The Odyssey, by Christopher Nolan: Our Take on the Movie of the Summer

Hello, welcome to Have Toga Will Travel, a podcast exploring the Mediterranean world, ancient and modern, through the eyes of two former classics professors. I'm Emily.

I'm Cam.

And we're your hosts.

Big day today, because this is the day we get to talk about Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.

Yeah, I mean, we've been thinking about what this film might be like for a year or more now.

Oh, yeah, at the very least.

So before we jump into our thoughts here, we just want to sort of preface this by saying we haven't really been reading any other reviews of the movie. We've really tried to avoid that because we wanted to form our own ideas and opinions before sort of looking at what other people thought. That doesn't mean we haven't encountered them, but we haven't actively sought them.

Right, it's impossible to avoid discussion about this in the various media channels that we sort of pay attention to.

Yeah.

But, you know, still, what you're going to get here is sort of our more or less unmediated thoughts after having watched the movie a couple of times. The bottom line is we think it's a good movie, but maybe not a great one.

Yeah, I will say I think we both liked it better on the second viewing than we liked it the first time. And that's, I think, partly because the things that kind of jarred us or sort of took us out of the movie the first time we watched it, we were prepared for on the second viewing. And so we weren't as shocked by it or pulled out of the movie by it in the same kind of way.

Yeah, I was irritated at some things the first time I saw it, and far less irritated about them the second time.

Yes, you were very irritated after the first viewing. And I will say the film has some really just fantastic elements. There's some great moments. And it does try to engage with some really big ideas about war and its impact on both people and society. And so it does take some really big swings there. But in the end, we just don't think some of those connected in quite the way that Nolan wanted to with the film.

Yeah, I think that's fair. So overall, if we were going to grade this thing, I think we'd probably give it a solid B. It's definitely a movie you want to go see in the theater because the visuals are actually pretty rewarding when you see it on a big screen.

For sure. That said, we've also found that this is a movie that's difficult to talk about because there are things that we really loved about it and we're going to talk about those. But we're worried that we're going to come across as if we didn't like it or that we're nitpicking the film because of some of the things about the film that bothered us.

This is the nature of criticism.

Yeah. And I will say that this is not necessarily a film that rewards deep contemplation of the film itself. I've sort of made the comparison in our conversations about it to a reflecting pool. It's really pretty. It serves a very clear purpose in its setting. It has value in its own right. But if you really go probing at it, you'll find that it's pretty shallow.

I liked the other metaphor you used, which is the movie is sort of like a theater set. It looks solid and real, but once you start pushing on things, it can't necessarily stand up to the pressure.

Yeah, yeah. And watching it a second time, sort of having some ideas about it, it didn't really get much deeper on the second viewing. So it wasn't as if we missed things the first time, because then we went in looking for these particular themes and such that we're going to talk about. But what we're going to do today is start off with a brief synopsis of the film, and then we're going to talk a bit about the parts that we really liked and what we think really worked, and then move on to the bits that we didn't think worked as well as they could have.

Now, maybe this doesn't need to be said, but this episode will involve talking about aspects of the movie in a lot of detail. So this is not going to be a spoiler-free episode. And so if you want to go into the movie in a state of blissful ignorance about what you're about to see, probably a good idea to pause here and come back to this episode after you've seen it.

So the synopsis. The movie does generally follow the plot as it's structured in the poem, and it adapts the bulk of the poem itself.

And just a reminder that in our last episode, we went over the plot of the poem in a lot of detail. So if you want a refresher about the poem, that's a good place to look.

Like the poem, it starts in Ithaca, 20 years after the Trojan War started, where Penelope and Telemachus are dealing with Odysseus's long absence and dealing with the suitors who are there trying to marry Penelope. Telemachus, in the hopes of finding some news about his father's whereabouts, decides to travel to Sparta to visit Menelaus.

We then cut to a beach where Odysseus is wandering in the surf. This, it quickly becomes clear, is the island of Calypso, and Odysseus has little to no memory of how he got there or even who he is.

From here, the film pursues both of these storylines. Telemachus' trip to Sparta and Odysseus' efforts on Calypso's Island to remember who he is. And both of these stories are intercut with flashbacks that are introduced as either the memories of Odysseus or the memories of characters that Telemachus talks to in his efforts to learn about his father. And so we get these extended scenes about both the Trojan War and about Odysseus' experiences after the war.

Now, once Telemachus has learned more about his father and Odysseus has remembered who he is and what happened to him, both men return to Ithaca. Telemachus wants to find a way to expel the suitors from his home without violence, which would violate Zeus's law, an important conception in the movie that's imagined here as a host's obligation to put up with pretty much anything from his guests.

Odysseus wants to expel the suitors as well, but he's not so much worried about the violence, so long as Telemachus at least is not implicated in it because then Telemachus would face exile.

Now, needless to say, their interests converge, especially when Telemachus figures out who Odysseus, posing as a beggar, really is. He helps Odysseus infiltrate the household, where Odysseus, still in disguise, takes a lot of abuse from the suitors and has a long conversation with Penelope. Then Penelope decides that the time has come to test the suitors by demanding that they string Odysseus's bow and send an arrow straight through a line of 12 crossed axes.

Now, Odysseus, still in disguise, is, of course, the only one who can pass the test, at which point his identity is revealed. And in a culminating fight sequence, he kills some of the suitors, including their ringleader, Antinous.

And then the film ends with Odysseus and Penelope sailing away into exile, partly to fulfill a prophecy that demands that Odysseus has to honor his men who died in the war and during the voyage home, and partly because Odysseus feels that he himself needs to go into exile to keep the peace in Ithaca and let Telemachus take his place.

So that's the overall synopsis of the movie. Again, it adheres fairly close to the poem. The next thing we're going to talk arbout are thre things that we really liked about the film. And first, I want to start us off with just the production itself and the incredible practical effects of the film that just made for this very textured, very real world that was very easy to immerse yourself in.

Yeah, there are a lot of great moments. And I think one that really struck us pretty early on is the scene when Odysseus and company are sailing away from Troy and they first unfurl the sail on the ship.

So cool.

Yeah, it's a really well done scene. They're using a reproduction of a Viking longship.

Okay, I know you had some issues with that.

Right. But I mean, it's a real boat, real sails, really on the sea. And they do a really good job of sort of evoking the excitement, I guess, of getting under sail.

Yeah, but also just the amount of effort it takes to get the sail up. And then right after that, you get the scene with the dolphins jumping in the water. And it was just wow, just beautiful, gorgeous. So cool. So cool. Just loved it.

Yeah, and a lot of scenes in the movie are like that. These nice little touches that really sort of drive home an emotional moment.

And they make it feel very real.

Yes.

I will say on making things feel real, one of the things I really enjoyed were the sheep in the Cyclops' cave. very clearly real sheep behaving the way that real sheep behave. And one of my favorite little moments, which is clearly not scripted, is the men have like tied, you know, hay or grass or whatever it is to themselves to help them slip out with the sheep. And you can catch one moment, one of the sheep comes up and starts eating the hay off of one of the performers' backs.

Yeah, that's a pretty unexpected moment.

Oh my gosh. But you watch that and you're like, oh no, those are real sheep doing sheep things. And again, just adding to the texture and depth of the world that's being created.

Yeah. It's not that there isn't CGI used in the movie. It's that it's used sparingly and used to complement physical effects. And the physical effects take priority whenever possible. And again, on the subject of practical effects in a world that feels real and inhabited, there are a lot of pretty harrowing scenes when they're on the ship, stuck in rough weather. which, you know, I think give you a pretty good sense of how terrifying a storm at sea could be in an ancient galley.

