Liisa Leinonen and Lauri Liukkonen
Two Christopher Nolan fans went to see the new film The Odyssey. Warning: This article contains spoilers.
Liisa: You said The Odyssey left you feeling a little hollow. Why?
Lauri: Well, it wasn’t a bad film. I’m definitely not saying that. But when you know what Christopher Nolan is capable of at his best, that’s where it fell short. I’ve never walked out of a Nolan film without spending the next three days raving about it and crying at least four times during the screening. This time I got a lump in my throat halfway through, but during the final scene I just thought: what a stupid battle.
Liisa: How did I have exactly the same reaction? It was an excellent film, especially in the middle, but it lacked Nolan’s usual element of surprise. It was still immersive, though.
Lauri: What I like about Nolan is his ability to build his films in several stages. First, the slow, lingering storytelling puts the building blocks of a good story in place. Then escalation and conflict enter the picture. Finally, the story progresses through magnificent, “voyage through the unknown”–type sequences until the protagonists must learn or realise something to complete their journey. At the end, there is an epic fanfare that brings all the plotlines together.
This film didn’t have the same effect. It tried hard, but I don’t think it reached the level of Nolan’s best work. There was no fanfare.
Liisa: The ending was quite conventional: a battle, a victory, a departure, and the son becoming king.
Lauri: Before the screening, I heard what may have been the best comment about the film: “Nolan must have faced a difficult task, because the story of Odysseus is very hard to adapt into a film.” That was exactly it. The plot of The Odyssey is highly traditional, so Nolan couldn’t play around with time in the same way as in his previous films.
It was amusing to watch people online trying to manufacture controversy and hype around the film. Nolan hadn’t done anything particularly experimental. He had stuck to a very traditional style of storytelling.
Liisa: There was practically nothing woke about it, despite certain people criticising the film for that in advance. But perhaps it is already too much for some people to hear that destruction has been caused, things have been broken and now a new civilisation will emerge. The word used in the film was civilization, if I heard it correctly.
Lauri: I have to say that Elliot Page, who is trans, gave one of the film’s best performances. I find it hilarious that he is probably more masculine than 90 per cent of his critics. The entire uproar was completely pointless. I might even call it an orchestrated hate campaign, but there was nothing more remarkable behind it. That is simply what the internet is like these days.
Liisa: What else would you highlight about the film?
Lauri: This is Nolan’s first film shot entirely with IMAX cameras. Throughout the film, you could see why that was worthwhile and why Nolan continues to favour IMAX. Put simply, it produces exceptionally high-quality, spectacular and artistic images, but it is also obscenely expensive. That is why entire films are not usually shot with IMAX cameras. Nolan wants people to go to the cinema. That is where you can hear the sound design he has invested in from the beginning and later took even further with Hans Zimmer.
The soundscape he has refined over the past 20 years is now in a class of its own. In the opening scene, a poet chants a mantra and strikes a staff against the ground. Every strike felt as if it might send the seats flying. The way the sound travelled through the cinema was magnificent.
Liisa: The soundscape was almost the best thing about the entire film. In the cave scene, for example, the Cyclops’s voice and the sense of immersion it created were incredible.
Lauri: I went to see Dunkirk in 2017. It is the only film that has made me feel as though someone was genuinely shooting at me. One person in our group had to leave the cinema. Nolan’s sound design has been intensely immersive for years.
In Dunkirk, it was deliberately taken to an extreme because the entire film is about fear and how time behaves under constant fear. That alone is a brilliant premise for a film. Here, sound was used more as a storytelling device. It placed emphasis on certain mantras and reinforced them powerfully.
Did you notice, by the way, that whenever a decisive battle began—in Troy and in the final battle—the drumming kept getting faster? It told us that events were gathering momentum.
Liisa: I did. On the one hand, it draws you in. On the other, there wouldn’t actually be enormous drums pounding across a battlefield like that.
Lauri: That comes from Hans Zimmer. In large-scale Hollywood films, Zimmer introduced guitars alongside strings. He is an outstanding composer and, unless I have misunderstood, the guitar is his main instrument. The same style is particularly prominent in the Dark Knight films.
During the bank robbery at the beginning of The Dark Knight, there is a constant clock-like “pa-pa-pa-pa” in the background. It gives the viewer the same sense of urgency. Zimmer simply did it much better. The sound pushes the viewer forward without dominating the scene as it did here. This time, the execution went slightly awry.
Liisa: As I said, I thought the middle was the best part. The first scene was powerful, but after that I briefly wondered whether the film was going to be too conventional. It didn’t draw me in quite as effectively at first.
For me, the best section began in the Cyclops’s cave. You could interpret the film psychologically, as a depiction of the subconscious. Circe turns men into pigs. When they enter the cave, they encounter a monster. The Sirens’ song, however, was handled quite briefly.
Lauri: It was over very quickly. I liked seeing Matt Damon tied to a post and screaming his head off. I enjoyed the Circe section as a self-contained story because it contained a clear element of trauma. At the same time, it showed that she wasn’t exactly innocent either, since she kept her sister in a cage.
Liisa: It had some humour as well.
Lauri: Yes. It was beautifully done and the turn of events felt convincing. Circe appears traumatised, which explains why she turns people into animals. But she has probably also had some communication difficulties. It is easier if I stay here doing my own thing while my sister remains a raven in a birdcage. That way, we get along better.
Liisa: Then they went to the land of the dead...
Lauri: That was a fine sequence.
Liisa: At first, I wondered whether it was going to turn into some kind of zombie nonsense, but it worked extremely well.
Lauri: Elliot Page gave his best performance in the film there. The storytelling came together incredibly well. The relationship previously established between Page’s and Damon’s characters also carried through the scene.
