On Monday I was running errands in Burlington anyway, so I decided to catch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey on the big screen. I'd like to say that I loved it, but, truthfully, I'm not really certain that I even liked it (and this has nothing to do with the $32 I spent for a movie ticket, a coke, and a popcorn - seriously, it's not simply the crappy movies coming to theaters, it's also the insane cost of snacks, that are keeping people away from seeing movies in the theater). I know everyone was madly/illogically complaining about the casting - and I had some issues with it (I counted at least eight actors who had appeared in the MCU or the DCU) - but I didn't have the usual idiotic complaints about Lupita Nyong'o or Elliot Page, both of whom were fine. I mean, Lupita Nyong'o is a very fine actress, and she's stunningly beautiful, so she's a great choice to play Helen. My problem is the dumb stuff that these characters, and, for that matter, all of the characters, had to say. I don't think there was even one line from Homer's Odyssey that appeared in Nolan's Odyssey. Granted, film is a visual medium, but would it have killed Nolan to have included some of the best lines from Homer (even considering that the Odyssey pales in comparison to the Iliad in regards to great passages)? There are so many great scenes that were just ignored (Odysseus meeting his mother, Achilles, and Ajax in the underworld) in favor of dumb scenes such as Odysseus explaining to Penelope that Agamemnon was starting the war to dominate trade in the Aegean. The attempts to deal with the patriarchal nature of a work created twenty-five centuries ago were just clumsy, like implying that Odysseus didn't really cheat on Penelope, because he didn't sleep with Circe (a wasted Samantha Morton) and even if he slept with Calypso he didn't really sleep with her because she had him drugged to deal with his obvious PTSD. In the epic Odysseus wants to go home, but he doesn't feel any great existential remorse for his role in the Trojan War. The attempt to foreground the female characters was noble, but it was also clumsily done, leaving them utterly one dimensional (and I would argue that they aren't in Homer's work). Essentially, it felt like an Odyssey made by a person unfamiliar with the Odyssey for an audience that would never read the Odyssey, which I guess is a good fit for this Trumpian post-literate age. Give it a pass. Instead, go back and watch Memento, the one truly great film that Christopher Nolan ever made.
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