Oh, yeah. No, those scenes on the boat, generally, yeah, you're there with them in the water and like, it feels so real.

Yeah.

I think I also really enjoyed the effects work done in the underworld scene, where the shades are just covered in mud and they're doing what they do in the poem, which is they have to drink the blood of the sacrifice that's been offered to be able to speak. And so not only do you have the like mud smearing their faces, you've got the blood that's run down their chin. And it's really visceral. There's also a visceral moment where they're talking about what it was like to be inside the Trojan horse. And there's a moment where I just remember thinking, man, I can almost smell what that interior was like. And it just, it really hit, and that tangibleness of the world it created was just so cool.

Yes, claustrophobics beware, that scene filmed from inside the Trojan horse might be rough.

Yeah.

But let's talk a little bit about the visual language of the film as a whole, the way it uses costumes, scenery, and stuff like that to evoke a particular mood. And I think the place to start here is with a discussion of Agamemnon, played by Benny Safdie. The movie gives Agamemnon a really distinct costume. It almost looks kind of like an ancient take on Darth Vader's armor.

It really does.

Which, you know, clearly is not meant to be a historically accurate piece of armor, but captures what the film is trying to do with that character.

Yeah. And he glides. He doesn't always walk. He sort of moves differently. And you never see the performer's face fully. So Agamemnon just becomes this kind of looming, dark figure who's not totally a real person on some level.

Right. And that ties in, as we'll see, with some of the main thematic concerns of the movie, which have to do with war and the impact of war on both individuals and societies that fight it.

Yeah. And what's also sort of interesting and similar is that the Trojans, you don't ever really see their faces either. You see soldiers, but they've always got masks on. And so they become kind of this nameless mass. It's an interesting design choice. I don't know that I've quite teased out what that visual language is trying to convey about the Trojans, other than the film really isn't interested in the Trojans as individuals, maybe because Odysseus isn't interested in the Trojans as individuals, except for one person that we see towards the end of the movie, one victim of the Greeks' wrath that then kind of becomes pulled out. And in a way, it kind of reminded me of the girl in the red coat in Schindler's List, like we're going to focus on this one victim out of all of these people.

I haven't fully sorted this out, but there's something significant about the color choices going on here too. The Trojans are presented in white and the Greeks for the most part are presented in dark colors verging on black. And clearly that's supposed to make a statement about the moral positioning of either side in the conflict as the movie presents it. And it may be that the decision to keep the Trojans' faces mostly covered is playing with the idea that victims of violence are all sort of cast as anonymous when we talk about war in contemporary culture. That's the best I can do.

In that larger vein, I think one of the other cool really visual elements is the Trojan horse and how they chose to both design it, this sort of horse rearing up on its hind legs, but also the presentation of it kind of buried in the beach. It doesn't look like something that's designed to be wheeled into the city easily. And it just looked really cool.

Yeah. And I think that scene is also consciously playing with Planet of the Apes, right?

Oh, totally.

The Statue of Liberty scene. So it's meant to conjure this idea of, you know, a civilization sort of in the throes of decay brought about by its own mistakes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which, as we'll see, is a running theme throughout the rest of the film. I'd also like to say something about the world of the palaces that the characters inhabit here. You know, prior to the film's release, there was a lot of chatter on the internet about the fact that the movie wasn't particularly historically accurate in its sets and in its costumes and stuff like that. And that's totally true. I don't think a movie like this has to be historically accurate.

And we'd even have to define what that means for a poem like The Odyssey that isn't historically accurate to any one period anyway.

No, exactly. It's a seventh century world with flourishes reaching back to a much older world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But anyway, I really liked the Mycenaean-style palace that is meant to represent Odysseus' palace on Ithaca. I thought the exterior was very evocative of the remains at Mycenae.

Yeah.

But they also included some nice interior touches, Mycenaean artifacts and things like this, that again, aren't that germane to the story, but are details that you can pick out if you know what you're looking for and give you a little moment of, oh, that's really cool.

Yeah. And I think one of the other things that really adds richness to the film is, of course, the acting. And this is a deep cast, and everyone turns in solid performances. And you've got some fairly big-name people, like Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong'o, who don't necessarily get a lot of screen time, but what they do with their screen time is really good. And so we're not going to necessarily talk about everyone here, because that would take the whole episode probably to talk about every performance. B ut across the board, just really good acting to watch.

Yeah, I really liked Himesh Patel in particular, who plays Eurylochus, Odysseus's lieutenant, I guess. And I think he did a really good job of sort of depicting somebody who was ultimately pretty frustrated about being at war for 10 years and stuck on this long trip home.

Yeah. And also similarly, John Leguizamo, who plays Eumaeus, who gets a much larger role in some ways in the film than he does in the poem, takes that role and really makes it his own.

Yeah, it's fun because here he's playing a character who is blind. And the physicality he brings to the role is really well done, right? And really sort of conveys how a character like that would move through the world, I think. And then we get to the big three, and that's Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, and Matt Damon. And all three of these people too do a really, really good job with the roles that they've been given.

I really like Tom Holland's Telemachus. He conveyed a real youth and immaturity that I felt like really worked for the character. And I actually wish he'd been given a little more to do to show the character's growth and development, because I think he would have done a really great job with that.

Yeah. And the character Telemachus, Odysseus' son, just in case you've forgotten, is a character struggling with what it means to become an adult in a world in which your status sort of depends on how good you are in war and how good you are at giving political advice. And here in the movie, Tom Holland really does effectively play somebody who's grappling with exactly those issues and hasn't figured out any of that yet.

Yeah. And then, of course, there's Anne Hathaway as Penelope. And she's fabulous. I mean, I love Anne Hathaway. And she's such a talented actress and does such good work with this character. I don't have much to say because I'm like, well, of course she's amazing in the role.

No, she's really, really good. The role is a little bit limited, I think, for reasons that we'll talk about later. But there's absolutely nothing bad you can say about Anne Hathaway's performance here.

Yeah, no.

And then finally, that brings us to Matt Damon.

Okay, I'll be honest. This was the casting choice I was most skeptical of going into the movie.

Me too. Matt Damon doesn't really seem like the sort of actor who is well-suited for this kind of epic role, I guess.

Yeah. And I think he turned in a really solid performance.

Yeah. I do have some quibbles, but those quibbles are script quibbles, not acting quibbles.

Yeah.

And we'll come back to those later.

Yeah. So I definitely went into the movie not having a lot of confidence in that casting choice and came out sort of the first showing being like, he did not annoy me at all in that role.

Yeah.

Which feels like I'm underselling it. You know, he was really good. And like Cam said, some issues that we have, but they don't really have anything to do with Matt Damon's performance in and of itself and have to do more with other aspects.

You know, above all, I will say that he was really convincing as an Odysseus struggling to reconstruct the past. The scenes he has with Charlize Theron, who's playing Calypso, were really, really good.

Yeah.

And next, there were some story issues that we really, really liked as well. Some decisions the film made about how to present the world.

Yeah, one of the things I really loved was the way that they opened the movie with the bard telling the story of the Trojan War to the banquet hall. Not quite how the poem itself opens, but is evocative of it and draws on scenes that exist in the poem. So I love that kind of meta moment of this is the bard telling us a story, but it's a story within a story. And Travis Scott plays the bard. And I mean, the one thing I would say is like, I wish they had given him the opportunity to give his recitation of the story that he's giving a little more musicality, but loved that choice as a way to open the film.