Liisa: The depiction of the Trojan Horse was also extremely successful. It was beautifully done.
Lauri: Yes, and I liked the emphasis on the horse as a sacrificial offering that had to be respected. The twist was that Odysseus’s men had no respect for that sacrificial tradition whatsoever.
Liisa: For them, it was merely a clever trick that allowed them to destroy Troy. That was precisely where the remorse came from.
Lauri: The reason behind it was deeply human: ten years of frustration on that beach. It was a wonderful psychological element, and the film made considerable use of it. My greatest disappointment came from the fact that the film had already begun to stir real emotions during the middle section. I thought: “Oh my God, Nolan is doing it again.”
The first half had been slightly dull, but there was a reason for that: the film had been laying its foundations. Just as everything began to work and the story appeared to be heading towards its climax, all we got was a little puff. In my opinion, it ended with a whimper.
Liisa: I wouldn’t be quite that harsh, because I also thought the ending was beautiful. I understand what you mean about the disappointment, though. I suspect—and I’m even willing to throw in a gender stereotype here—that female viewers may like this more than traditional interpretations of the story of Odysseus.
Lauri: Yes, certainly. I think Nolan’s film contains a great deal of depth and plenty to explore. And it really is a good film. But I would be much more restrained in my criticism if it had been made by Denis Villeneuve or Steven Spielberg, for example.
Liisa: You would think it was a good Villeneuve film.
Lauri: I believe he would have made it in a fairly similar style, although the use of sound and some of the scenes would have been different. This film lingered in a different way.
Liisa: Was it more monotonous?
Lauri: I wouldn’t put it quite like that. Villeneuve is one of those astonishingly good directors, but he constructs his narratives differently. Have you seen the 2013 film Prisoners? It masterfully examines a parent’s anguish and the extremes to which a person can be driven under certain circumstances.
The casting is incredible, as it generally is in both Villeneuve’s and Nolan’s films. This film also had an enormous all-star cast. Nolan, however, is the only one of these directors who can take a film one step further—turn it from “ten to eleven”. It is as though he has an additional dial that allows him to push a masterpiece one degree further. That was missing here, which left the experience feeling a little…
Liisa: A little meh.
Lauri: But technically, it is a perfect ten. Not a single scene looks or sounds bad. Everything is produced to an exceptionally high standard. One of the world’s best directors is behind it, and only the finest professionals in the industry make it onto his technical team. I can absolutely recommend seeing it. But if you are a die-hard Christopher Nolan fan, consider yourself warned.
Of course, I may later recognise some ingenious core idea, as often happens with Nolan’s films, and decide that it is the best film of the year after all. On the first viewing, however, that idea did not reveal itself very clearly.
Liisa: The film was almost three hours long, but it didn’t feel long.
Lauri: Not at all. The same was true of Interstellar. Was it three hours and twenty minutes? It feels shorter than two hours. The same applies here.
Liisa: I rarely watch films this long, so beforehand I wondered whether it would be too lengthy and whether I would get tired watching it in the evening. I didn’t feel that way at all. If anything, it felt as though the film could have gone on and on and on.
Lauri: All the essential elements were there. Whenever the film began to drag slightly, the filmmaker recognised it immediately and knew how to change course. There is an enormously experienced director behind it. I often compare long films to watching a television series. When they were sailing towards the vortex, I thought: now we’re in episode three. It was like a roughly 45-minute episode, after which the film began moving towards its conclusion.
Liisa: That is what it felt like. It was the beginning of the end. I don’t know whether I would call it a weak point, but they could certainly have done much more with the Sirens.
Lauri: And they could have done more with the vortex. It could have created a great deal of horror. At the other extreme, of course, the film might have stopped following the original work.
Liisa: I don’t know. The Sirens and the vortex are both extremely powerful elements, narratively and psychologically.
Lauri: The clues and prophecies given by the dead could also have been used more effectively. There was a clear threat behind them, but...
Liisa: …It felt as though they simply had to get that part out of the way so they could move on to the final spectacle.
Lauri: Yes, a little. The ending frustrates me most because so many strong foundations had been laid beneath it.
Liisa: The Battle of Troy earned its place more convincingly, whereas the final battle was, quite frankly, clichéd.
Lauri: The Battle of Troy was immersive and contained a human element because Odysseus regretted it afterwards. The final battle, by contrast, suffered from a severe case of Superman syndrome. If a man gets impaled all over his body and simply keeps fighting, even though his throat has practically been cut, it becomes difficult to believe.
I actually laughed aloud when he grabbed a pillar and began swinging it back and forth, knocking eight men around like a clock’s pendulum. By that point, there was no immersion left. It was an Arnold Schwarzenegger scene.
Liisa: It was exactly an Arnold Schwarzenegger scene. And then Mum and Dad sail off into the sunset on the Love Boat.
Lauri: Dad is now exiled.
Liisa: So how many stars do we give it?
Lauri: I don’t like star ratings. I know many people like Rotten Tomatoes, but its rating system is completely baffling to me. I’ll give it a 7.8 on the IMDb scale. It doesn’t reach masterpiece territory, but it is still a very, very good film. I would keep the rating quite firmly there.
Liisa: I would give it an eight on the IMDb scale. Otherwise, I agree with you, but there is something in the film that lifts it slightly higher for me. It may not be as good as it could have been by Nolan’s standards, but by ordinary standards it is excellent. It is worth seeing.
Lauri: It is also worth remembering that classic films such as Forrest Gump and Dark Knight only score a little over eight on IMDb. Television series reach scores closer to nine much more easily.
Liisa: To sum up: we liked the film, although it does not rank among Nolan’s very best.
Lauri: That is exactly how I would sum up our discussion.