We thought we’d hate The Odyssey – we were so wrong

Alex Casey and Claire Mabey discuss Christopher Nolan’s latest epic The Odyssey, in cinemas now. 

Please note the following conversation contains spoilers for The Odyssey, a story which is nearly 3,000 years old. You have been warned. 

Alex Casey: Claire Mabey! Come join me in this large wooden horse, rapidly filling with both human waste and seawater, to discuss Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I was delighted to discover that you, like me, were expecting to hate this movie. My reservations were simple and, in hindsight, deeply stupid: that any movie over 98 minutes is taking the piss-filled-horse, and that anything involving swords and/or sandals is a chore reserved exclusively for the world of men, much like finding torrents and taking the gross bin out. Why was it giving you pause? 

Claire Mabey: Alex Casey! Honoured to be flailing in this filthy water alongside you, with a cool helmet on. I was apprehensive about Nolan’s The Odyssey mainly because of Nolan. I didn’t like Oppenheimer! I ground my teeth through a fair whack of Interstellar (like when Jessica Chastain finally cracks the formula or whatever and literally runs out with a stack of paper and yells ‘Eureka!’ and tosses the formula she just cracked over the balcony and then I think pashes a guy?). So I was just feeling… worried that it was going to be a big old man fest with lots of fighting bits that would make me weary. But! Thrilled to report I only got bored maybe once and there was so much I loved about it! How did you pull up after three hours?

AC: I generally like Christopher Nolan – big Prestige and Interstellar-head – but I did find Oppenheimer fiercely boring, so I am delighted to report that I did not even go to the toilet once during The Odyssey because I was so gripped. I’m also embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really know much about the story (genuinely thought Matt Damon was playing ‘Homer’ until about two hours beforehand), but then I realised… it’s just a vajazzled version of O Brother Where Art Thou (content note to serious literary types: this is a joke). There were so many jaw-dropping sequences and performances, that crazy murderer’s row cast just kept spawning and spawning, and I was reduced to big rolling tears multiple times over the near-three hours. Tell me, what did you love?

Gather ye swords and sandals.

CM: I did read somewhere in the criticsphere (maybe Richard Brody in the New Yorker) that those who haven’t read The Odyssey will enjoy it most. I have read it but many, many moons ago and have more absorbed The Odyssey via adaptations over the years. So I went in like you sort of half-remembering bits of the story but mostly nicely oblivious to the minute details. And maybe this helped me LOVE it? Straight to the top of the highlights list is Samantha Morton as Circe. Holy pig trotters. It was all of 10 minutes but what a performance! Morton was all women everywhere somehow: the way she was genuinely terrified of those marauding “people from the sea”, these big, armoured warrior men pouring into her tiny witch home. Then the horror she unleashed upon them! A grotesque spectacle that was not even created with CGI but with sculptable animatronics. And sort of funny, too? Nolan made a clear decision to have Matt Damon’s Odysseus a shame-burdened, regretful, tired, conflicted guy. I think in the original he’s more tricky, a little comedic, a grandiose storyteller… Nolan’s more sober direction was clever because it let the smaller parts truly shine. Like Circe. I want to live on her large-cat filled island. I also loved the way Nolan treated the Cyclops. He was a pitiable creature, humble, a cheesemaker! Frankenstein’s monster-y. I was very moved by that episode, haunted even, which is quite different to how that part of the story usually goes. What were your highlights?

AC: God, the things I would do to nosh on that Cyclops cheese and slurp up Circe’s hexed guts soup. Hopefully they do one of those “eat-a-long” sessions someday soon. I completely agree that Cyclops was an absolute showstopper (fun fact from a parent friend of mine, Cyclops was played by Mr Noodle from Elmo’s World!), and Circe’s sequence was basically the thesis statement for the entire film re: the monstrosity of man. I was also really enamoured by the fiercely loyal servant Eumaeus, played by a milky-eyed, white-haired John Leguizamo. Robert Pattinson was resplendently snakey as Penelope’s evil suitor Antinous, and I have been relishing that line where he spits “somebody get these BEGGARS out of here” like the rest of the internet since it happened. Also, I cannot stop thinking about the flex of casting Elliott Page as Sinon, the bravest man Odysseus ever knew, and Page’s truly haunting performance in that creepy-as-hell Hades sequence. ALSO, there was so much hooplah about Anne Hathaway in the trailer, but I really liked her strung out Penelope – complete with forehead wrinkles!

Love to see forehead wrinkles

CM: Amen to that: a real face! I am not the biggest Hathaway fan but I have a new level of respect for her after watching Penelope whack at that loom like she was smacking time itself; and her glorious disdain for that hoard of horrid suitors. It really struck me coming out of the film how simply seeing skin crumples meant so much to me. And that it was the first Matt Damon film I’ve seen where I hardly thought about Matt Damon. He embodied Odysseus; raggedy, grey Calypso’s island beard and all. Leguizamo, likewise, a treat. I loved him as Eumaeus (even when he tossed the puppy over the cliff) just as much as I loved him as Tybalt in Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet: iconic. Elliott Page as Sinon! I have since read that Sinon was completely invented by Nolan which reinforces for me that Nolan truly understood the assignment. Great adaptations are their own thing. I was also impressed by the reliably excellent Himesh Patel as long-suffering Eurylochus; and thought Tom Holland nailed the task of conveying an adult son suspended in boyhood: he suited Telemachus down to the sandals.

AC: I did get the ick reading about how Christopher Nolan rang Tom Holland first (notoriously off an unknown number because he doesn’t own a phone) to ask if he would be “offended” if he approached Zendaya to play the role of Athena, but that’s what happens when your algorithm gets clogged up with their never-ending and sometimes too-silly press tour, proving to be a bit of an Odyssey in itself. What I welcome more of is finding out all the bonkers behind-the-scenes technical trivia, like how the IMAX cameras could only shoot for three minutes at a time and it made Holland think Nolan kept calling “cut” on his bad takes, or how they set up an intricate mirror system to shoot close-ups, or how Matt Damon sent a video to his wife and Ben Affleck the first time he saw Ithaca because he couldn’t believe the scale of it. 

Along with Nolan’s expert and on-theme dunking on AI, The Odyssey made me feel hopeful that even if we live in a world where we were “blind to its beauty, until we broke it”, art and creativity will endure through whatever shitstorm humanity finds itself in. As Odysseus himself says to Penelope at the end: “song will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.”

CM: I didn’t fully understand what IMAX even really was until I saw a clip of Nolan manhandling his Trojan-horse sized camera in Iceland filming that harrowing world of the dead scene. I really want to see it in IMAX now! My Instagram is flooded with memes showing how much of the frame is cut off in the normie cinema. Even still, I was enveloped by this film. It looked real and felt real. But what made it for me was the fact it was about the destructive cruelty of men and war. That final frame (I won’t describe it in case it’s a spoiler) was a profound and unsettling image to leave us with. Even though women had fewer lines and smaller parts I felt that the story was actually about them. Lupita Nyong’o as both Helen of Troy and her twin sister Clytemnestra was outstanding: boiling with justified rage and revenge. Zendaya’s Athena was the only god to appear – as an inescapable aspect of Odysseus’ mind, his worldview: I loved that. The absence of the other gods kept the story focussed on the humans and the struggle between ideals and actions. I felt that Nolan was making a comment about our times: that the fundamentals of civilisation (hospitality, treating strangers as family, not plundering land) are as broken now as they were then. And we have to remember. Sing the songs. Tell the stories. Make the art. Find our way home. 

The Odyssey is in cinemas now. ...