I also really liked the way the narrative structure of the film mimicked and paralleled the narrative structure of the poem. So the poem The Odyssey begins in, as they say, medias res, in the middle of things, late in the stages of Odysseus' attempt to get home. And the poem tells that story by engaging in looks back at the past, which are stories told by characters within the poem. The movie here follows that format pretty effectively. It too starts in medias res, late in the story. It too uses flashbacks to fill in background details. And those flashbacks are explicitly structured as memories of some of the characters in the movie.

Yeah. And I think it actually makes the movie feel more engaging than if you had just been like, let's do this in chronological order.

Yeah, the bad way to do it is the Armand Assante way.

Yeah, that, yeah.

Not to pick on that miniseries, but yeah, hewing to sort of the structure of the poem is the right decision here.

Yeah, we tried to be watching the Armand Assante film and we couldn't get through it.

Yeah, the effects are really not great.

Yeah, no, it's not good. One of the other choices that they made that I really enjoyed was one of these flashbacks that you get ties together some of the elements that are going to be key to recognizing Odysseus when he returns to Ithaca. And that's sort of this origin story, if you will, of the dog Argos, a story about Odysseus's bow, and about the hunting scar that he has that will be used to identify him. And those all get sort of tied together in one backstory. And I thought that was a really efficient way of setting up all of these elements of recognition really nicely.

And then finally, the movie focuses heavily on the adventure story elements of the Odyssey. That is, it focuses on the story Odysseus tells about himself in the poem and about his journey that took him from Troy to Calypso's Island. And in the film, a whole lot of these adventure stories are really, really good when treated as isolated episodes.

Yeah. So first of all, of course, the scene in Polyphemus's cave.

Polyphemus, for those of you who don't remember, is the name of the Cyclops.

Yeah. We talked about the sheep and how much I loved the sheep in that scene. But also some of the design choices they made for Polyphemus were just really, really cool and really striking.

Yeah. We get a Picasso-esque cyclops, I guess. So they imagine a creature with one eye, which of course is what a cyclops is. But what you get here is a cyclops whose face has been twisted and contorted and the eye is aligned vertically rather than horizontally, it just looks really creepy.

Yeah.

But that scene is also just effective because it's sort of a masterpiece in small scale horror. Yes. Odysseus and his men are in a dark cave. They can barely see anything and these giant hands come down out of the shadows and grab individual crew members and eat them. And it's just really, really well done.

Yeah, when they first see the Cyclops, the like, holy crap, look on everybody's faces. Yeah. It's just really, really well done.

It reminded me a lot of the Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth.

Yeah.

Which also is a scene that involves eating in disturbing ways.

Yeah.

Classic horror.

One of the things I found really interesting about that scene was the way it rethought the escape. Because in the poem, Odysseus and his men are like tied to the bellies of the sheep and get out that way.

After the cyclops has been blinded.

Yeah. But if you're dealing with real sheep and real people, this is not going to work.

No. Sheep, generally speaking, are just not big enough to actually make this work.

Yeah. So they came up with the way that the men are going to get out by kind of crawling with grass and hay and whatever tied to their back so that it'll feel kind of like a sheep's back when they go out with a flock.

As Polyphemus is, yeah.

As he's feeling, yeah. And I thought that was a really interesting choice to think around a very practical problem. Yeah. The other scene I really liked, though I'm sure not everybody will like

this, was Odysseus' encounter with the sirens. Yeah. So in the Odyssey, the sirens are these mythical creatures, usually conceptualized as half women, half bird of some sort. And their song lures people to their deaths, lures sailors to kill themselves on the rock as they try to reach the sirens. Both in the poem and in the movie, Odysseus and company deal with the sirens by stuffing their ears with wax so they can't hear the siren song, all except for Odysseus, who decides he really wants to hear it and has himself lashed to the mast by his men. What the movie does is shift perspective from Odysseus to his men, in particular to Eurylochus, who, because he's got

his ears stuffed with wax, can't hear anything. Yeah, and you can hear as the wax goes in that The sounds get more and more muffled. And it's just a really neat effect.

It is a really neat effect. And what that means is that the viewer is locked into Eurylochus' perspective. You can't actually hear the song. All you can see is Odysseus screaming and thrashing against the mast. Yeah. And I thought it was just a really effective way to sort of convey that without having to create a soundscape that lives up to Homer's description of how the song actually functions.

Yeah. It's also kind of cool because it's a moment where we really see the Odysseus from the poem. Odysseus could have put the wax in his ears, just like everybody else. But he's like, no, I'm the guy who wants to hear this thing for myself.

I want the glory of being the only person to hear the siren song and live.

Yes, yes. And that's the one moment where it really does best access the Odysseus as we see him in Homer's poem.

I also think visually the sirens worked here, too. I mean, they're not depicted as harpy creatures.

You can't see them very well.

You can't really see them very well because they're shrouded in mist. And the tone they're going for is, you know, like something that you know is desirable, but it's just out of reach and you can't quite lay a hold of it. So I just thought that scene was really, really well done.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Another scene I really liked, and I've talked a little bit about this already, is the underworld. And in the poem, what they do is they dig a pit, they offer sacrifices, and then ghosts start coming out from the ground. And then there's this weird slippage between we haven't actually gone to the underworld, but we're also in the underworld. The poem is just really odd in how that's conceptualized. And I thought the film captured that really nicely. They're in this very bleak landscape, lots of mud. They pour the sacrifice. And then, yes, these shades start coming up out of the mud.

Yeah, they literally dig their way out.

And it's just really visually very, very cool, very striking. And then all of a sudden you're surrounded by all of these spirits who then need to drink from the blood to be able to talk. And that whole sequence really, it felt like both being in the real world, but being in some sort of magical other space, which I think captures the vibe of the poem really nicely.

Yeah. And the dead, there really are shades.

Yeah.

They're reflections of their past selves in a way that's very, very effective. And then finally, probably the best scene in this whole sequence of adventure stories is the scene in which Odysseus and his companions encounter Circe.

Oh, yeah.

In the poem, she transforms them all into pigs. She gives them some kind of a drug, which she hides in their food, and then she taps them with her wand, and hey, presto, they're pigs.

I mean, there were a lot of things that were really cool about this scene. One, I love the choice to sort of present Circe as kind of middle-aged peasant woman. Like she doesn't look like anything special. She looks very, very ordinary. And then the transformations of the men are very tactile, right? It's not just touching with a wand. She's literally reshaping their faces. And I did read somewhere that Samantha Morton, who played Circe, was thinking about this like a potter shaping clay. And it's so visually striking. It's also kind of grotesque.

Oh, it's so creepy.

You know, and initially she acts like she doesn't have any power, like that she is just this sort of weak, fragile woman. And then this happens, but she still gives off this very calm, chill vibe the whole time.

Well, the great part about that is, you know, she explains to Odysseus later, she's just allowing his men to express their true inner natures externally. She thinks they're all pigs, basically. And when she reverses the enchantment and turns them back into people, she sits there whispering, back into your disguises, everybody. She transforms them back into humans. Yeah. And it's just a really nice touch.

And her vibe is so almost like maternal and care enhanced. Like there's nothing threatening about her. And yet she also does this like really awful on some level thing.

Well, it drives home that they are in the grips here of powers that they just don't understand. Yeah. Which I think is true to the poem, but done in a much more effective way on screen here.

Yeah. And I really loved Samantha Morton's performance as Circe.

Yeah, she was really great in that role.

Outstanding.

