Midday Movies: Is 'The Odyssey' worth the journey?

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[00:00:20]>> Welcome back to KPBS Midday Edition. I'm Jade Hindman. Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, is one of the oldest surviving works of literature. And it's remained popular over the millennia, inspiring all sorts of movies, shows, and books.

[00:00:35]In fact, if you name your favorite story, chances are you can find some of The Odyssey's DNA in it. It tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus and his journey home after the 10-year-long Trojan War. Well, this week, Christopher Nolan's epic IMAX adaptation of the ancient tale arrives in theaters, and that's where Nolan wants you to watch his film. To discuss the film, we have once again gathered our Midday Movies critics, KPBS Cinema Junkie Beth Accomando, and Movie Wallaces podcaster Yazdi Pithavala. Beth, Yazdi, welcome to you both.

[00:01:10]>> Thank you so much.

[00:01:11]>> Thank you, Jade.

[00:01:12]>> So, let's begin with a little of the trailer for Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.

[00:01:17]>> Tell me what you remember.

[00:01:19]>> [music] >> A wife.

[00:01:25]>> [music] >> A son.

[00:01:32]And then what?

[00:01:35]>> [music] >> We went to the war.

[00:01:43]Help me go home.

[00:01:49]>> So, Yazdi, do you feel Nolan's film merits making the effort to see it on the big screen in IMAX and 70 mm?

[00:01:57]>> Uh the short answer is yes. I should say though that I'm not your typical fawning, you know, Nolan devotee, and I found plenty to gripe about with his more recent films. But even so, there is no denying the majesty as well as, and this is the surprising part, the emotional heft of his latest, The Odyssey.

[00:02:18]Dare I say this may be amongst Nolan's best films even.

[00:02:22]An immediate improvement from his past films is the score for The Odyssey from Ludwig Göransson. And for once, there is no clanging, deafening background music that drowns out the dialogue. Hooray!

[00:02:34]Because that was an issue with a few of his last films. Nolan still cannot resist though the needless back and forth in time through the entire running time of this film, which makes the first half hour of the film pretty hard to decipher.

[00:02:48]But having said all that, as far as pure cinematic achievement goes, first film shot entirely in IMAX, the use of mostly practical effects over CGI, and a 3-hour film shot almost exclusively on location, it is hard to deny The Odyssey its flowers.

[00:03:06]>> I mean, a full rundown there, Beth. What are your thoughts? [laughter] >> Okay, I'm going back to my normal self of being a little more negative than Yasmine. [laughter] So, I had really mixed feelings about this. I know you talked about like the emotional heft, and that's the place where it fell short for me.

[00:03:23]I was impressed by the scale and the spectacle and the technical skill. I mean, it was impressive to see this on the big screen.

[00:03:31]But I never fully felt engaged in the emotional weight of the story. And while some have complained about the casting of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy because she's black and the cinematic image has always been of a blonde, fair-skinned woman, this has been a somewhat racist backlash towards her casting, which has been an unfair criticism of Nolan casting her in this role. But, aside from that, I was upset about the casting of American actors Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway as Greeks. It's not so much that they're not Greek, but they just did not strike me as the right people for these particular roles.

[00:04:11]And I had heard that Nolan had considered Tom Hardy for the role of Odysseus, and now that would have been a different film that I might have been able to embrace more fully. Robert Pattinson got it right as the kind of slimy villain, but for the two leads, I just wasn't as emotionally invested in them as I was hoping to be.

[00:04:33]And I did hear Nolan in an interview, and he was talking about how he was obsessed to make this movie from a very young age, and I was going like, "Oh, wow, you've loved Homer's The Odyssey this long?"

[00:04:45]And then he said his obsession was making a film all in IMAX. I feel like it was the format he was in love with at the age of 16. I thought he was going to say he's was obsessed with this Greek story.

[00:04:58]So, a lot of the promotion about the film, a lot of the discussion has all been about the logistics, how big it is, how epic it is, the technology that was used.

[00:05:08]And I just feel like maybe some of the emotional weight of the story got lost.

[00:05:13]Plus, for me, I felt like the film didn't give us much context to know what's going on. So, who is Helen? Like, why was this war fought? What's the role of the gods in this whole thing? I mean, they're kind of expecting us to know this from when we read these books back in like high school or something.

