The Odyssey

[Departed]

I've seen so many classicists lambast the film for "missing the point of" or "bastardizing" the original source material, saying that the story is supposed to challenge people more, among other things, which, I felt the movie did just fine, but I'm not inclined to care much. I'm not so in love with the source material that I care one way or the other how "true to the roots" it is. As a filmgoing experience, it was the fastest three hour film I've seen in years, and it never once let up for me.

Nolan's always been one of my favorite directors of today because I know the experience of watching his movies in theaters is one I'll never forget, and Odyssey is up there for me. The tension I felt during the horror and shade sequences, the excitement during the action, and some of the more visceral scenes got me twisted and uncomfortable in the best possible way. I thought the cast was outstanding across the board and especially loved Pattinson as such a deliciously loathsome scumbag. The "Beggars" meme is a new favorite of mine.

I'll admit it still threw me for a loop how "modern" the dialogue was. I went in expecting everything to sound like Gladiator, but I got over it real quickly since the film had its hooks in me from jump and its iteration of the journey itself was one I found really gripping.

Definitely among my favorites from Nolan, and easily the best film I've seen all year.

[SK8R LUNG]

i haven't read Emily Wilson's translation, but i just read her review and it definitely sounds like she is critiquing the film against her understanding of the story rather than taking the film for "what it is".

that said i thought some of her points seemed fair, raised some interesting ways of reading nolan's film in comparison with the "text", and she actually voiced a couple of thoughts that i had about the film myself: 

there is nothing inherently wrong with the movie’s attempt to approximate contemporary American speech. If you’re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, you might as well use something like conversational American English. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat.

This muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear.

[Null]

its true, dialogue is not nolan's wheelhouse. he is very much a master of spectacle and storytelling. but i don't think it harms his films as much as people claim. he's addressed the criticism a few times as well, IIRC he said that identifying the mechanism doesn't invalidate its usage. sometimes exposition, even if its constant, works for what is intended

[SK8R LUNG]

its true, dialogue is not nolan's wheelhouse. he is very much a master of spectacle and storytelling. but i don't think it harms his films as much as people claim. he's addressed the criticism a few times as well, IIRC he said that identifying the mechanism doesn't invalidate its usage. sometimes exposition, even if its constant, works for what is intended

yeah i would tend to agree. i found it to be more of an aesthetic thing, but something you can just accept and move past. i also think it's a more difficult story to create dialogue for in a modern film than emily wilson is giving credit for. like the speech in the text gets translated all kinds of ways that are like anachronistic or archaic sounding