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| Images courtesy of Universal Pictures |
Christopher Nolan has been pushing the IMAX 70mm envelope for
the past several years beginning with his The Dark Knight Trilogy before
cementing his full subscription to the format with Interstellar and with
each project he’s been amassing more clout and upping the ante a little bit
more with each subsequent production. Often
accused of switching aspect ratios too much, a trend initiated by Stanley
Kubrick and later Douglas Trumbull, between Interstellar and Oppenheimer
which proved to be Nolan’s most resounding success to date garnering the Best
Picture Academy Award even, it was only natural from here that he would take
his technical mastery and interest on colossal historical texts and personages
to the next level.
A director whose clout today is rarely equaled and a firm
believer in analogous manmade spectacle still being the superior medium for
creating and showing movies, his latest endeavor like Oppenheimer before
it is such that controversy will surround the interpretation and artistic
liberties undertaken while still garnering its subset of fans and
defenders. As someone who has never
really been into Nolan until Interstellar hit and subsequently converted
yours truly into actively following his work, for all of its ups and downs from
trailer reactions to casting decisions The Odyssey, told in a time of
apparent magic, could be the most ambitious undertaking the filmmaker
has yet attempted artistically, philosophically and commercially.
One of many screen adaptations of Homer’s epic poem of the
same name including multiple television shows including one by Runaway Train
director Andrei Konchalovsky as well as the framework for the Coen Brothers’
offbeat O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the biggest accusation lobbied
against it sight unseen is that it isn’t bringing anything new to the
table. The fantasy mythological epic is
tricky business when it comes to special effects and falling into the trappings
of the sword-and-sandals epic recently popularized by Ridley Scott and Wolfgang
Petersen with his own 2004 take on Homer’s Iliad with Troy (set
for Arrow 4K rerelease as well). Add to
it Nolan’s penchant for practical effects work and physically doing set pieces
and sequences mostly for real before the cameras and going into The Odyssey runs
the risk of veering into gladiatorial camp ala 300.
What Nolan has fashioned here is a pop-art broadly appealing
historical fantasy epic people are either studied in or vaguely familiar with
and reconstructed it in a way that echoes the intensely committed fantasy
realism of, say, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah or even Peter Jackson’s The Lord
of the Rings trilogy though admittedly neither film comes near the size and
scope of Nolan’s vision. Featuring a
powerful ensemble cast including recurring Nolan stalwarts Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway
and Robert Pattinson as well as many newcomers such as Tom Holland and Zendaya
and industry veterans like Charlize Theron and Samantha Morton, The Odyssey deals
in fantasy lore with the photochemical realism of Denis Villenueve’s Dune: Part
Two where the fusion of Old Hollywood screen spectacle and epic historical
texts results in near Biblical proportion.
Replete with Hoyt Van Hoytema’s crisp and luminous IMAX 1.44:1 70mm
photography (presented in scope 2.35:1 or 2.20:1 depending on where you see it)
and Ludwig Göransson’s frequently atonal score and sometimes even jazzy score echoing
the ticking tension of Hans Zimmer’s work on Dunkirk, from a purely
technical end Nolan and his team are casting some real magic spells here.
One of the strengths of Nolan’s interpretation of The
Odyssey is how strongly both it and Oppenheimer resonate with our
current increasingly warlike generation and the cyclical nature of death and
rebirth, destruction and restoration. Allegorical
for bloodshed both ancient and immediate and a testament to man’s will to
survive inexplicable world hardships including but not limited to weather with
many moviegoers last night braving the hostile air quality emanating from
Canadian wildfires, something about Nolan’s The Odyssey didn’t play to
escapism. Rather it felt, not unlike
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar winner One Battle After Another,
confrontational and speaking through its timeless world into our timely one. With world powers aiming their drawn guns and
swords at one another, The Odyssey comes as a recognition of our tendencies
towards self-destruction while also signifying man inevitably will rise again
from the ashes of his conflagration.
Opening in theaters last night and playing across many
formats from digital to IMAX 70mm, The Odyssey is at once divisive and
unifying, horrific and hopeful.
Including scenes that are beautiful and terrifying, even gross in one
scene involving witchcraft, this is Nolan’s most confident and boundary pushing
work to date even after the divisive uses of sex and nudity in Oppenheimer. It also could be, for all of the outlandish
and strange concoctions conjured up by Homer’s imagination and wry observations
of ancient Greece, the most humanist of the director’s oeuvre. Interstellar stoked heavily at the
emotional front whereas Oppenheimer was an engrossingly detached biopic
but The Odyssey finds itself somewhere in the middle finding the human
element amid an otherwise uncompromising Gospel-like adaptation of Homer’s
ancient text.
--Andrew Kotwicki