[00:05:30]>> [gasps] >> But, you're thrown into it, and I feel like he could have done better at that.

[00:05:35]And I think, Yazdi, when you're talking about the back and forth in time, the other thing about that is it doesn't help clarify a lot of those things, and we don't feel like it's this long journey, which is part of what the whole story is about, like taking so long to return home when you're jumping about all the time.

[00:05:53]So, I will say I think he wanted this to sort of be a spiritual sequel to Oppenheimer because Odysseus is a man who's carrying the weight of all this destruction that was caused through him during the Trojan War. But again, I just never felt like we knew enough about him to fully understand what Nolan wanted to make the film about. I do understand that he wanted to make it in 70 mm IMAX and a movie grounded in the real world as much as possible, but for me that just wasn't enough.

[00:06:22]>> You said that he doesn't really explain like why this war is fought, the role of the gods.

[00:06:27]Isn't that all though very like interpretive from one viewer to the next, that part of the story?

[00:06:35]>> I mean, how you see some of those things playing out can be interpretive on the part of the audience, but I think if you don't know why or what role Helen played in why the Trojan War was fought, then you're kind of at a loss for understanding like why do these people hate each other? Why do they want to kill each other? Why are they willing to go to war? And in the story, the gods play a role in how all this plays out. I mean, one of the things about the gods that's so much fun in Greek mythology is they're like petty humans.

[00:07:09]>> And mischievous, yeah.

[00:07:10]>> Yeah, they are doing things because they want to mess with you or you know, they've got personal vendettas and and those things play out in the context of that world, whether you want to believe it's fate or that man has free will or anything like that, that's totally up to interpretation. And I don't even know how that plays out in this film. So, he didn't even explore it.

[00:07:29]>> No.

[00:07:30]>> Yeah, no, and I I think the movie does expect you to come with some prior knowledge, like you're never explained anything about Helen of Troy. I mean, she has very few scenes in the movie.

[00:07:40]any.

[00:07:41]people keep talking about Agamemnon and we don't really know how he sits within, you know, everything else. Maybe a Star Wars like feed at the start of the movie [laughter] which laid everything out would have helped.

[00:07:54]>> Athena pops in now and again, but again, we don't understand like her connection to him or to the story or, you know, they talk about Zeus's law and how he's supposed to be telling the humans that you have to be kind to everyone because anyone could be a god.

[00:08:12]But those things are just dropped in there. I mean, it's not a part of the real fabric of the story.

[00:08:19]I just felt like his attention was elsewhere.

[00:08:23]>> Interesting. Well, you you actually went to see this film with someone who who builds suits of armor?

[00:08:29]>> Yes.

[00:08:30]>> Uh to get his take on how it works in the film?

[00:08:33]>> I thought it would be fun to go with someone who actually handcrafts armor to see a film where, you know, this is a part of the film. And so, Jeffrey Hedgehog has 40 years of experience crafting armor very authentically to whatever time period he happens to be working in. He's done armor work on Army of Darkness, the Evil Dead film, and The Cell. And he does extensive historical research whenever he builds armor. And so, he shared some thoughts with me about how armor can function in a film.

[00:09:02]>> Well, there's been a lot of talk about what the armor looks like online and you can pick apart the historical accuracy of it, but it's a film. And for me, I always look at how the armor is used in the film and how does it help tell the story? How does it help develop the characters? What does it say about the characters? And of course, whether it is used in a way that signifies that the armor is indeed protection. If it's not protection, then it's just an article of clothing.

[00:09:34]The armor needs to help tell the story.

[00:09:35]Armor is usually under the subheading of the costume designer. It It sort of falls between the cracks in the wardrobe department. [music] It's usually considered specialty wardrobe. In any case, it really needs to help tell the story whether or not it's historically accurate. A movie is not a documentary. It's not there to tell us exactly the way things were, just give us an impression of history and an impression of of how our ancestors lived.

[00:10:00]>> And he thought that the armor used for the giants in the film was particularly effective because it is used in part as a display of power and invincibility.

