I have been asked by no less than three people in three different states in the past week the following series of questions: “You’re a movie guy, have you seen that new Nolan movie?”
Followed by “Does it live up to the hype?”
Look. I love you all, and I love my friends, but eat shit and die why would you phrase it like that?
The Nolan Enigma
Christopher Nolan is a man who is best understood through his pattern of films beginning with his first foray into the zeitgeist with Batman Begins. This grounded superhero story, though narratively robust, was relatively straightforward. There was a bit of nonsense in what order the early events took place, but it was only confusing if you’re like, 9. Which I was. In 2005.
Then comes The Prestige, which is another film where the order of events is part of the intrigue of the whole film, cranking up the chronological nonsense from Batman Begins to an 11. It was a good sci-fi drama period piece. I skipped Memento on purpose.
Following that we have every fanboy and video essayists’ magnum opus film, The Dark Knight. Fantastic superhero movie, and I won’t insult myself by explaining further.
Inception was the film that truly put Nolan on the map as a man with talents, because from superhero films he moved on to hardcore sci-fi. In a sense, Inception is “high concept” sci-fi, because it’s not just a story about people living in a world of advanced technology, it’s a story about how people are affected by that advanced technology. It’s also a character drama.
The Dark Knight Rises was plagued by various issues, but I think if you’re good at thinking about stuff, you’ll recognize that if
a) Nolan is as great as you’ve understood him to be so far, and
b) the movie had production issues, then
c) Nolan could have overcome those issues, which leads us to
d) Nolan just stopped caring about this franchise because he was ready to move on.
He followed up with another cultural heavy-hitter film, Interstellar. A film that, while relatively straightforward from a chronological perspective, was another sci-fi character drama. It really toes the line between generic sci-fi and high brow sci-fi because there’s so many different types of new technologies that are introduced in the film. Even though the movie explores how that new tech impacts people and their relationships with one another, it’s hard to say that things like time dilation or space travel are concepts that haven’t been really explored in something like, say, Oldboy or Ad Astra. The black hole could have been the ‘high brow’ trigger, but that whole concept is resolved with ‘love ex machina’ cheese. But still. Sci-fi character drama.
And like the bow that Odysseus strums to announce his arrival back at Ithaca to a room of suitors, the pattern changes. Nolan goes from switching between superhero and sci-fi drama, replacing Batman with ‘historical drama’.
Dunkirk was one of the first times that general audiences kind of balked at Nolan. They were a little shaken because they weren’t really sure what the point of the movie was, and what the heck Nolan was doing directing this movie. It wasn’t bad or so offensively inaccessible that people could dump on it, so they just sort of let it slide. Real cinefiles will tell you, however, that Dunkirk was an exceptional film. I never published this review, but it was written on August 13, 2017. I sat on the film for about a month before writing about it. Of the three flowery paragraphs I wrote about the movie, here are the most relevant lines:
“Without spoiling much of his storytelling techniques, Nolan finds an incredible way of telling a tale from reality, and heightening the power of moviemaking to truly transport us to the desolate waters of Dunkirk. 9/10. An incredible film, yet complex enough to only warrant a single, incredible viewing.”
Dunkirk was Nolan’s best effort at dilating time to tell a story non-chronologically. You can argue that Memento did it better, and you could argue that you’re right, but Memento had the same impact on ‘people’ as Dunkirk. It was good, but they had a hard time understanding exactly why, and perhaps even what and sometimes how. Same thing with Dunkirk. It’s not exactly a misstep by Nolan, but I suspect that he thought it was.
Because then he did Tenet, which was his least-liked modern film because it was the most inaccessible. I think, though, that Tenet was pretty good. It was ambitious and interesting and well-thought out. It dragged a bit in the sections with its villain, but it was the type of movie that demanded you go back and rewatch it to finish piecing it together, much like Terminal, but arguably worse. Even for me, at that point in time, Tenet was the weakest Nolan film by a mile, but only because his other films were so much better.
Another historical drama followed in the loudly lauded Oppenheimer. The historical drama allowed for little narrative flair, resting on the shoulders of an all-star cast, Ludwig Göransson’s incredible soundtrack, and the promise of incredible nuclear bomb effects. I know that Nolan was too smart to make the bomb the climax, and was instead focusing on the individual. However, for a movie this steeped in accuracy and honesty, it was far too “so what do you think of Oppenheimer?” instead of “So this was Oppenheimer.”
