the point: he realized he had made bad choices and didn’t deserve to come home, unless his wife could recognize him as a humble beggar. There was a hint of him testing her to see if she was worthy of him, but I chose to frame it more that he had been struggling for decades because of how he cheated against the Trojans. An honorable warrior wouldn’t trick a foe, you see. His gambit with the Trojan Horse was brilliant, but was dishonorable, and he hates himself for it. In my mind, if I’m mapping that to our present world situation, it tells us that maybe there is hope that one or more of our tech bro overlords will see the light before it’s too late. Given Nolan’s recent films, I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe this was part of his point. Still, despite this realization preventing me from hating the film, I felt anger throughout. Maybe that was the point and the goal, but there were few characters that I really liked except Leguizamo’s Eumaeus and Hathaway’s Penelope. Everyone else seemed either duplicitous, lacking backbone, whiney, or downright evil. That’s not Nolan’s fault; that’s The Odyssey, and it’s a problem I often have with ancient stories. That said, it’s less good. It’s not the reason I felt “meh” about the film.

A small quibble also with the depiction of the Sirens. We don’t have to see every creature that comes around, but I feel like, given the way the other creatures were depicted, they were shortchanged visually. Not enough to take down the film, just a disappointment.

Oh, and not the biggest deal, but there was the whole training scene with Telemachus which never paid off. I realize that’s a very Rocky-type expectation, but if you’re going to show me that a character has something to learn, then I want to see if they learn it when the chips are down and they should use their training.

The final critical “not a deal breaker” moment is when a hole is made in the ceiling to drop weapons in. This was unintentionally funny, and seemed like a moment in an RPG instead of part of the dire consequences of a tense battle built up over decades.

The Bad

First off, the small things. Tom Holland is great as Spider-Man. As Telemachus? I think he’s miscast. He’s the right apparent age, and he does come off as a naive son wanting to take the throne. But his performance was too modern. It didn’t help that he was allowed to refer to his parents and “dad” and “mom”, but it wasn’t just that. He simply didn’t feel of the time. Now I don’t want to overstate it; Holland is a good actor generally, and has pulled off some great emotional and even comedic roles in the past. Here, though, he just feels too new. To be fair, the whole production wasn’t couched in people sounding “Greek” or “ancient”, but still, of all the performances, his stuck out to me as not appropriate to the overall piece.

I also had an issue with the casting of Zendaya. I suppose maybe they’re a package deal now, and I get that at one point, her face was the face of a young Trojan girl who was killed. To me, though, Athena is a stronger presence, and while I admit it would be very hard to play both an innocent girl and a powerful goddess, I didn’t buy her as the Goddess of the Hunt. She just seemed sort of there, which I think is a lot of what she does in most movies. Again, it’s not to say she isn’t skilled at the mechanics of acting, I just feel like it was a miscasting.

I alluded to an issue with costuming, and there was really only one I cared about, and that was Calypso. While Calypso is supposed to be a nymph, and therefore not a normal mortal, her costume just stuck out to me. I know that the ancient Greeks had fishing nets, but somehow the use of that in her costume stuck out also as too modern. Like Charlize Theron was about to go to Da Club in 2005. Or 1985, but with less bright color. In any case, the choices for her costume didn’t speak magical nymph to me, it almost felt like Theron was asked to bring whatever ocean/island related clothing she had to set.

Now, we come to the big issue. The way things looked.

I praised earlier the practical effects and style of some of the creatures, and I stand by that. Overall, though, my eyes were… bored. I don’t think this is modern film ADHD, because I recently watched Citizen Kane again, and while the pace is a little slow, otherwise I never had this feeling. For a film with battles, a lot of fire, ocean disasters and murder, there was just something missing for me in The Odyssey. Here was this huge budget film, telling a story with all this history, and to me it was just very… flat. I wasn’t excited by the camera angles, the color grading, the motion of the camera, or anything else in the way film was used to tell the story. It was all very straight ahead. Certainly better than a Cecil B. DeMille epic in many ways.

And yet, it also seemed kind of small and claustrophobic. Maybe that was the goal, I don’t know. To me, it didn’t have the grandeur of say Lawrence of Arabia, or even Bridge Over the River Kwai, two films with arguably similar messages and situations. It doesn’t have to be Transformers to be exciting, and I’m not asking for loads of special effects; I respect the desire to use as many practical effects as possible. Somehow, though, this translated into what, to my eyes, was a staid and again, flat, presentation.

A huge part of this was the color grading. Almost sepia toned, the whole thing is dim and dreary. And yet we know that Greeks had access to color. Thus, it was a choice to make the reds deep red instead of something a little more vibrant. Agamemnon’s court, which became the court of Menelaus, was also very drab and dim. Perhaps that’s the point of the story, that everything is awful since they attacked Troy with dishonor. But you can be depressed or evil but still have some color. It’s a choice, and a valid one, but when you make it, you have to bring up the rest of the presentation to overcome it. I feel like The Odyssey failed to do this.

I’ll be clear: it wasn’t that the film was boring, per se. Things were happening, people died and made hard choices, there was an arc and consequences. What I liked was done very well, and even what I didn’t like was done well. Nobody was sleeping on the job here. It just didn’t add up to a film that excited me while watching, and I have no reason to try and watch it again. For a film with as much action and drama as this one has, that seems very difficult to do. An accomplishment in and of itself, but not a good one.

If that was all corrected by watching on IMAX with a 70mm print, then I guess my response is: that’s the only way it should have been shown. Otherwise, to me anyway, it failed to reach the pinnacle of what I consider good, and was just meh.

I give it 6 out of 10 intractable suitors.