But instead of being an answer to our prayers, The Odyssey ends up being just another reason for despair. In the runup to its release, The Odyssey seems to have inspired more anxiety than actual anticipation. Lovers of classical literature have been asking, Will it hew close enough to Homer’s vision? Or, perhaps more accurately, Will it hew close enough to their vision of Homer’s vision? On the right, pundits have bemoaned what they see as the pure fact that you simply cannot have a Black Helen of Troy (she’s played in the film by Lupita Nyong’o), though it’s hard to fathom that the most controversial trait of a woman who’s been hatched from a swan’s egg should be the color of her skin. The Odyssey has already inspired so much chitter-chatter that its actual release was poised to be a letdown in comparison. But just wait till you actually see this eye-glazing dud of a movie.
Hathaway and Holland as mother and son, awaiting the return of Odysseus —Courtesy of UniversalIt will take Odysseus 10 years to get home, and though he and a gang of surviving warriors set sail from Troy near the beginning of the movie, he will ultimately return without his men. (They’re played by an assortment of actors including Himesh Patel and Elliott Page, though most of them blur into a somewhat faceless mass of dudes in Marvin the Martian helmets.) The challenges they face on their journey are many: After a lone sheep leads them into a cave, they encounter a one-eyed giant, the Cyclops (Bill Irwin). Odysseus, in a supposed act of bravery, blinds the giant by stabbing his one good eye, and his men turn against him, grumbling that he has angered Poseidon, the god of the sea, the Cyclops’ father. And sure enough, the ocean tosses their tiny, rough-hewn wooden ships hither and thither. Other stuff happens on other islands: At one stop, the men anger the Sun God by eating his cattle, despite Odysseus' bossy warning not to do so. At another, the enchantress Circe gives the hungry men—though not Odysseus—a generous meal, but only as an excuse to turn them into swine. This is the finest scene in the movie, perhaps the only truly good one: as Circe, Samantha Morton seems to have dropped in from a different, better picture, uttering a chilly incantation as she massages the men’s dirty, meaty faces into visages with pig snouts. Later, she’ll tell Odysseus that all she was really doing was revealing the true nature of men. It’s hard to argue with her.
Damon, center, and some of the men who are doomed not to make it home —Courtesy of UniversalMeanwhile, back in Ithaca, Hathaway’s Penelope is weary for a different reason: though she’s holding out hope that her husband Odysseus is still alive, she must fend off 108 boorish suitors—they’re like Airbnb guests who refuse to leave. These men, each aspiring to become king, hope to bully her into marrying. Chief among them is the aggressively reptilian Antinous—Robert Pattinson plays him with a plastered-on leer. Hathaway’s costumes and jewelry are the saving grace of these scenes: at one point she wears a gown that falls around her in lustrous teal folds, a testament to the fact that Nolan does at least strive to hire the best craftspeople—not just anybody can dye fabric to look this luminous. (The costume designer here is Ellen Mirojnick.)
Zendaya, as Athena, who appears as a sort of guilty conscience to Damon's Odysseus —Courtesy of Universal
There are other problems, among them Nolan’s failure to make use of Nyong’o's gifts. The issue isn't that her casting plays into any of the advance criticism the movie has received; it's that it barely feels like a choice at all, representing not a burst of imagination but a failure of nerve. Nyong’o plays two roles here, that of Helen and of Clytemnestra, Helen’s twin sister. But there’s so much decorously, Homerically faithful story swirling around these two figures, glimpsed mostly in passing—and so many men around them, doing seriously manly stuff—that neither role registers. Through no fault of Nyong’o’s—who’s both accomplished and, though it should go without saying, uncommonly beautiful—these are almost blink-and-you-miss-them portrayals, the kind of thing a director can magnanimously hand out like candy. We’re supposed to applaud Nolan for bravery in casting, but the result comes off as tokenism, surely the opposite of what he intended.
But then, there’s little in The Odyssey that breathes. It churns so dutifully toward its predictable conclusions—summed up roughly as “War dehumanizes men!” and “Civilization, now as in Odysseus’ time, is on the brink!”—that you begin to wonder if it wouldn’t be a better use of your time to just stay home and read The Odyssey. We want and need more movie artistry—and more dedication to the craft, which Nolan, no matter what you think of him, surely espouses. But a movie still needs to add up to something you actually want to watch, not just a testament to a filmmaker’s solemn dedication to the hallowed tradition of filmmaking. We’ve reached a point where we get so few extravagant, ambitious studio movies that we’re expected to collapse with gratitude whenever we're presented with one. That’s not opening ourselves to what movies can be; it’s succumbing to a kind of hostage taking. No matter how endangered the movies become, we still get to choose what moves and delights us. Why settle for less? It’s our job to make demands. Otherwise, we’re nothing more than spoils of war.
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