And then finally, the one thing I really liked anyway, and I know that this is not going to be an opinion universally shared among people who watch this movie, is the way that the gods were depicted in the film.

Yeah.

The film backs away from what the poem does. The poem actually shows the gods as characters, especially Athena, who pops down and intervenes in various ways. But the thing is, even within the poem, the gods rarely reveal themselves to people as what they truly are.

Yeah, and if you see the gods interacting as gods, it's mostly with each other on Olympus. They're talking to each other, yeah. It's not with people.

Exactly. The movie presents gods in a different way. Athena does appear, mostly to Odysseus, looking like a young priestess of Athena who was murdered by the Greeks right in front of him at Troy.

Assuming, of course, that she isn't just a figment of Odysseus's imagination, which is a potential interpretation of the film, one it kind of flirts with. But we tend to skew towards it's Athena and not Odysseus's imagination.

Right. But otherwise, the gods make their presence felt in the way that gods actually made their presence felt in antiquity, through nature, basically, through signs, thunder, especially. And there are some really cool moments, I thought, when you can hear Zeus speaking in the film at moments when Zeus is said to intervene forcefully in the poem. So the ones that really stood out to me on second viewing anyway, were when Calypso and Odysseus are talking to each other very early on. And Odysseus says something like, I really want to remember what happened to me. And Calypso is resistant to this. She wants to keep him there with her. And she starts to express that. And all of a sudden, there's a rumble of thunder. And she stops and she rethinks what she's about to say because she knows exactly what that thunder means.

Yeah, it's so subtle.

Yeah.

It's so well done. So that's a lot of the things that we really liked about the movie. We thought were really well done. But, you know, we would be remiss if we didn't try to unpack some of the things that we maybe didn't like as much. It's just worth a reminder that when we're looking at films like this and evaluating them, we are very mindful of the fact that every translation, every adaptation of a piece of material is an act of interpretation. And so, you know, the question we go in with is, do you end up with an interpretation that is interesting and coherent that honors the source material?

Yeah, this is really difficult to do. You clearly have to have enough knowledge of the source material to understand it as best as you can. And then you need to make choices about what you're going to emphasize, what you're going to cut, that sort of thing in a way that allows you to actually deliver an interpretation that is convincing and moves people.

And so we like to see really smart, interesting, strong choices. And, you know, we think this movie made some really strong choices, but I don't know necessarily how smart or insightful or internally consistent some of those choices were.

Right. So for me, the main problem I had with the film is that it seems like there's a real misalignment between the story that the film actually tells in the images it displays and the way it's plotted and so on, and the themes that Christopher Nolan clearly wants to explore. What Nolan really wants to do is tell the Odyssey as a story of how war damages both the individuals and the societies that fight it, especially when war is undertaken by people for clearly self-interested reasons, cloaked in the guise of, I don't know, moral imperative or whatever. So in this case, you've got Agamemnon wanting to control trade routes so badly that he's willing to take Helen's abduction as a pretext to fight a war. He's willing to sacrifice his own daughter to get there and so on. And this leads to bad consequences in the world of the film.

Yeah. And so the film has this premise that war of this sort damages the individuals involved. So like Odysseus, right, ends up trapped on Calypso's Island with no memories of how he ended up there or really who he is because of this trauma that he's experienced.

Right. And that trauma, it turns out, in the world of the film is both because of the carnage he witnessed during the sack of Troy, for which he ends up feeling responsible, as he himself tells Penelope in the conversation that happens between these two characters late in the film; and, it seems, because he feels responsible for the deaths of everyone who sailed there with him. You know, again, the Odyssey is a story of Odysseus' homecoming. Nobody else who sailed with him to try ever makes it home.

Yeah. And the other element, right, is that war of this sort damages societies as a whole because it, as the film puts it, breaks the fragile bonds between men, which in the case of the film is framed around the idea of Zeus's law, which is this kind of conflation of ancient concepts of hospitality, that is xenia, and the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And the xenia here is presented maybe in a little one-sided, right, that the obligation is always on the host to honor it, but they don't really talk about the obligations that are on the guest to honor that relationship. So it's that, you know, hosts should always treat people the way that they would be treated if they were strangers, and that's how it gets framed. And this concept gets reiterated over and over and over and over again in the film that Zeus's law must be obeyed, and that this is very clearly seen as the central organizing principle of society.

The argument the movie ends up making is that what the Greeks do at Troy violates Zeus's law in a way that almost really breaks society beyond repair. The movie plays with this by introducing the idea of the peoples from the sea, having various characters drop references to these mysterious people from the sea who are depicted as raiders that appear without warning and attack communities all over the place.

And in his conversation with Penelope late in the film, Odysseus reveals what is presumably supposed to be a shocking revelation, that the people from the sea are none other than he and his men and the other Greeks returning from Troy who pillaged their way home.

The idea here is that their society has been essentially collectively traumatized because the Greeks violated Zeus's law by taking Troy, using the Trojan horse, using trickery. And now in the world of the movie, people are essentially acting in purely self-interested ways, taking what they want from who they want it. And that persistent violation of Zeus's law is causing the world to fall apart around them.

Now, this is an adaptation of ideas that you can spot in the poem, in the original source material.

Yeah, the theme of trauma is something that a lot of people see in Odysseus' interactions with the Phaeacians in the poem. When Demodocus, the bard, starts singing songs about the Trojan War, and in the poem, Odysseus reacts to this by weeping, which you can really read as Odysseus processing grief, processing trauma.

And also the way that he takes vengeance on the suitors sort of being seen as excessive and beyond the bounds of what is reasonable in that world is also sort of a mark of his trauma.

At the same time, this idea that violating the laws of Zeus is a bad thing, it could have major bad consequences, is an extension of a theme that's clearly present in the Odyssey, because the Odyssey, the poem, really does engage in some thinking about what xenia actually means. What's the relationship between host and guest? It's just that the movie goes about doing it in a slightly different way.

And both of these, the idea that war damages individuals and that war damages societies, are huge ideas. They're big ideas, and they could be really impactful if they're done well.

I can easily imagine a movie in which these are developed well and effectively, and Pasolini's The Return shows you that this is possible by offering a pretty good reading of Odysseus as someone traumatized by war.

Yeah, unfortunately, with the Nolan film, you know, we just generally don't feel like the film did the work it needed to do to really drive these themes home effectively.

Yeah. And I think the main problem ultimately is the movie forgets a very important rule, which is show don't tell. It does a lot of telling us what we're supposed to think without showing us a narrative that actually drives those themes forward. Arguably because Nolan decided he didn't want to risk alienating the audience, we think; maybe that's something we'll come back to a little bit later.

Yeah. And so the result is in the end, a very superficial treatment of these things that ends up being coupled with some really ham-handed dialogue so that it can tell us what we're supposed to think without showing. Some lines of like, our civilization is collapsing, or the age of bronze is ending. I just feel bad for Matt Damon that he had to deliver that line.

Yeah, he got some really, really horrible dialogue in the last half hour of the movie in particular.

Yeah, just, there were some really bad lines.

Anyway, this basic problem that the film relies too much on telling and not enough on showing and therefore doesn't really develop these themes as well as it could, is really really clear when it comes to the war damages societies theme. In the movie this theme really does hang on Odysseus's revelation at almost the very end of the movie what he says is the Greeks captured Troy only by breaking Zeus's law by offering a gift and by using the Trojan horse as a trick and sort of breaking this fundamental law of hospitality, and that in doing this, they broke themselves and the world around them. Penelope at that point responds by saying, you are the Sea Peoples. And Odysseus says, yes, my queen.

Yeah.

