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Notes -
I have watched the Odyssey, and whilst you can make a Culture War thingamajig about some of the casting decisions (which I'm negative on but not like '-100000 points, 3woke5me') I'm giving it a 6.5/10. Some fun spectacles but it didn't really hang together well.
Felt the pacing was a bit overlong, they could easily have cut out certain parts or merged certain 'trials' without losing much. I feel like swapping about 10 minutes worth of the 'final battle' which goes for ages, culling some of the 'ZendayAthena gives meaningful looks' scenes, the cannibal ambush, the temple ambush and some of the girlboss moments for Helen and Penelope for a bit more pre-sacking Troy character establishment would have gone a long way. Cyclops scene having no direct Odysseus-Polyphemus dialogue is insane when it's like his big moment.
Random complaints from this point.
The Cannibal ambush being generic Dark Souls miniboss guys did nothing for me. There was this general air of 'Movie is telling me Odysseus is a super smart genius but he's never really shown giving any thought to anything and it's like a highlight reel of Odysseus moments half of which feel unearned or kinda-random in the scope of this movie'. There's a repeat flashback to a young Elliott Page and Robin Pattinson where Pattinson is played by a de-aged CGI version of himself and Elliott Page is like some random generic looking chubby young male which feels super incongruous since Page Junior looks literally nothing like Page senior. The way they keep using the word 'Collapse' to try and push through some sort of 'The Trojan Horse killed the norms-based political system of the Aegean and Odysseus is the Sea People who everybody is scared of' take is like... okay but Nolan really harps on it. Using a bunch of MCU B-listers in the cast took me out of it, even when reasonably racially-appropriate.
I also feel like the movie should have made a stronger choice between being agnostic (since the gods rather pointedly are never shown clearly) and being supernatural. The Lotus Eater plot device makes it super easy to use flashbacks of dubious veracity in order to contain all the supernatural elements of the movie and introduce an element of unreliable narrator where Odysseus has essentially spent 10 years in an Opium den. Trying to deny the existence of the gods when there's cyclopses and giants and undead and tentacle monsters feels a bit offkilter.
The Odyssey is not a bad film.
I strongly disliked it, but that is because I am a curmudgeon and I wanted it to be better. It is not better. What works about it is what works about the original story.
It is also curiously bloodless, not in the sense of violence or gore but in the sense that it lacked any bone-deep humanity, grand drama, emotion, pain, and anguish. The women are the only ones who show this, Anne Hathaway especially, because she refuses to be bad in any role.
Nolan still does not know how to film action, and the walls of Troy are so unimpressive I refuse to believe any serious army was stymied by that for ten whole years if they had craftsmen capable of building the Trojan Horse.
The real question is why did you watch it?
Because I wanted to see it?
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