"A gift...an idea...a trick..."
The movie starts metapoetically with a poet tapping a stick, stringing together words, abstractly, a kind of stream of consciousness poem introducing a theme, "an idea...a thought...a trick." These words return as the theme gets expanded later in the movie when Odysseus (as a beggar) tells Penelope:
"What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if...one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn't possibly be there anymore. What if…when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night? We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that's ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home.What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain—and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow—what if he knew exactly what he'd done?"One man's idea. One man's trick to break Zeus's law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn't bear to see the ruins of what he'd done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home."
"Movie stars"
Nolan uses movie stars perfectly in this film. It's like watching the Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. The film uses real life couple Zendaya and Tom Holland, the biggest millenial stars in Hollywood, as supporting actors. In fact, in the next theater over the new Spiderman was playing starring... Zendaya and Tom Holland. But Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, for the Gen Xers, were both fantastic as the more seasoned leads too. Robert Pattinson is a great. He was also in a recent movie with Zendaya , The Drama. Mia Goth, Lupita Nyong'o. It's stacked! The star power just makes everything feel more mythic. But also there were plenty of surprising casting choices too, like John Leguizemo (great) and Elliot Page as Sinon. But my favorite was Bill Irwin as the cyclops. He brought so much pathos to the character.
I loved how the cyclop's one eye was sideways. He side-eyes you! It looks like a Picasso cubist painting, disorienting.
I loved how the cyclop's one eye was sideways. He side-eyes you! It looks like a Picasso cubist painting, disorienting.
"Open Belly"
Telemachus' mentor, Mentor, tells him to expose his belly to the enemy so the enemy trusts him and he can then move in for the thrust. This seems like good advice at the time. But by the end of the movie it is revealed that this is breaking the law of Zeus. We see it in Odysseus speech mentioned above, "We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that's ever sacred between people."
"Shroud"
Penelope is weaving and unweaving and reweaving a funeral shroud for her father and this is how she keeps away the suitors. I love how mythic this is. The "Father" is both her father and the father of her child, Odysseus, simultaneously. She is weaving it as a funeral shroud for both of them, but it has an ironic urgency for Odysseus. She refuses to believe he is dead, so the funeral shroud for "Father" cannot be finished.
The shroud is also a metaphor for the poem, the lines on the loom like the lines of text, both of which must be woven before Odysseus' story is over.
"The power of the sacrifice is in the cost of the person making it. Monstrous."
Odysseus is explaining to Penelope about Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter. She calls this monstrous. Unlike Agamemnon Odysseus refused to sacrifice his son. I think this may be read as a critique of Christianity by Nolan.
Penelope says, "Love's not a sacrifice." Odysseus replies, "Of course love is a sacrifice."
But he's not talking about sacrificing his son, but himself, for Ithaca. The difference is crucial.
"Batman"
There is an early battle scene when we see Agamemnon shot from below. He cuts an imposing figure in black armor. It looked very aesthetically cool. (The early Greeks had a great sense of style, and Nolan capitalizes on this). I realized as I was watching the film that Agamemnon looked like...The Dark Knight in Nolan's Batman movie. Clever.
"Cyclops/ Grendel""
The Cyclops scene, like the poet reciting a poem within the poem, reminded me of Beowulf. The Cyclops is Grendel eating the warriors in the mead hall. It's terrifying and funny all at once. It's the primordial monster story. And, later when the Cyclops is shot in the eye, it's sad too. This is the son of Poseidon (like Grendel was his mother's son) and he is just a big boy who eats ants. Kudos again to Bill Irwin who makes all of this particularly haunting with his tragic face.
"Popcorn seeds aren't bad "
This note didn't have to do with the movie per say. I realized that if you just think of the seeds as chewy hard savory candy, they are actually pretty good.
"Panic
piss and shit"
This refers to the scene inside the Trojan horse. This scene was filmed brilliantly. Odysseus talks about telling the story "from within." He means this figuratively and literally. You never think about what it would have been like for the men hiding in the horse, how difficult it would've been to be quiet in their own accumulated "piss and shit" and extreme claustrophobia. You feel it in this movie. It's a metaphor for being "in the film".
Nolan's idea of bringing this part of the Iliad into the story of the Odyssey is smart. It gives you a sense of both Odysseus' brilliance as a strategian and of his crime which, "breaks Zeus's law forever," by turning a gift of peace into a weapon, which then leads to the figurative death of Athena.