Dun, dun, dun.

Yeah. Okay. And before we even get into the problem of telling instead of showing here, can we just talk about the problem with the movie's internal coherence in this big reveal? So Odysseus, at the end, they violated Zeus's law because they left this gift for the Trojans that wasn't a real gift, and this fundamentally breaks Zeus' law on a society-wide level. But what's interesting is when we actually get the story of the Trojan horse as it's told by the bard at the beginning, when the Trojans encounter Sinon there by the horse, Sinon tells them that the horse is a gift for Athena. And then the Trojans, of their own accord, decide to take it into the city. So it's not explicitly cast as a gift for the Trojans. The Trojans could have just left it alone. But then later when Odysseus is telling the story, he talks about how it's left as a gift for the Trojans, as a symbol of peace, etc. And that's not actually how it's presented earlier.

Yeah, it's a problem that the movie doesn't clearly explain how the Trojan horse stratagem is in some way a violation of Zeus's laws as the movie itself has constructed those. It tries to do that indirectly, maybe, through metaphor, a metaphor that Odysseus draws about the difference between fighting and hunting. And he tries to cast hunting as stealthy and therefore bad in some sense. But again, it's not something that the movie actually convincingly engages with.

Yeah, and this problem of internal incoherence actually is connected to this problem of telling and not showing. And here, the big thing we need to talk about are the Sea Peoples. Because even though we've got this idea that Odysseus and his men are the Sea Peoples, and we hear all of us talk about the Sea Peoples and how violent they are, all of that, the film just actually doesn't show us that the trauma of war has made Odysseus and his men worse in any clear way.

Yeah, the closest it comes to doing this is in a scene early in their voyage home when Odysseus and his men raid a coastal town as they're searching for provisions. This is clearly modeled on an episode that actually takes place in the poem, Odysseus' raid on a city inhabited by the Cicones. Now, Odysseus and company are clearly not really good here, right? They're doing something bad. They're taking other people's stuff. But the thing is, in the movie, their behavior is actually pretty restrained, given what we might expect, and particularly in relation to how this episode is presented in the poem.

Yeah. So it's clear that the men are sort of willing to engage in violence to get the supplies they need to get home. Although I will point out that the sanction of engaging in violence is not given by Odysseus, but by Eurylochus, his lieutenant, if you will. But the purpose in getting these supplies is to help them get home. And it's not necessarily for self-enrichment or anything like that, right? It's meeting basic needs, not anything else.

But the problem is that the movie doesn't even really go with that idea, right? Because it turns out that the villagers have abandoned their houses before Eurylochus and Odysseus' crew actually arrive.

So yeah, the violence isn't needed.

Right. It's a very puzzling scene, right? Eurylochus and his companions have clearly set fire to the village.

And are taking all the stuff from it.

But the movie is also at pains to suggest that nobody was hurt. The villagers weren't there. And it seems that Eurylochus and his men burned the place down, I don't know, because they were frustrated that nobody was there to greet them. It's kind of messy.

Yeah, yeah. There's like one person they find and they just sort of ask him what's going on.

Yeah, their question is, why weren't you here when we landed?

Yeah. And, you know, so it's all a little perplexing because the comparable scene in the poem actually does involve quite a bit of violence, right? They massacre the town, they kill all the men, they enslave the women and children, they pillage and plunder and burn it to the ground. And those elements could be put to work here to serve this story that Nolan wants to tell about how the men have been sort of warped by engaging in violence, but that's not actually what we see.

No. And there's another really clear missed opportunity along these lines, too, and that is the Polyphemus scene. The Polyphemus scene in the poem is really, really complicated because, yes, Polyphemus is wrong to eat them all. Like, clearly, we sort of established in our episode last time that you shouldn't eat your guests. But the other thing about this scene in the poem is that Odysseus and his friends come in an ambiguous role as well. They want to claim to be guests, but they enter Polyphemus's cave uninvited, and they basically loot his stuff. And Polyphemus calls them out for this when he arrives in the cave by saying, "Who are you guys? You guys must be pirates roaming around causing people trouble on the seas." And of course, that's exactly what Odysseus and his friends are at this moment in the poem. Here, though, that's not a theme that's really pursued by the movie. There are hints about it. You know, Matt Damon tastes the cheese and says, Oh, it's pretty good. But then they sort of hunker down to wait, and they don't really do anything that seems abusive or a violation of Polyphemus' hospitality. Instead, they play up the horror of the scene, right? They're being eaten by this giant that they just don't understand at all.

Yeah. And so the scene ends up portraying Odysseus and his men more like victims rather than, you know, both sides are problematic. And this idea that Odysseus' men are mostly victims on their trip home gets reiterated a lot. So for example, in the scene with the Laestrygonians, you know, they show up, they meet a child, and they say, hey, we just need some food. And the child sort of summons the Laestrygonians who then start slaughtering them.

And this tendency to portray Odysseus' men mostly as victims is true even in the scene that arguably tries to do the most work to give an alternative perspective, and that's the scene with Circe. This is a scene that could have been played in a way to really play up the menace and the potential violence represented by Odysseus' crew. It's a situation in which a bunch of armed men show up and confront a lone woman in her home. That's a scene loaded by its very nature with threat and danger, potentially.

And Circe reacts to them in that way initially.

Yes.

Right? And then after she's turned them into pigs and she's explaining her actions to Odysseus, she gives a very fiery speech in which she makes that argument explicitly and accuses Odysseus' men of, you know, raping and murdering and pillaging their way across the world.

Right. The problem is that we haven't seen them doing that. So it seems like this speech she's making is sort of at odds with reality. And even within this scene, the movie doesn't really commit to that view, because Eurylochus, you know, after initially coming into Circe's house and startling her and terrifying her, is really trying to talk her down. You know, nobody's going to hurt you. We're not here to harm you. We're just looking for some food.

Yeah. So it undercuts that threat and menace immediately. And don't anyone think that Eurylochus' men might actually harm this woman in the way that she's afraid?

Right.

So we have that problem on one hand of Odysseus and his men never actually seem that threatening or damaged even. Like they just want to get home. And at the same time, the threat of the Sea Peoples also feels a little hollow. And the film actually doesn't, I think, do a real good job of developing those stakes. Again, it tells you about them, but it never shows you anything. So the stories of the Sea Peoples are entirely rumor throughout the film. And that's how they're presented. Wait, we've heard about this. We've heard about this. But no one in the film has any firsthand experience of them.

Yeah, we've never seen a place they've attacked. We never see them. They're just this sort of...

Boogeyman out there.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. We never meet people who've actually survived an encounter ever.

Yeah.

And they do say that, you know, they only know about them from travelers' stories, because this is the only way that you get news about anything is having, you know, random travelers come by and tell you stuff. Which for me provokes the question of like, so are we supposed to believe that this is a world where nobody has messengers? There's no envoys going between from one king to another. They're not merchants out there working the trade routes who come by regularly who were like, no, like, we're just imagining this world in which every community sort of exists in isolation until a random traveler shows up and brings some sort of news from elsewhere. It just feels contrived in a way that isn't believable.

Well, especially since when Telemachus visits Sparta, what's going on in Sparta is a big wedding celebration. And Menelaus will talk a little bit about the sea peoples and the threat they face, but the whole vibe is they don't really take this threat seriously.

Even though Menelaus says he's heard that they're getting closer.

Yeah. So what we're being shown undercuts what we're being told in ways that completely neuter this threat that we're supposed to feel.