And sometimes, vice versa.
The BarbenHeimer meme movement catapulted Nolan back into the good graces of the zeitgeist, but I found that Oppenheimer, much like Tenet, was, at that point in time, the weakest Nolan outing.
Like the twang of Odysseus’s bow to announce that he still lives to his wife and enemies, the pattern changed again. Sci-fi was swapped out for a historical epic, and that brings us to:
Obvious Answers to Subtle Questions
The Odyssey: A mostly faithful adaptation of the Homerian tale of Odysseus, a mythical hero of Greek mythology and his journey home following the Trojan War.
This is about when I’d love to shift the conversation from ‘so what’s the deal with Christopher Nolan?’ to ‘omg adapting source material is so hard!’ because what’s the fuckin’ difference between this and the Harry Potter movies? Or if you wanna get really inflammatory, what Christopher Nolan is to The Odyssey is what Jon Favreau is to Iron Man. Right?!
However, the adaptation conversation wouldn’t truly answer if The Odyssey is any good, or if it’s worth the hype. Rather, we’d only answer if the movie was a good adaptation of the quote-unquote original Odyssey. So let’s avoid it, and just wonder why I brought it up at all.
That said, before continuing with this exploration of what Nolan does to movies, and why we’re tying his name to the movie, much like how we tied Lee Cronin to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, I want to take a moment to answer the implied question when someone asks “Was it worth the hype?”:
“Was it good?”
Yes, dude holy fuck are you dense? The Odyssey is excellent. For all my huffing and puffing about Christopher Nolan and the apparent incoherence of Tenet and the simplicity of Dunkirk or the laziness of The Dark Knight Rises, the dude knows how to tell a fuckin’ story. He’s the one of the only guys who’s ever used flashbacks and non-chronological storytelling without it being a lazy trope or an excuse for a lack of narrative creativity. The man understands framing and scale and composition and dialogue and the technology behind filmmaking and humanity’s relationship with itself and the world it lives in and the massive question of ‘what are we doing here?’
There was no doubt about whether or not The Odyssey was going to be good. I wondered if it would be accessible, in the sense that would general audiences understand what the fuck Nolan was trying to do and why. But I don’t much care if the masses misunderstood that Oppenheimer wasn’t going to be weapons porn.
That said, I think that most people, unless they’re weird incel racist rubes, will get what’s going on here. The Odyssey is an epic tale. Not epic like, “Dude that shit was so epic!” but epic in the sense that “what an epic tale of survival!” It’s a film about a myth, it’s a film about a legend. A fantastical tall tale full of adventure and action and heroism and a lesson about hubris and humility and why you shouldn’t fuck with Greek gods.
Nolan got that, and as such, the film leans into the fantastical. Giants, giants, witches, and even witches, not to mention houseguests (Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, Calypso, fuck houseguests who stay too long). As much as it’s both justifiable and lazy to critique CGI and special effects, Nolan gets that practicals just make more sense if they’re properly applied, and by golly, that shit was so good. Fucking inject that shit into my goddamn veins holy shit.
Plus, I think that the addition of Odysseus’s guilt over his lie, the ramifications of his lie, the guilt of having led his men through the lie, and their subsequent brutality and violence, was a very interesting dynamic to add. What was a tale of insulting and then placating the gods turns into a story of a man realizing that all of his guilt over his influence on the world around him was hubris, but that does not excuse him from the role he played. I can’t profess that it emotionally resonated as well as it should have, but logically I understand the gravitas of the emotional climax of the film.
The Odyssey was good, and it was nearly guaranteed to be good, and the only variable that remained was the intelligence and media literacy of individual audience members. So shut up.
But Hype?
Hype and Hypertrophy
I know I’m going to sound like that annoying kid in your science class with that fuckass “uhm akschually!” bullshit, but maybe that’s because I was the annoying kid in a science class. So at the risk of, for the umpteenth time, sounding like a contrarian for contrarianism’s sake, no, I don’t think The Odyssey is worth the hype.
What is ‘hype’? Wanna go down that route? Wanna talk about what ‘hype’ means? Fuck you.