"Violence is more real in film"
You feel the violence in this movie more than you do in reading the Odyssey. That's one thing films can do better than novels or poems. It's not easy anymore because we have become inured to film violence, but Nolan does a pretty good job of making you feel the impact, which underscores the pain of the lessons.
"men with their appetites"
Upon reflection, the Circe scenes might be the best in the film. Watching Circe turn the men into pigs reminded me of the scene in Spirited Away when Chihiro's parents turn to into pigs. (Miyazaki took this idea from Homer of course). And just like Odysseus, Chihiro knows better than to eat the food offered to her. It's an ancient cautionary tale.
I read that the film crew spontaneously applauded after Samantha Morton's performance. It is wickedly good.
The conclusion to this scene is a bit confusing. Afterward I did a deep dive on it and the whole crow/sister thing has a cool backstory in Greek mythology. In the film Circe turned her sister into a crow, and says "we get along better this way," but when Odysseus threatens to kill the crow Circe shows that she really cares. We talked about this idea with the girls after the film and I said, "Never turn your sister into a crow, girls," and Sofia said, "it's too late." I pointed out to her that Circe, in Nolan's rendering, comes through for her sister in the end, which I know Sofia would do too.
There is a great psychological insight in this scene. Circe thinks all men are pigs, so she turns them into pigs, but Odysseus asks, "did they hurt you?" She says no, and he explains that they meant no harm, they were just hungry, and they just want to go home. She was biased against them because of her own past trauma. (And, you know, men). She comes around though because of the reasoning of Odysseus. And because he puts the knife down and does not kill her sister, the crow. A reasonable good-hearted man can make a difference. Nolan's Odysseus is better-hearted than Homer's, and I appreciate that.
All of this sister/crow stuff is very easy to miss. There's always this kind of thing in a Nolan films I think, like the ending of Inception, which is completely up in the air and open to interpretation. The ending of The Odyssey is also open to interpretation. Some read the ending as Odysseus dying at the hands of the suitors and sailing off to the "Western Sun," or death, or the afterlife, with Penelope.
"Calypso framing device"
Nolan has this cool device where Odysseus is trying to remember his past and narrating it to Calypso. It's smart and used well. There's a scene, for instance, when they are sailing and Odysseus says, "The sea was calm just long enough to lure us into Zeus's sky." (In other words, don't be fooled by calm). But I just generally like the idea of the hero narrating his own story by remembering it, as if waking up to it.
"Sirens/ Lotus flower"
The Sirens scene is really well done. It's used as a way for Odysseus to reflect that he has wishes he wishes he didn't have and that part of him doesn't really want to go home.
Sirens and Lotus flowers. Sex and drugs. Fiending can get in the way of home life, a tale as old as time, and one that millions of men and women are still in the throes of dealing with, so the story still speaks to us. But what's especially poignant about this film is that it gets underneath the reasons why we sometimes fall into temptation, why we need to fill the hole. Our guilt doesn't allow us to accept love. We are looking for something to take away the pain. It's the Trojan war (PTSD?) that is driving Odysseus.
"Give yourself up to the storm. Give up control"
Athena says this to Odysseus at the end of his journey. It goes deep because early in the film Penelope tells Telemachus that being a man is about making choices. This is true for the young man, perhaps, but here, at the end, it's more about giving in and giving up control.
Odysseus is humbled and he becomes a mere beggar.
"Clearest view of a man is from below"
There are many great lines worth pondering in this film and this is one of them. You can see men better from a humble position, looking up at them. In other words, a man in a position of power will show his true colors when you are looking through sorrow and leveled humanity. Odysseus has been chastened.
"Zeus seems interested in the outcome"
Zeus doesn't really care about the outcome in the original Homeric text, because man is just a product of fate. But Nolan makes it so freewill enters the picture. Even Zeus doesn't know what Odysseus is going to do. He "seems interested."
"Songs will be all we have to remember"
We remember here that The Odyssey was originally a song. That poetry lasts. I'm reminded of something I read recently, that songs are the last thing senile people remember, even after they have forgotten everything else.
"Athena's head"
At the end end of the movie we realize that Odysseus' vision of Athena is predicated upon a young girl who he watched being killed in the Trojan war (played beautifully by Zendaya). This death is the result of the "gift horse," his "trick." He was responsible for the death of the girl, and therefore the goddess. Because he killed her, she becomes the face of Athena, who represents his consciousness. He learns to listen to Athena, which helps get him back home. This is a beautiful idea well executed by Nolan.