Yeah. And the other thing that sort of, I think, stretches the bounds of disbelief for me with this is that, all right, so we get this revelation at the end that it's Odysseus and his men who are the basis of the rumors of the sea people. And we have in the sort of contemporary moment, these very active fears and rumors going around about the sea peoples, right? They're out, they're getting closer, they're, you know, whatever. And yet Odysseus has been on Calypso's island for seven years at this point, and his men have been dead for seven years. And I have trouble just reconciling that here are active rumors about these people going around, and the people that are supposedly the reason for those rumors have literally been off the board for almost a decade.

Yeah, there's a lot that just doesn't work here. And again, it's frustrating because, you know, this is a theme that could be really, really powerful if executed well. And it just isn't. The film wants us to believe that war damages societies to the extent where things fall apart. But because it just doesn't show us that and just expects us to take these rumors at face value, it just didn't work for me.

Yeah. Without showing—

Yeah.

You know, the fear is not real. It's just a thing people are talking about, but nobody in the film acts like it's a real threat.

Right.

And so similarly, the parts of the movie that explore the war's impact on the individuals have similar problems. And some of this we've talked about with the behavior of Odysseus's men. But also the film, we don't think does a real clear job of charting Odysseus's psychological struggle.

Yeah, I think what the movie is trying to do is to position the deaths of what's left of Odysseus's crew in the final storm that they have to go through as sort of a breaking point psychologically for Odysseus. This is the moment that pushes him over the edge by building on his earlier trauma, which the character later explains as his feelings of guilt for what happens in Troy after he uses the Trojan horse to take the city. And to be fair, the movie does a decent job of showing that Odysseus is haunted by one particular episode at Troy, the murder of the priestess of Athena, whose form Athena herself adopts whenever she visits him. But when it comes to the crew, though, the film didn't really do enough up to this point to really convince me that Odysseus cared about them all that much, or necessarily even that the viewer should, because I sort of read a lot of those crew members as red shirts.

Yeah, so I'm going to disagree with you a little bit here, because I think it does try to show that Odysseus cares about his crew, at least as a collective of people that he's responsible for. But I will agree that I don't think the film makes us care about actually the crew themselves, other than Eurylochus. They don't really get characterized in any way. So as an audience, I care less about what happens to them.

Yeah, none of them have personalities other than Eurylochus. Yeah. We don't have a relationship with any of them. But I take your point that there are definitely moments where the movie is trying to suggest that Odysseus does care. So the big moment is Polyphemus' cave. Early on, there's an initial escape attempt, and about half of them get out, including Odysseus. But he then realizes that half his crew is still stuck inside, so he decides to go back and try to save them. So that's one of those moments, I think.

Yeah. And I think what I put it there is the film is interested in Odysseus' relationship with the crew as it speaks to Odysseus's position as a leader.

Yeah, that's maybe the better way to put it.

Rather than in caring about the crew itself as people.

Right.

In another moment, we can see some of this idea of Odysseus as a leader and his relationship to his men is the conversation between Odysseus and Sinon in the underworld. Sinon had been one of Odysseus's men, someone he had known as a young man on Ithaca that he brings with him to Troy, and Sinon is the person left behind with the Trojan horse after the Greeks pretend to leave. I will point out Sinon's not actually in the Odyssey, although he shows up in other tellings in antiquity of the story of the Trojan horse. Although in those poems, he himself is a trickster and he is left behind to intentionally lie to get the Trojans to take the horse into the city.

Not the case here.

Not the case here. In the case here, right, Sinon volunteers for this role and is lied to by Odysseus about the Trojan horse. So he has no idea that there are soldiers in it. Anyhow, Sinon is killed by the Trojans and Odysseus encounters him in the underworld and Sinon accuses Odysseus of concealing the truth about the Trojan horse plan from him, basically to use him as a tool to set up the Trojans, knowing all the while that Sinon is going to die.

Yeah. And it's clear that the movie is trying to argue that Odysseus is suffering from feelings of guilt at this point.

Yeah, that Sinon kind of represents the bad choices Odysseus has made and how it affects other people.

Yeah, exactly. But this is like a theme that isn't really developed in any extensive detail in anything that happens before this. So it kind of comes not quite out of nowhere, but pretty close out of nowhere.

Yeah. And even in the scene with Sinon, Odysseus doesn't really internalize what's being said. He's just like, you know, we had to because the plan had to work this way. And I really wish you hadn't volunteered for it. But like Odysseus didn't pick Sinon, Sinon volunteered, and this was something that served the larger army. So he doesn't react in a way that shows that this weighs very heavily on him.

Yeah, it's again, telling rather than showing.

Yeah. And I also think there's another coherence problem here. This idea about the character of Sinon not knowing what was going on with the horse. For me, where this kind of falls apart is that the film shows Sinon watching them build the horse, like it's being built right there by the ships. And yet somehow we're expected to believe that he also had no idea that it's a trick, that people are hiding inside it. Did they like send him out to run errands? Like he knows he's going to be left behind. We have no idea what they've told him about why they're just going to leave him behind if he's not in on the trick. I just can't— I just can't believe it.

It's a little unbelievable. Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, a second aspect of this trauma narrative suffers from that same basic problem. You don't really see Odysseus reacting in ways that sell the story. And here I'm thinking about the fact that Odysseus is depicted as someone who is traumatized, who has forgotten his past, who has to remember while he's on Calypso's island. But then almost instantaneously, as soon as he remembers his past, everything's better, and he suddenly reverts to superhero Odysseus.

Yeah, the sort of mental psychological recovery that he should need to go through to recover from this trauma isn't really ever explained. Like his recovery just seems to be some sort of combination of actually remembering the past, which I would point out is just like a first step to recovering from the trauma.

Yeah.

And then, you know, surrendering himself to Poseidon's punishment is kind of all he needs to do to recover from the trauma.

But the other thing that bugged me here, and maybe even a bigger issue, is that his later behavior seems to be at odds with this argument that he was traumatized by very specific factors. So part of the cause of his trauma in the movie, again, seems to be the guilt he feels for what happened at Troy after the Greeks used trickery to get into a position to win the war. And in spite of that, what happens in the last 45 minutes of the film, of course, is that Odysseus, once again, uses trickery to get himself into a position where he can win a struggle. This is the internal struggle in his household. And he comes into his household as a beggar, fools everybody, and then kills a whole bunch of them.

Yeah, and in point of fact, claims hospitality as a beggar.

Yeah. So there's like a real contradiction there between the alleged source of his early trauma and what he does later on in the movie, which sort of suggests that if there was a lesson to be learned, he didn't learn it anyway.

Yeah. So another issue that came up for us that is sort of related to the lack of development of both of these themes is how the film actually interacts with violence. For as much as the film purports to be interested in exploring the impact of violence on individuals, on societies, etc., it really goes to great lengths to sanitize the violence, to flatten out any moral complexity. So, right, it wants to explore the negative impacts of violence without actually showing the characters engaging in any sort of problematic violence or doing anything that risks alienating the audience from the film or from Odysseus. And I did happen to catch a bit of an interview with Christopher Nolan where he's pretty explicit about the fact that he didn't want to include any violence or anything else that might alienate the audience or make the audience want to look away from the screen.

Right. And as we've mentioned already, one major aspect of that problem is this whole idea that Odysseus and his men are the Sea Peoples. They've been damaged by war. They've become violent to the point where they don't respect norms and things like this. That's an idea that's never actually developed because once again, we don't see them engaging in the kind of violence that would sell that story.

