The Loneliness of the Long Distance ‘Odyssey’ Dissenter

Here we are in the immediate wake of a huge opening weekend for “The Odyssey” — $124M domestic, $257M worldwide — accompanied by critical hosannahs and assurances of eventual Oscar glory.Two years after Mr. Nolan’s celebrated “Oppenheimer” won the Best Picture Oscar, and after a 21-year parade of grandly conceived “smarthouse” megahits — “Batman Begins”, “The Dark Knight,” “Inception,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” the aurally frustrating “Interstellar”, “Dunkirk” and the Covid-compromised “Tenet” — “The Odyssey” has, somewhat curiously, become the biggest hit of Mr. Nolan’s high-toned blockbuster career. The irony is that the smaller-scaled “Memento,” made in 2000, is Nolan’s cleverest, critically hailed, and in some circles most-admired film — Steven Spielberg recently called it his all-time Christopher Nolan fave — which has been largely unseen by Mr. Nolan’s under-45 fans; ditto the 23-year-old “Insomnia,” in which Al Pacino played a sleep-deprived detective named Will Dormer. Yet Mr. Nolan, an aloof fellow and an odd duck, could be forgiven for standing on the highest ridge of Mount Olympus, surveying the landscape below and quietly smirking or chuckling, ”I’ve done it again…count the money!” Yet, unlikely as it may seem, there are a few voices in the wilderness who — brace yourself — think that “The Odyssey” plays like melted brain taffy; that the film is confusing and pretentious, an impossibly convoluted episodic adventure that looks good and is well-acted, especially by Matt Damon, but ultimately amounts to a lot of flailing around. His new film also reinforces how Mr. Nolan will never be comfortable with depicting sexual situations. “The Odyssey” contains not a second’s worth of physical affection between Matt Damon’s Odysseus and Charlize Theron’s Calypso, even though she’s been his lover of seven years.Christopher Nolan might be a big-deal visionary — the Cecil B. DeMille of the 21st Century — but he’s not exactly Mr. Warmth. His films come primarily from his head, not his heart, and he’s generally regarded as a cold fish. For Mr. Nolan, flicks are tricky thematic exercises about time, identity, tortured memories, and mind-bending spectacle.In “The Odyssey” the director works very hard at Nolan-izing the material, which is to say deploying an emotionally restrained cinematic style, obscuring the basic Homeric story and weaving all the threads into a kind of “wait, what is this?” version of “One Battle After Another.” It’s a kind of cinematic Gordian knot with flies buzzing around and, for people like me, allowing for only an occasional grasping of the dialogue. Matt Damon as Odysseus, center, in a scene from ‘The Odyssey.’ Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP“The Odyssey” is decidedly less fun and a good deal more ponderous than the swords-and-sandals mythological epics of the mid-20th century, although the sequences involving Cyclops in Mr. Nolan’s new film are not all that dissimilar to those in the 1954 Kirk Douglas-starring Homer adaptation “Ulysses,” in which the one-eyed giant was played by Umberto Silvestri. Yet the novel achievement of the Christopher Nolan brand is that his films appeal to arthouse regulars and to popcorn-inhaling multiplex crowds. Come for the primitive thrills, stick around for the smarty-pants plotting and thematic undercurrents. Now that the opening weekend tallies of “The Odyssey” have made history, it’s logical to ask what drove this stunning success, especially with some anticipating that the poorly received trailer, which conservatives didn’t like and led to a disproportionately negative reaction, might foreshadow a general response to the film itself.Obviously that didn’t happen. But last weekend’s “Odyssey” boom wasn’t generated by the reviews, although nearly all critics raved, albeit mainly out of professional necessity. Not even the audience enjoyment factor as viewer word-of-mouth rarely kicks in, box office-wise, until the second and third weekend. An opening weekend gross, bottom line, is therefore almost always about marketing: anticipation, online buzz, and the like. Many believe it was driven mainly by culture war backlash and right-wing social-media anger over casting choices—particularly Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as Sinon, an armored, pint-sized, odd-looking Greek soldier who fights to the death during the siege of Troy.Awards Daily critic Sasha Stone took her mentally spry, woke-leftist, eighty-something mom to “The Odyssey” last Thursday. “She was sold on seeing it because she saw Nolan on ’60 Minutes,’ and because it had a 95% rating on ‘Rotten Tomatoes,’” Ms. Stone said. “But she turned to me about 45 minutes in and said, ‘This is about as bad as a movie can be.'”“Being a person who didn’t like “The Odyssey” puts me in the ‘out group’ on X,” Stone admits, “and it’s a very lonely place to be. I’m glad Hollywood has made a successful epic. I’m glad it did well. But I can’t lie about what I saw on screen. It lost me about 15 minutes in and I was never pulled back in. The only good thing was Matt Damon, who gives the performance of his career.”YouTube pundit Emily Butler was also unimpressed, stating, “‘The Odyssey’ is a pretentious movie made by a pretentious man who thinks that he’s God’s gift to filmmaking. This movie has serious, heavy-handed storytelling problems that Hollywood will continue to ignore. They will give Nolan praise and accolades and awards so they can turn around and shove it in our faces and say, ‘No, it’s an award-winning movie…you’re ignorant and you’re wrong.'” Average Joes on aggregate website Metacritic haven’t been all that enthusiastic. “The Odyssey” only has a 5.1 rating on the site’s “user score” box. So half like it, and half dislike it.So why the huge gulf between elite, know-it-all “Nolanoids,” a term coined by the film critic Armond White, and proletariat malcontents? “I think it’s possible that some of our colleagues were afraid to speak out,” said Ed Douglas, author of the Weekend Warrior newsletter, who recently faulted “The Odyssey” for “pacing problems, darkly lit scenes, and a muddy sound mix “At least Time’s Stephanie Zacharek wasn’t afraid to stand alone in the blustery winds, writing: “We’ve reached a point where we get so few extravagant, ambitious studio movies that we’re expected to collapse with gratitude whenever we’re presented with one. That’s not opening ourselves to what movies can be; it’s succumbing to a kind of hostage taking.”Since last Friday I’ve also been grappling with a syndrome that I’m calling “The Loneliness of Being an ‘Odyssey’ disser, or dart-thrower.” I am not an absolute hater, however, as I found certain portions diverting or even throttling. The last half-hour is mostly quite good. But the first 90 minutes bugged me all to hell.Yet I’m determined to catch it again, and not just anywhere but inside Manhattan’s AMC Lincoln Square, which has a massive IMAX screen and IMAX-sized celluloid projection. A picky grump who had a mixed response to Nolan’s film but considers it vital to catch “The Odyssey” a second time? That tells you that, in cinematic terms, Christopher Nolan is Zeus and we are mere ticket-buying peons.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance ‘Odyssey’ Dissenter

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