[00:10:10]But he did criticize in the Battle of Troy, he said he got a little pulled out of the story because the Trojan armor couldn't protect them from the most basic weapon that was being used, which were bow and arrows. So, he felt that it should have been more [laughter] functional in that context. But, you know, the the Trojan soldiers also looked very like washed out in these white, grayish armor. And it was almost like Nolan had condemned them to death from the beginning. They were like specters and spirits and ghosts from the time that the war started. So, maybe it was costuming there and, you know, symbolically showing us these we're all doomed to die.

[00:10:51]>> Had Nolan leaned more into the mystical, supernatural [laughter] part of this, maybe it would have worked better. It would have worked better. It would have.

[00:10:58]>> Well, Yazdi, I mean, how do you place this film in Nolan's filmography?

[00:11:02]>> So, there's no mistaking that this is a Nolan film. All the usual Nolanisms are here. There's no opening credits. We talked about this fussy back and forth in time, which really doesn't do this particular story in, you know, in particular any justice. And then we have the sprawling cast with many new characters introduced fairly late in the plot. And as we've said before, so many of those characters are just left generally untethered with the rest of the plot. So, it's it's hard to to of get your arms around it.

[00:11:32]But I also think there is a certain maturity in storytelling here. Uh I'm not giving anything away by saying the last half hour of the movie is almost entirely devoted to more emotional beats compared to, you know, large-scale action.

[00:11:46]Um so I kind of did a did appreciate that. Um many have taken a lot out of Homer's classic, but I was surprised that Nolan kind of highlighted the principal underlying theme of the Odyssey to be something quite unexpected, which is Odysseus's great guilt from having won a war that came at the cost of killing so many innocent people. As Beth mentioned earlier, this curiously was also the theme on his take on Oppenheimer. So it's interesting that Nolan continues to wrestle with even as we have wars going on right now, he continues to wrestle with the price we pay with the people who die during wars.

[00:12:26]Having said all that again, in terms of sheer scale, the Odyssey definitely trumps everything else that Nolan has done, which is saying quite a lot.

[00:12:35]And after finding his last few films to be somewhat hollow spectacles, I was hoping and praying that Nolan would go back to his roots and make smaller films such as Memento and The Following and Prestige. Instead, he made the biggest film of his career to date. And, you know, to give credit where it's due, I think he did nail the assignment against all odds. Like Beth, I heard another interview with Nolan where he actually said that once he gets older, all he will be making is smaller [laughter] films. And right now, while he has the energy and vigor, he wants to make the big ones. So I understand that.

[00:13:11]>> But promises promises.

[00:13:13]>> [laughter] >> There's logic in that. Well, Beth, how does the Odyssey rank for you in Nolan's canon?

[00:13:18]>> All right. Well, it hasn't changed my ranking of my favorite film. Memento still remains my personal favorite. I think that film was perfection and that's where the non-linear narrative, the breaking up of time worked so well because it was so part of the character and part of the theme of the film. So, that still is the pinnacle for me. I also love The Dark Knight, but I think that was more for Heath Ledger. So, I feel like Nolan is an extremely talented filmmaker, but I feel like the recent growth in scale of his films has meant that he sort of lost the intimacy and I feel like he is a little more obsessed with that bigger picture aspect of it and with the technology. I mean, I think he does love the, you know, the whole process of filmmaking, the technology used to bring that vision to life, but sometimes I do feel like he loses a little of the humanity along the way.

[00:14:15]>> [laughter] >> Yeah.

[00:14:16]>> So, I wasn't a big fan of like Tenet or Inception or Interstellar, but The Prestige, Dunkirk, and Memento at the top.

[00:14:23]>> Mhm. Well, you know, the Odyssey, as you you mentioned, it it touches, just touches on Greek mythology [laughter] this go around. And but it's always been popular in movies. Do you have a favorite film you'd recommend as a companion piece or counterpoint to Nolan's film here?

[00:14:39]>> I'm a big fan of the Clash of the Titans from 1981.

[00:14:46]>> Clash of the Titans.

[00:14:49]The combat.

[00:14:50]The courage.

[00:14:52]The splendor.

[00:14:54]The spectacle.