Yeah. And just like more generally, for as much as we're talking about warfare and all sorts of elements of violence, I can only think of a few moments where you actually see blood in the film. One is the sacrifice at the underworld. One is when they're hiding in the horse and the Trojans are like stabbing into it and someone actually gets stabbed and you get some blood on the blade. And then with the Laestry gonians sort of slaughter people, I feel like you can see some blood in the water. But other than that, there is no blood, despite having several fight scenes that involve swords and people getting their throats cut. No blood at all.

But the problem is even deeper than that, because the film really doesn't want to engage with what the consequences of war and violence in the ancient world were actually like.

Yeah.

So one of the big things that happens, both in the ancient world in reality and within the worlds of the Homeric poems, is enslavement. Usually the men are killed, women and children are enslaved. It's a really violent, horrible process. And if staged correctly, it would really drive home the costs of this kind of violence. But the movie just doesn't want to go there at all, even though it's right in the source material.

Yeah, and the film asserts that part of what traumatizes Odysseus is the extreme violence he witnessed in the sack of Troy.

Right.

But that violence is really downplayed. I mean, we do see a lot of fighting and there are two really quick cuts of Greek soldiers killing Trojan women that we notice, but we don't actually see, say, bodies or captives in the aftermath or anything like that. And the one really impactful bit of violence in that scene comes late in the movie in which a priestess of Athena is murdered in front of Odysseus. But even that's softened, right? The death is implied because what you see instead is a soldier striking the head off of the statue rather than the person being harmed. And so it's made very metaphorical that way. And it doesn't really convey the horrors of what Odysseus saw. And I'm not saying they have to depict everything, but it's hard to say I witnessed horrors and you don't really see them. They get kind of hinted at and they leave it for you to read in and infer stuff. But it feels like a cop out. Similarly, the fight with the suitors at the end. This is one of the really blood-laden, disturbing moments in the poem. And in the film, Odysseus says he's going to bring all the vengeance on the suitors, but he doesn't. He doesn't kill all the suitors. In fact, the fight scene stops when he kills Antinous, and then he just kind of lets the rest of the suitors go.

Yeah, a lot of the suitors are explicitly shown in positions of surrender. They get down on their knees, they bow their heads, and Odysseus lets them be. That, once again, is dramatically different than the poem in which Odysseus kills everybody, even those like Leodes who are specifically trying to surrender and rely on the protection of Zeus.

Yeah, that final fight scene really fell flat for me in a lot of ways. And it doesn't actually do anything to raise questions about, is there an okay amount of violence? What does the violence of vengeance really mean? What are the moral implications of it? Like, are we just supposed to, I don't know, think that Odysseus has somehow like, overnight, just come to terms with his past and like, feels no need to engage in more violence than is necessary—because it was only the day before where he's like, I'm going to take all the vengeance— and has somehow recovered? But if that is the case, if that's what we're supposed to think, that psychological journey is never shown in this moment where the audience is expecting all of that internal chaos to be unleashed. So in the end, it feels like a fight that doesn't have any real stakes to it. Like it's just there to be a fight scene.

Jason Bourne in an ancient world movie, right? Because that's really how that scene read to me.

Yeah, yeah. The first viewing, this was a scene that really pulled me out of the movie.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the one character it actually does something for is Antinous, and it just reiterates that Antinous is a coward repeatedly.

Who is perfectly happy to order other people to go get killed.

Yeah.

But like is terrified to do anything like that himself, which is clearly a commentary probably on contemporary issues in our own culture.

But then that means that the final confrontation between Odysseus and Antinous loses some of its stakes because you don't see Antinous as being any real threat in the fight itself.

Yeah, that last fight scene is anticlimactic. And that takes us into a final problem that we had with the film, which is that the ending really didn't work very well for us. Overall, it felt pretty rushed, not just because all of the problems posed by the film seem to get magically resolved, but also because we don't get a meaty reunion scene between Odysseus and Penelope.

Yeah, let's talk about Penelope for a minute. For as much as, again, Anne Hathaway turned in an outstanding performance, it kind of feels like the film doesn't quite know what to do with Penelope. And so you get these conflicting moments with her, right? She, on one hand, is presented as like wanting the king back, wanting Odysseus back as king, asserts that Ithaca needs a king. But then later, she presents herself as someone who has basically been ruling Ithaca solo for 20 years as a way of rejecting Telemachus' claim that she should leave so that he can be king. And he even asks her in that moment if what she really wants is just power for herself. And so it doesn't know how to treat her as a woman with power in this world.

There's that. And then there's also the fact that while the movie sort of plays with the idea that Penelope recognizes Odysseus while he is in disguise, and helps with the unfolding of the revenge plot, it never actually gives her the chance to play that moment and to sell it in a convincing way.

Yeah, because she's hidden behind a screen when we assume she figures out that it's Odysseus.

And then at the end, we don't get the famous scene from the poem about their bed. This is really annoying to me because the scene is set up near the beginning of the movie. There's a quick shot of the bed, which Odysseus had built into a living tree growing in their bedroom. Now in the poem, this is something that nobody but Odysseus and Penelope knows about. And Penelope refuses to acknowledge that Odysseus is who he says he is until he reveals that he knows this secret, even though, of course, she probably knows very well at this point in the poem that it's him.

And the film, because it cuts the bed element, it kind of cuts one of her best moments, which is when Penelope tests Odysseus about his identity by asking the bed to be brought into the hall. And he has to say like, wait, but that can't be our bed because our bed was built into this tree. And in the poem, right, this is kind of a power move on Penelope's part. She's going to make Odysseus prove his identity to her beyond a reasonable doubt. And also, it serves a way for her to remind Odysseus that she is just as clever as he is.

Right, because she tricks him into making the key revelation.

Yeah.

And without that, you get what feels a lot more like a fairy tale ending. Now that Odysseus is back, nothing else matters. Penelope can just go back to being his wife in spite of this speech that she gives earlier about her own skill as a ruler and so on.

Yeah, she just relies on the fact that he has this pin that she gave him when he left and like that's all she needs. And then, you know, collapse into joy, right? And everything about her as someone who's been keeping it together on Ithaca for 20 years just sort of dissolves in light of the fact that Odysseus is home and she can just drop everything now. And I just, I don't feel like that serves the character of Penelope well.

No, it doesn't. It doesn't serve Penelope's character well. And it also just contributes to the fact that the whole ending sequence feels really rushed in comparison to the adventure story narrative.

Yeah.

There's no real reunion. There's no real coming to terms with what being apart for 20 years means.

For the two of them, for their relationship.

For Telemachus.

Yeah. We get the fight scene. It ends. And that's about it, right? We just get a little scene of Odysseus and Penelope leaving to go west and Telemachus is king and that's it, right? Everything is resolved. There's like no need to deal with the suitors who weren't killed. There's no need to worry about restoring the household or reestablishing authority on Ithaca or anything like that, right? We're just going to leave that all to Telemachus, who hasn't really had a chance to show his transition to adulthood. But clearly he's going to be king and it's all going to be fine.

Yeah, even though civilization is supposedly collapsing around him.

Yeah, and that's another major inconsistency because the film wants this happy ending with Odysseus and Penelope sailing away into the sunset while expecting us to believe at the same time that civilization is also collapsing. Like, again, what we're told and what we're shown just don't line up.

Well, yeah, the issue there is twofold. One is that I think the movie intends for us to infer that what the suitors are doing is a symptom of this collapse created by the Trojan horse trick, I think. But that's not an argument that's built.

No.

And second, part of the reason the movie ends the way it does with Odysseus going away into exile is because he acknowledges briefly that he himself has somehow violated Zeus's law by killing the suitors and is expected to go into exile.

