The Odyssey: Mark Kermode’s fantasy film review (video).
The video review above belongs to Mark Kermode and Ben Bailey Smith, who stepped into Simon Mayo’s chair and discovered that Christopher Nolan had filled the cinema with Greeks, monsters and enough IMAX film stock to frighten an accountant.
Their verdict on The Odyssey is broadly enthusiastic, although Mark Kermode’s enthusiasm arrives by the scenic route. He eventually names it Film of the Week, but only after accusing its opening stretch of being ponderous, lumbering and roughly half an hour longer than strict necessity requires.
This is perhaps appropriate for an adaptation of Homer. Odysseus takes ten years to get home from Troy, despite the journey being considerably shorter on Google Maps. A film version that gets slightly bogged down during the first act may simply be honouring the source material.
Kermode found the early stories-within-stories structure something of a trudge. The film, he suggests, spends a long while assembling its narrative furniture before permitting anyone to sit down. Ben Bailey Smith had a rather brisker response. The first appearance of the Trojan Horse made him gasp, proving once again that one man’s ponderous opening is another man’s enormous wooden animal.
Both agree, however, that this is not a production to be watched on a telephone while waiting for the kettle. Nolan has shot the entire feature using IMAX film cameras, an undertaking that appears to have required equal quantities of engineering, determination and financial recklessness.
The result, they argue, needs the largest possible screen. Watching The Odyssey on a laptop would be rather like examining the Parthenon through a letterbox.
The technical achievement is extraordinary. IMAX cameras are famously noisy, which is inconvenient when actors are attempting to deliver dialogue rather than shout over something resembling an industrial tumble dryer. The production therefore developed a new blimping system to muffle the machinery, while film cartridges apparently had to be changed every three minutes.
For the actors, this must have added an interesting rhythm to proceedings. Deliver a speech about war, guilt and the cruelty of the gods, then pause while several people reload the camera.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus, the supposedly heroic king whose journey home becomes a prolonged demonstration of what Ben calls imperial hubris. Damon’s version is wily, exhausted and increasingly haunted by his own decisions. He looks less like a conquering legend than a man who has survived the office Christmas party and can no longer remember where he parked the fleet.
Kermode was surprised by how well Damon fits the role. This Odysseus is not the straightforward hero found on an inspirational poster. He is clever enough to escape most dangers, but proud enough to create several new ones before breakfast.
Ben sees echoes of historical naval disasters in which commanders ignored caution, local knowledge and the obvious warning signs because they had become too impressed by their own uniforms. Odysseus may have gods and monsters to contend with, but his chief opponent remains the conviction that his latest idea is definitely going to work.
Anne Hathaway’s Penelope provides the film with its emotional anchor. The reviewers describe her performance as strong enough to remain present even during long stretches when she is not physically on screen. While Odysseus wanders the Mediterranean losing ships, men and any hope of arriving before supper, Penelope waits at home with rather more patience than the average household could reasonably supply.
Kermode also reads the film as a story about trauma and guilt. Damon’s Odysseus is so alienated from his own legend that returning home becomes almost more frightening than continuing the journey. The war may be over, but he has carried it aboard with him, tucked somewhere between the weapons and the emergency sandals.
This interpretation gives the spectacle a darker current. The Odyssey may contain monsters, gods and legendary adventures, but beneath them sits a man wondering whether the person who left home still exists. The Cyclops sequence is where Kermode’s reservations appear to be firmly trampled under one enormous foot. He calls it breathtaking and brilliant, praising the physical reality of the creature and the tangible quality of the cave.
This is useful praise in an era when many cinematic monsters look as though they have been added during somebody’s lunch break. Nolan’s Cyclops apparently occupies the space with weight and menace. It does not merely appear on screen. It seems capable of damaging the screen and sending the cinema manager an invoice.
The highest praise of all goes to Samantha Morton. Kermode describes her sequence as a magical incantation that lifts the film into dreamy wonderment. He is so certain of its power that he promises to eat his hat if Morton does not win an Oscar. This is a dangerous pledge. Awards bodies have sent many distinguished hats to an undeserved end.
Morton’s appearance seems to provide the point at which The Odyssey stops being merely a colossal feat of production and becomes something genuinely uncanny. In a film stuffed with famous actors, ancient kings and expensive maritime difficulties, she apparently walks in and alters the weather.
The final forty minutes also win Kermode over completely. After the earlier lumbering, the film gathers itself into what he calls a powerful romp. One suspects Nolan has spent much of the running time tightening an enormous narrative spring before finally allowing it to strike everyone in the face.
Ben regards the film as Nolan’s most accessible work, which may alarm anyone who still has a flowchart left over from Tenet. This time the central journey runs broadly forwards, even if Odysseus himself spends much of it sailing in circles and irritating supernatural beings.
He also describes it as proper popcorn entertainment, though audiences should perhaps purchase a larger box than usual. At the reported running time, the Greeks may sack Troy before you reach the bottom.
The film’s scale makes its commercial gamble particularly striking. This is a 250-million-dollar blockbuster carrying an R rating in America and a 15 certificate in Britain. It has therefore spent the budget of a minor city while deliberately excluding a portion of the traditional summer audience.
Most studios would respond to this equation by adding a talking animal and requesting twelve fewer minutes. Nolan has instead filmed Homer entirely in IMAX and apparently invited the audience to keep up. What emerges from Kermode and Bailey Smith’s discussion is a film of contradictions. It is overlong but gripping, laborious but spectacular, ancient in subject and almost absurdly modern in its technical ambition. It begins as a trudge, discovers a Cyclops and ends at a gallop.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we are happy to let Mark and Ben conduct the actual critical navigation. The video above contains their full voyage, including Kermode’s doubts, Ben’s enthusiasm and the future wellbeing of one potentially endangered hat.
Their final judgement is that The Odyssey is an event rather than merely another release. It may test the bladder, patience and structural integrity of the local IMAX, but it also contains the kind of imagery that reminds people why cinemas were built so inconveniently large in the first place.
Odysseus may take rather too long getting home. According to Kermode, the journey is still worth making.
