The Odyssey - Review: Shockingly, It Was Way Better Than I Expected

 The Odyssey explores Nolan’s biggest fear at its most head on: that mankind is destined to forget and repeat its own mistakes in an enormous cycle that is spiraling towards our destruction. The Odyssey is about how that existential dread first formed in our minds within mythology, Oppenheimer is about how that dread infects people's minds and continued forward in the modern world, and Tenet is about people actively trying to fight the dread of the future and having to deal with the sins of their ancestors. You can tell Nolan was most interested in the mythological aspects of Oppenheimer’s story in his last movie, and this movie is his realm to fully explore it. Does he succeed? Well, kinda…

This core theme is explored in the various legends that Odysseus goes through, which culminate in his wife and Athena realizing that he and his men are the sea people that they have been fearing this whole time. I think this conflict of the movie is done the best, the conflict inside Odysseus between fighting war and coming home for peace. Athena is what holds the whole movie together, she’s the optimism that Odysseus, Nolan, and the audience each hold that a brighter world led by love and peace is possible, and the movie explores how Odysseus tries to be guided by Athena but consistently fails. He is constantly confronted with the savage way he lives and how he tries to keep being honorable in a time where what we’d consider honor is a very foreign concept, but he still feels like all the killing and war will have a negative affect on the world, we see him live through the horrors he’s unleashed by defying the gods and continuing to be a warrior. In this sense, the movie is a tragedy. The Odyssey is the first great story of war, it’s what people looked up to as the pinnacle of humanity and it’s what has influenced every single story that came after from Snow White to Batman. It comes from a time when pain and suffering were much more common in the world, and we are living in a time when war and death in the Western World are much less common compared to then. This movie serves as a reminder that the endless cycle of man destroying the world and forgetting their mistakes did not start from nowhere, it has been going on for generations and we will forever be living with the consequences as we fight for a better one. The movie ends with Odysseus going on another Odyssey but this time with his wife at his side and love right next to him, and he tries to learn from the mistakes of his past and he lets himself get led by Athena more, but the tragedy is that he is still making the mistake of going on a journey and that others will do so in the future with no regard to the mistakes he made in the past. Is that a tragedy? I think it is, but it’s a fascinating topic and I really appreciate how this movie explored it.

Circe, Athena, and the Sirens are all ways of confronting Odysseus and the audience with the flaws in the men we follow. Circe confronts their selfish and greedy nature, the Sirens offer pleasure in place of pain, and Athena is the one who truly guides them with love, even if Odysseus always ignores her until the end. I think the movie is at its best when it actively confronts the hypocrisy of Odysseus, like how he constantly cries for Athena while ignoring her heeds to him, in addition to when we explore the ramifications of him rejecting the gods in one way or another and how that ties back to the world we currently live in. In this aspect, I think the movie excels and the non-linear narrative allows it to shine. The other half of the movie is drama back in Ithaca and how the kingdom is doing in Odysseus’ absence and it’s not nearly as compelling as the other stuff. Robert Pattinson is fun, but this part of the movie is very much about the family stuff Nolan includes in all of his films to some extent. It was largely absent from Tenet and merely a shadow in Oppenheimer, but this obviously takes it to the extreme, and I felt the stuff following Holland to be pretty good, but it was nothing that really got me over the moon or deeply interested like how Oppenheimer kept me invested the whole time as a deep psychological study rather than the huge scale and family dynamics present in this movie.

Overall, I think this movie has some very interesting stuff to say and is a very nice closing statement on the trilogy formed by his last 3 movies, but I feel like it gets kinda lost in some places and doesn’t feel as unified as Oppenheimer did. Despite this, I still quite like what the movie says at its core and it's a great summer blockbuster that I enjoyed spending 3 hours on.