Why The Odyssey is an epic for our times | Rough Cut | Kaveree Bamzai

[00:00:06]Hello and welcome. This is Kavie Bamzai at Draft Cut and this week is truly a great one for the movies. There's just one movie that everyone is talking about and for good reason. It's the Odyssey by Christopher Nolan. If you haven't heard it, you've been living under a rock, but I hope you have and I hope you would know the epic poem behind it, which is Homer's Odyssey. And what can I say about the film? It's the most modern and most contemporary retelling of the epic that you can think of.

[00:00:40]It There's a reason why great leaders are urged to read the classics. It's because of that very Greek word hubris, the curse of power, the curse of absolute power and what it does to corrupt the human mind.

[00:00:57]And the Odyssey is really a wonderful example of it. Who is Odysseus? Odysseus is the hero of the Greek war on the Trojans, the mastermind behind the Trojan horse, which was all about the brain and not the brawn, and also the man who won the war. But really the cost of war is what the Odyssey talks about.

[00:01:22]Odysseus returns finally to his homeland, Ithaca, where his beloved Penelope awaits him and his son, who's never really met him, Telemachus, awaits him. But the cost of war is so enormous and in this world where there are wars all around, it really is a little sermon actually to the leaders of our free world. What are we doing with the power that we have? What are we doing to the people that we have? Why are we dividing them? Why are we creating divisions among human beings?

[00:01:59]And the Odyssey tells us what the cost of war is.

[00:02:04]Um I'd just like to break it down a little and I have a few notes for a change which I want to emphasize so that you understand why this is a movie that has to be watched. Not as a Greek lesson or a lesson in epics or a lesson in great literature, although it is all of that, but also to understand the world that we're living in. Agamemnon, who's brother-in-law of Menelaus, who is the husband of Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships. She's the reason ostensibly that the Greeks go to war with the Trojans, but the real reason as Odysseus says in a throw away line is to control the trade trade routes. Where have we heard that before?

[00:02:48]Then the whole idea of war and what it does to the armies that are sent to fight for a nation's honor.

[00:02:58]The cost of it. Odysseus comes back, but he comes back with not a single person from his army. He has lost all of them and there is a stunning sequence, without giving too much away, where he meets them in Hades, which is hell of course, where they talk to him and they tell him that they followed him into war and and on occasion he didn't have even the decency to bury them, to honor their sacrifice. And I think that's something else that comes through in another stunning sequence with Circe, who's played by Samantha Morton, who really should be up for some award of some kind.

[00:03:41]Uh it's a stunning sequence, again without giving too much away, where she talks about how really in a way the women are are ones who suffer the most because uh the soldiers rape and pillage uh whichever country or whichever state that they're meant to and it is called discipline. But the women are the ones who really bear the cost and we see that in Penelope. We see that in Circe. We see that even in gods like Athena whose temple is destroyed.

[00:04:13]There's so much to unpack in Nolan's film and not in the least in the way he's told it through some amazing performances. I think Matt Damon could not have been better in this. He He looks as if he's lived through a 20-year war, 10 years fighting the war, and 10 years trying to come home. And all the things that we've read about and heard about from um T.S. Eliot's Wasteland to all the classics that we've read or at least have sort of referenced, you see them. You see the monster Cyclops. You see the monster Scylla. You see the Charybdis. You see uh the sea sirens.

[00:04:58]And uh you know, it could just have been one adventure upon adventure, but there's an underlying meaning to all this, which is really what comes right at the end. And I want to read out what um uh Odysseus tells Penelope finally when they meet. It's not really a spoiler alert. And he says, "A new dawn will break over the darkened world and our mistakes will once again be forgotten."

[00:05:23]Again, it's something that we could say, you know, pretty much about what's happening in the world today.

[00:05:29]>> [snorts] >> Uh also, I think the casting is so contemporary. You have Travis Scott as the bard. I mean, one of the foremost rappers as the bard, which says a lot about how Chris Christopher Nolan is imagining this epic. You have Tom Holland as uh Telemachus, who's this who's performance is extraordinary as this boy who wants to be king and the boy who wants his father or dad as Robert Pattinson's very loudish villain tells us.

[00:06:01]And there's Anne Hathaway who of course is wonderful as Penelope but even Zendaya and Calypso who's uh who plays who's played by Charlize Theron all just wonderful performers and even if you see them for 10 minutes for 5 minutes they leave such an impression on you.

[00:06:26]But as I said the underlying thread really is the return and how tough it can be to go back home where home is not exactly what how and you left it and a lot of us will see parallels in it to Ashoka when uh Odysseus is surveying the battlefield with the graves of all his dead soldiers or when he is full of remorse about having left behind so many unburied soldiers you can see that despair that war leaves behind something I wish our leaders would also understand and I think above all it's the human ambition to be like gods and how that can lead to their downfall. And here you see Poseidon you know cursing Odysseus for for thinking that he could be better than him he could be he could master the sea you see Zeus the master of the the god of sky you know raining down thunder and lightning on Odysseus because he thought he could be bigger than him and the whole idea about about Zeus's law which I think is something that we all have forgotten, the humanity in in that, which is about how even a beggar could be a god in disguise, and we all have to treat strangers with the ultimate kindness. As I said, so much to unpack. A lot of us will see similarities with the Ramayana. There's a deer that Odysseus and his soldiers follow, which actually is a trap. There is a sort of a second swayamvara in a way to test Penelope, which involves a bow and arrow. Where have we seen that before?

[00:08:22]There's there's so much that seems similar, but I suppose that's true in all our epics, and we see the same human element and the same human emotion everywhere, even centuries centuries later. What else can I tell you about why you need to watch it? And not just once, I think you should watch it twice. Once to just take in the spectacle of the adventures and the extraordinary encounters that Odysseus has. And the second, I think, to understand the deeper philosophical reasons that Christopher Nolan may have made the the movie. I think he remains, especially after Oppenheimer, he's actually become one of our greatest anti-war activists in a way. And we see what war can do to people who actually started it and who instigated it. And I think that really remains to me the biggest lesson from the Odyssey, the cost of war, the cost of war on women, the cost of war on soldiers, the cost of war on nations, and how Ithaca and Troy, neither of them remain the same as they were before the war. And you see Helen of Troy, Menelaus' wife, you see Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, and what they go through because of what the war has done to them.

[00:09:55]So much more to tell you, but I would really urge you to go and watch the movie.

[00:10:01]Even if you can't find an IMAX screen next to you, just go and watch it in any theater. And just keep aside all your distractions, focus on the movie, enjoy the spectacle, enjoy the amazing acting, enjoy the effort that Christopher Nolan has put in making this movie with IMAX cameras, and really have a good time at the movies this week. You'll enjoy it. I did.

[00:10:27]Thank you.