Yeah, but it still doesn't actually explain how all of a sudden civilization isn't collapsing anymore.

So what you're reacting to is the fact that Telemachus is expected to remain king in Ithaca and everything will be fine.

Yeah, you get this impression like everything's going to be fine now after you've had these literal lines saying our civilization is collapsing.

Yeah.

And yet we see no evidence of that, no urgency around that, you know. But what's really funny is that after we saw the movie the second time, we went and grabbed some food nearby. And a little while later, a group of people came down and sat next to us who had also clearly just come from watching The Odyssey. And we got to overhear part of their conversation. And these inconsistencies were actually something they were commenting on. So, you know, they highlighted this bit about Odysseus complaining about how poorly and obliquely the gods communicate. And then they point out like, but you've got these prophecies that told you explicitly everything that was going to happen.

Yeah, Circe and Tiresias. Yeah.

Yeah. And then another comment I caught was like, yeah, someone says like, well, just watch me. I'm going to do this thing. And then he doesn't do it. And so they were sort of frustrated by that.

That's pretty clearly the vengeance.

I think that's what it was, but I didn't quite catch it. But it was sort of interesting to hear kind of random people talking about the movie.

If you're starting to suspect that we didn't like the ending, you're probably right.

Yeah, it really was the weakest part of the movie, which is really unfortunate because it meant that for us, particularly the first time, the film really ended on a bad note. There'd been moments where I'm like, oh my God, like the opening. I was like, I love this opening like this. Oh, this is going to be really good. And then it really, I think, dropped the ball on ending strong.

Well, maybe we should wrap up here with some final takeaways. Talk a little bit about how we might be able to explain why this movie looks the way it does. How do these things that bug us actually come to be?

Yeah. So first of all, for as cool as those adventure scenes were, in many ways, the film does sort of fall into the trap that a lot of films fall into, which is it spends a lot of time on those adventure stories. And in the end, they don't really seem to add up to much in the larger story. So they're really cool to watch. They were some of my favorite parts of the movie, but they don't always feel like they're serving the larger narrative effectively as the film wants to construct it. And I will say that, you know, I definitely got to a point both times watching the movie being like, okay, I am ready for these scenes to end. Not that they're bad, but they don't feel like they go anywhere. And I really want to get on with the story.

Yeah, just to put this into perspective, the movie runs for two hours, 45 minutes or something like that. And it takes almost two hours for Odysseus to get to the end of remembering the adventure stories. So that's two thirds of the movie's runtime. By comparison, in the poem, those adventure stories take up a much, much smaller chunk of the narrative. They're four out of 24 of the poem's books.

Yeah.

The poem doesn't treat them as really an elemental part of the story. It's not interested in the details of what's taken Odysseus so long to get home. It's much more interested in what happens when he gets to Ithaca.

Yeah.

The second thing that I think is going on here is that Christopher Nolan decided either that the stakes in the poem weren't weighty enough and that he had to add stuff in to make those stakes seem more dramatic. Here I'm thinking of the world is ending theme. Or he had a story that he really wanted to tell, but he felt unable to develop a narrative that actually ran with those themes, probably because he wanted to stick with the structure of the poem, the adventure stories and so on. And he just sort of lays those themes inelegantly on top of the pre-existing narrative structure.

Yeah, I do think there is a sense that he's trying to raise the stakes of the original story with these themes that he wants to explore, but he's also not willing to explore them in any way that will provoke a negative reaction in his audience.

Yeah, that could be. For what it's worth, I mean, these are very contemporary themes. So I can see why he goes with these, right? He wants to give an interpretation of the Odyssey that resonates with modern audiences. And you can do that. And again, I'll cite The Return as an example of precisely that kind of approach to the material. It just doesn't work here the way he wanted to.

Yeah. And I think connected to that is the fact that the movie really seems to need to portray Odysseus as, you know, a quote, good guy, despite his trauma, despite whatever it might say about him. And so the decisions that we see him making all seem to be motivated by Odysseus trying to be a good leader by thinking about what's best for the group. Even if, you know, he expresses some regret about those decisions or talks about those decisions in a negative way, we don't actually see him acting in this sort of self-interested or problematic way. He's trying to be a good leader the entire time.

And Athena actually tells him that at a late stage in the movie.

Yeah.

But also, he never really does anything that's going to make the audience dislike him. So even in those moments where the picture hints at Odysseus' men doing something violent or harmful, it's not Odysseus giving that order. It's usually Eurylochus.

Yeah. And I mean, generally speaking, when there's a decision made among Odysseus' men, that decision is actually usually led by Eurylochus and not Odysseus.

Yeah. And even during the sack of Troy, it's not Odysseus who's running around killing helpless civilians. Neither are his men, at least as far as I can tell.

And similarly, the film really smooths over Odysseus' relationship with Calypso. You know, Odysseus isn't cheating on Penelope. He has no idea that he even has a wife. And as soon as he remembers her, then all of a sudden he's sort of horrified and has to leave. And so it smooths over that. And, you know, and I would say, right, like, he washes up on a desert island, he has no way to leave. And he's stuck there for years with this woman. I think we would have trouble finding fault with him for having a relationship with her as it's set up. But like, they're very conscious to even eliminate that level of complexity for him.

Right. There's no suggestion, for example, that he has a relationship with Circe, which is definitely a feature of the poem.

Yeah. Oh, he definitely doesn't have a relationship with Circe.

No, not in the movie.

Yeah. Yeah. Odysseus doesn't do anything bad. Again, doesn't do anything that risks alienating the audience from our main character, which, you know, as we said at the top, makes for a movie that is a little shallow in its substance, which is unfortunate because it does want to develop themes that could ask an audience member to engage with a lot of complexity, but it just really pulls back from doing that.

So those are some of the things we think didn't work as well in this movie as they could. And we've probably spent a lot more time talking about those than about the things that we liked. But that's sort of the nature of criticism. You're engaged in the process of analyzing what you think could be better or more effective. None of that criticism should be taken as an indication that you shouldn't go watch this movie. If you're at all interested in ancient stuff, you definitely should go watch this movie and you should see it in the theater.

Even if you're not interested in ancient stuff and you just want to watch a good movie, it is a good movie and it's definitely worth seeing and worth seeing in the theater. You know, I would rewatch it and I think seeing it in the theater is really key because of the really cool visual elements we talked about earlier.

Yeah. And for what it's worth, this is a movie that does engage with the ancient world in ways that are going to get people talking about it and interested in the material and rereading it and arguing about it. And all of that is good, especially if it prompts them to explore some of this material more deeply.

Yeah, the film is an entrance point.

So yeah, go see it. In spite of our quibbles.

And those sheep get some credit too.

The sheep, yes.

The sheep. Well, that's all for us today. We're going to engage with some of these issues about Odysseus and the Trojan War in our next couple episodes. as we look at some of the tragedies, ancient tragedies that engage with these themes. So we're going to kind of unpack some of this a little bit more in our next couple episodes.

Yeah. The next episode will be about Sophocles' Philoctetes. And what we'll talk about is various ways in which 5th century Greeks thought about Odysseus. And then following that, we'll look at Euripides' Trojan Women, which is an ancient attempt to grapple with some of the consequences of violence on a city-ending scale, right?

Yeah.

Looks at the aftermath of the Trojan War.

Yeah. So that's all for today. I've been Emily.

I'm Cam.

And this has been Have Toga Will Travel. Subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts, or you can follow us at havetogawilltravel.com or on all the socials.

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