There’s so much of this dickriding going on with Nolan. There are so many people overstating and applauding and just being fucking obnoxious about the film. Like. Shut up. Just shut up. Please shut up. It’s a good movie, but it’s not gonna break cinema. It’s a veteran director adapting one of the greatest epics working with an excellent cast and an incredible composer.
But like, this recent string of Nolan films haven’t truly been innovative or exploratory or experimental or even gripping the way that he’s proven to be lately. I found some of the editing a bit jarring, and I’m still not convinced that the modern English dialogue was a good choice, and Tom Holland was the weakest part of the cast (even though he was absolutely well casted). But it’s not bad. It’s a sound, whole film.
Is The Odyssey the worst Nolan movie? No. Is it the best Nolan movie? Also no. It sort of grinds because it switches up on Nolan’s pattern, and I miss when Nolan pushed the boundaries of film. Sure, filming entirely with IMAX and whatnot is commendable, but shooting on location and practical effects and incredible cinematography isn’t necessarily what made us fall in love with him in the first place.
I’m not saying Nolan needs to stay in his lane. I’m all for directors exploring genres and styles and pushing their internal creative boundaries. In fact, I think that this exploration of style and story is why, maybe, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day failed, or why Quentin Tarantino’s films are so easy to slide into a single universe. These guys barely strayed from their original styles, and their creativity faltered as a result, and their goodwill began to erode. Nolan experiments with narrative in Memento and Tenet and Inception and Interstellar are exactly the same kind of risk as him pushing from superhero films to sci-fi to historical dramas to, now, historical epics.
So. Hype? I mean. Not really dude. You shouldn’t have been hyped. If your expectations were high, you were wrong. For all the marketing, all the braindead cultural commentary, for all the twitter dickriding, and LetterboxD glazing- you’d think this is the greatest movie made this year. It’s not. It’s barely more entertaining than The Invite, far less emotionally robust than Obsession, and, at best, on par with the visuals of Backrooms. That doesn’t make The Odyssey bad, and comparing it to those films, or even to the others in Nolan’s filmography, isn’t a fair analysis at all.
So basing your expectations on comparisons to those films is stupid. I’m going to spend an embarrassing amount of time explaining why it’s stupid in the next section, so to save me the shame, and you the time, just skip to the rating.
The Cinefile’s Curse
You know how some people can predict the twist to a thriller, or the murderer in a mystery, or the punchline in a comedy? It’s because they have such deep experience with the medium and its patterns that they can anticipate the next beat. They can spot the clues and foreshadowing and piece together the puzzle of the film. The more creative the film, the harder it is to predict, and the more basic the movie, the easier it is for people to figure out.
If a movie is too opaque, like if it’s an adaptation or some shit action flick, like Into the Lost Lands, the accessibility goes through the roof for audiences, and now the only thing left to assess is whether or not the movie is made well. With a director like Christopher Nolan, an age-old story turns into a spectacle of color and music and wonder. But I know it will. I know it will. I know it will.
So that predictability, that ability to anticipate, turns into a fucking curse. I couldn’t refresh my understanding of the story of Odysseus before watching The Odyssey because then I’d introduce a bias that I don’t need. I’d see the story in my head, comparing Nolan’s efforts to some hubris-motivated vision that’s just seconds ahead of the movie. I did it in The Invite, when I was mentally begging the movie to end at the final scene with the piano, and then it did. I didn’t want to do it, but I do it all the time.
The curse persists. Because now I’m 2400 words into a review about The Odyssey and halfway in I already said it’s good, but then sandwiched it between a veiled “brah Nolan’s washed” comment and a not-so-veiled “you people are dumb and I am smart” section about hype. Help me. Help me. Free me. Bonk me on the head. I want to stop being such a fucking nerd. Jesus Christ I hated writing about The Odyssey. The fuck am I supposed to say? Do I dickride? Do I shit on the film? What do I do?
On top of that, you chucklefucks have the nerve to ask me “Omg, you’re a movie guy, did you see the new Nolan? Is it worth the hype?” and follow it up with “why haven’t you seen Parasite yet, it’s so GOOOOODOODODODDDOOD?!”!:
I thought The Odyssey was
GOOD
I saw it in theaters, and I’m not sure where it’ll stream. Probably on Peacock or someshit. Maybe buy the Blu-Ray. I don’t know, fuck you.
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