On the Ocean for Hours

I don’t want to say I’m a Christopher NolanMade famous when his second film, Memento, became an art-house hit, Nolan became a household name with his Dark Knight trilogy, quickly becoming one of Hollywoods biggest directors. hater, but I’m starting to wonder if I actually jive with the director’s style. Certainly I loved his early works. Memento is a clever, twisty, and interesting film that keeps you guessing right up until the end. The Prestige is a sumptuous, fascinating film with a solid twist that changes everything. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the man took BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen. and revived him for the big screen (after the fiasco that was Batman & Robin). His first two Batman films, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, are absolute masterpieces of superhero cinema, and those lock him in as an auteur no matter what else he’s done since.

But it’s with those follow-up movies where Nolan has steadily lost me. Inception was a decent enough film, but it absolutely feels like Nolan is operating in a space where he thinks he’s being just so clever. I got the same vibe off of Interstellar as well, a solid space film that just can’t help putting a twist into the plotline when it doesn’t necessarily feel like it needs it. And the less said about the confusing, confounding mess that is Tenet, the better. That is a film that absolutely should have bombed in theaters but was saved by the grace of COVID, forcing everyone to go, “oh it’s brilliant but messy. You’ll see when it hits streaming.”

And then we get to his recent spate of historical dramas, with Dunkirk and Oppenheimer both being sumptuously made but lacking in that specific punch that made me want to see them. I don’t think it’s bad that Nolan, a genre director, shied away from the genres that made him to go pursue other films. The problem for me is that these other films are just so long, so drawn out, and they reflect the same issues I had with Tenet: the auteur director feels like he knows best and doesn’t need anyone else’s input on his stories even when, you know, maybe a little focus testing could tighten up the tales. The Odyssey, a nearly three hour epic based on the Greek tale, feels like the nadir of this, and while I didn’t hate the film I’m hard pressed to say that I actually like it.

The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus (Matt Damon), the king of Ithaca (functionally a chieftain or mayor for his smaller city-state). When his king, Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), demands that Odysseus go to war against Troy, Odysseus packs up a contingent of men and sails off, knowing he could be gone for ten years or more, leaving his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and child behind. All for a war over a woman, Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong'o)... and maybe also to control the shipping lanes that pass directly by the city of Troy as well.

After a ten year slog of a war, Odysseus eventually helps his king conquer the city. But instead of following Agamemnon back home, Odysseus decides he’s done following and takes his three ships, and all his men, home via a different route. This then leads to them getting very lost along the way, traveling all over the Aegean and Mediterranean seas on a voyage that takes another ten years. They fight a cyclops, battle giants, deal with sirens, witches, and monsters, and by ones, twos, and in groups, the men are picked off. And all the while Penelope is at home, trying to fight off suitors while defending her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), from the assassination attempts she knows will come. If only Odysseus would come home…

Functionally The Odyssey is a linear story told out of order. That’s not to say it’s the same as Memento. That was a film told in reverse where the story only becomes clear once you’ve seen the whole story. The Odyssey is told out of order more or less because Nolan felt that was how he wanted to tell his story, but it doesn’t really add anything to the overall adventure. Aside from one minor twist (which we could debate all day about whether it was even that much of a twist, or added that much to the story, even if I won’t spoil it here), the rest of the story functionally could have been told in straight, linear fashion and it wouldn’t have changed the basic narrative at all.

And that narrative is very, very long. Functionally the film is a four-act story, with an opening set at Troy, then two acts of the adventure across the seas, followed by a climactic final act where (spoilers for a 2,800 year old story) Odysseus returns and has to fight all of his wife’s suitors. Clocking in at nearly three hours, the film is as long as an IMAX theater can take (based on the size of their film reels), and you feel every second of it. This is an epic, both in scale and length, and while I can appreciate what Nolan wanted to do, I wish he’d reined himself in some.

It’s a matter of necessity in storytelling. Nolan had a lot he wanted to get through, covering the final parts of The Iliad and the Trojan War along with the meat of The Odyssey, and it makes for a very long adventure that, at times, feels like it’s meandering around without a lot of focus. You know, almost as if we were stuck on that boat with Odysseus, unable to escape every danger, while we watched the story slowly play out. We’re all stuck wandering the Greek seas, and at a certain point you really wish you could get off the ride, at least for a little while.

Considering how much of the story Nolan actually cut, it makes what he included seem more baffling. While seeing the cyclops is interesting, and while Circe the witch (played by Samantha Morton) has a solid scene, there are plenty of dangers included here more because they were in the original story than because they add anything to the adventure. Most dangers simply up the body count, killing off a bunch of Odysseus’s no-name soldiers that we didn’t care about anyway, so why should we be bothered that they died? Not everything adds weight to the story, but the film includes so much just for the sake of inclusion.

And because of the fact that Nolan tells the story out of order, starting near the end of the adventure after Odysseus has been gone for twenty years (and spoiling that for us), the story lacks urgency. We cut back ten years, to the end of the war, and then watch Odysseus try to get home as fast as he can. Except we know he can’t, we know that he spends three years on the sea and another seven years on an island forgetting who he is (under the care of Calypso, played by Charlize Theron), so we aren’t fussed if he has to spend an extra day on this island or that one. He spends a lot of time on the sea, and we already know it.

The film has a middle act problem. The first section at Troy is thrilling, and when we cut back to the war the film finds real energy. The portion at the end, where Odysseus battles the suitors, also has urgency to it because we’ve finally hit the climax of the story and we haven’t had any part of it spoiled for us. But that whole middle section, on the sea, is… well, I don’t want to say boring but… drawn out. We know what’s going to happen in the end, so we’re watching the inevitability come for Odysseus. It’s not thrilling in any of the ways it needs to be.

The film is absolutely not helped by the fact that most of the actors are not doing their best work. Damon is pretty flat and bland here, and it often feels like he’s phoning in his performance. Holland is worse, being woefully miscast for a role he’s about ten years too old to play. Hathaway isn’t bad here, per se, but she’s largely wasted and given little to do. And then you have performers like Jon Bernthal as Menelaus and Charlize Theron as Calypso who are both wasted and miscast for their roles. It’s baffling, honestly.

And yet I still can’t call this a bad movie, not really. There are portions of it that really work. There are times where the film finds the awe, the beauty, and the wonder for its adventures. Just as many times as I was bored by the film there were times that it hooked me and kept me watching. I wish the film was shorter, more focused, and better put together. I wish all the actors in the film could be as good as the material demands. I wish The Odyssey were better because somewhere in here is a fantastic movie, but it’s buried under Nolan’s auteur vision and the final product doesn’t work for me… but it could have.

The Odyssey will likely work for a lot of people. It’s already well on its way to $1 Bil with no signs of stopping. Nolan is the most popular director in the world right now and his name gets butts in seats. I think, end of the day, I just have to admit that his way of storytelling doesn’t work for me. He thrills a lot of people but, with The Odyssey he didn’t thrill me.