- by HF
- The Guardian
- Issue #2201
Odysseus played by Matt Damon.
The long-awaited and highly controversial adaptation of the Odyssey has been released. Before the film was even released everyone and their dog already had an opinion.
The film itself is entertaining. It has a 3-hour runtime and it kept me engaged all through. The pacing is fast, and there’s a significant amount of story content covered in that time. Depicting every line of the Odyssey would have made the movie last a week, but the well-known elements of the story were covered – the giants, the Sirens, Circe who changes men into pigs, and of course the vengeful return and struggle with Penelope’s suitors.
The film features many prominent Hollywood actors, too many to name. Matt Damon as Odysseus was good for the role. A lot of actors are very prominent to the point where I couldn’t mentally separate them from their celebrity status. Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya didn’t fully feel like their own characters, and often seemed like familiar actors in a different costume.
Subject to racist and transphobic online hate campaigns respectively, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen and Clytemnestra, and Elliot Page as Sinon fit well into the casting. Nyong’o wasn’t on screen for very long but possibly had some of the best acting in the whole film, and Elliot Page had a particular stand-out scene. Overall the casting seemed very safe, as most of the cast were either celebrities or had worked with Nolan before.
One thing I didn’t like about the acting was the fact that every character spoke with an US accent. For period piece cinema in English, it’s cinematic convention to use British accents even though it’s no more accurate to Ancient Greek than any other kind of English. What I find strange is that a lot of these actors speak with non-US accents off-screen. Robert Pattinson speaks with a British accent in Nolan’s Tenet, so the American accents would have been a deliberate and strange choice in this film.
In terms of a cinematic experience, The Odyssey was brilliant. Spectable is something Nolan has a reputation for with his extensive use of Imax 70mm technology. The cinematography was visually stunning throughout, but frequent night scenes limited its potential. The music wasn’t as prominent and beautiful as in his other films, but it enhanced the experience well enough.
There’s a myth that Nolan doesn’t use CGI in his films. It would be more accurate to say that his films are shot practically and only use CGI when they absolutely have to, which is the case here.
A common criticism of Nolan’s Odyssey is that it isn’t fully accurate to the source material in terms of costumes and armour. The original armour of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean civilisations is very different to the European style armour used in the film. This will annoy people who expect a film adaption of a 2,600 year-old poem to be documentary realism, but the rest of us can put up with it. Personally, I was swept away by the action and the spectacle.
One aspect of the film that has rightly gained controversy is its filming locations. Odyssey was filmed all around the world; in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa.
However, parts of the film were shot in Western Sahara, an occupied territory of Morocco and the last official colony in Africa. Permission to film on location wasn’t given by the indigenous Sahrawi people, but by the Moroccan colonial administration.
The Sahrawi people endure displacement into refugee camps, militarised police, illegal Moroccan settlement, and landmines, while the Moroccan regime invites filmmakers to the desert beaches. Morocco’s colonisation of Western Sahara is to be condemned, not legitimised through Hollywood cinema, and all Western Saharan territory must be governed by its indigenous inhabitants.
To paraphrase Sahrawi creative Mohamed Sleiman Labat, cinema audiences and the Sahrawi people deserve better than to have art filmed without permission on occupied land.
Nolan’s The Odyssey is overall a good film. It’s a Westernised interpretation of a classic poem, and stands on its own as a technically impressive cinematic spectacle.