[00:14:56]>> Which really embraces the fantastical elements of Greek mythology. It It almost feels like the gods and humans are on the same playing field. And the practical effects used in that film, which which actually may even seem silly by current standards, they're extremely endearing. So, I I I just love watching that movie. Anytime it's on television, I'll watch it. And I think this use of practical effects kind of hearkens back all the way to Jason and the Argonauts from 1963, which used impossibly clever practical effects from Ray Harryhausen, which stand up, you know, even to to this day.

[00:15:32]We shall not talk about [laughter] the misbegotten 2020 remake of Clash of the Titans. We'll just let it be. But one of Nolan's true achievements with his Odyssey is that the fantastical elements of the plot are made quite realistic and inherently believable even when you're dealing with things like the Cyclops or Circe. And again, that speaks to the technical proficiency of what you see on the screen.

[00:15:58]>> All right, Beth.

[00:15:59]>> Well, I will second some of Yazdi's choices here. The Ray Harryhausen films are absolutely my favorite. I am wearing my Ray Harryhausen Jason and the Argonauts shirt today. It glows in the dark, too. Jason and the Argonauts, when I was a kid, that totally captured my imagination. He used a stop-motion animation to bring the Harpies to life, the skeletons, all sorts of things, and they're fabulous. Plus, in Jason and the Argonauts, you have Galore herself, Honor Blackman, as Hera, Queen of the Gods. So, those two remain my favorite in the world of Greek mythology. I know some people may like think they're a little silly in terms of the production values. I think they're magical.

[00:16:41]There's also Kirk Douglas in Ulysses, and I think that's also worth checking out as being, I think, a little more faithful to kind of the the narrative of Homer's original poem.

[00:16:51]>> Marvel at the tremendous spectacle of the Trojan War. Ulysses and his warriors springing from the mammoth wooden horse to overwhelm the walls of Troy. See Ulysses live his fantastic adventures again. Filmed where they actually happened 5,000 [music] years ago. The 1,001 thrills of Ulysses, the greatest of all adventurers, mightiest of all warriors, biggest of all motion pictures.

[00:17:16]Ulysses!

[00:17:17]>> But for well-oiled Greek history and mythology, there are no better films than 300.

[00:17:23]>> THIS IS SPARTA! [screaming] >> PERHAPS THE ONLY ZACK SNYDER FILM I like, and Troy as a second, although it's less successful in that realm. And then I do want to throw out I'm going to be like Yazdi today. I'm going to throw in some extra stuff. My two offbeat suggestions are Xena: The Warrior Princess, the TV series. I adored that show.

[00:17:48]And then Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits had an absolutely wonderful segment with Sean Connery as King Agamemnon.

[00:17:56]>> Where did you come from?

[00:17:59]>> Not sure.

[00:18:01]>> Who sent you? The gods?

[00:18:04]Is it Zeus?

[00:18:05]Apollo?

[00:18:07]Athena?

[00:18:08]>> That is just a beautiful, so heartfelt section of that film.

[00:18:13]>> Interesting. And well, to go out, Yazdi, India has a wealth of mythology to draw on. Can you recommend any films?

[00:18:21]>> Yeah, to get your cup of mythology, Indian cinema is where you should go.

[00:18:26]And I think the most recent example is the Bahubali films. There were three of them.

[00:18:32]>> [music] >> Those films were made from the same director as RRR. And all of those films can be watched right now on Netflix. But I should say that Indian cinema has been rife with films based on mythology from the very beginning. But the more recent films like Kantara from 2025, Kalki from 2024, and Brahmastra Part One from 2022 have done a great job with using the available contemporary technology to create these incredible tales of tremendous dazzle while still retaining the emotional strength of those antique stories. In fact, one of the most eagerly awaited Indian film this year, is a retelling of the Ramayana with some of the biggest names in Bollywood attached to it, and that film opens in November. So, something to look forward to.

[00:19:22]>> And just an FYI for you, Ramayana has a panel on Thursday at Comic-Con next week. And the last time that India took the stage at the pop culture convention, it was pretty epic with live music and dance.

[00:19:35]>> All right, sounds great. The Odyssey opens tomorrow, which is Friday. Be sure to check for the IMAX screenings. I'd like to thank our midday movie critics, Beth Accomando and Yazdi Batavala. Beth, Yazdi, thank you so much.

[00:19:48]>> Thank you.

[00:19:49]>> THANK YOU.

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