Christopher Nolan does not do anything small, so of course his Odyssey is shot entirely on IMAX film, scored on Bronze Age instruments, and staged with a sixty-foot practical Cyclops in an actual cave full of actual bees. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Ocean Murff, and Steve Sarmento pull up an oar for The Film Board's monthly round-table to figure out what all that machinery is actually in service of — because the surprising thing about The Odyssey isn't the spectacle. It's that Nolan takes Homer's victory lap and turns it into a reckoning.
Full spoilers throughout. The board digs into how the film reframes the hero: Matt Damon's Odysseus is a man who's very good at winning and increasingly sick about what winning costs, the Trojan Horse recast from clever trick to war crime, the whole story quietly asking whether "war hero" is a contradiction in terms. They get into Nolan the skeptic making a fantasy — the gods pushed to the psychological margins, Athena reimagined as guilt wearing Zendaya's face — and how a stacked cast (Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, Robert Pattinson as a suitor you will genuinely want dead) grounds all the myth in something human.
But the craft you guys… Ludwig Göransson's relentless, orchestra-free score built from gongs and scrap metal; the editing that makes a 172-minute movie move; the new camera Nolan had built and the reels that had to change every three minutes mid-scene. Steve saw it in the pristine 70mm format and comes back a little evangelized. Is a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score is earned or just the Nolan logo doing its work? What is the film is really saying about who we root for in a war? Plus, stick around past the credits for a genuine argument about whether the gods exist in this movie at all.
The Film Board is a monthly round-table on new theatrical releases. Part of The Next Reel family of film shows at thenextreel.com.
Links & Notes
Christopher Nolan on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart — the interview Pete cites, where Nolan says Oppenheimer is the only reason this got made. YouTube · Deadline recap
"Blucifer" — the Denver airport horse Pete wants to stab. It's Luis Jiménez's "Blue Mustang," and, fittingly for this episode, a piece of it fell on and killed the artist before it was finished. Blue Mustang – Wikipedia
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