The Movie: The Odyssey
The Director: Christopher Nolan
The Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron
The Story: Helping Matt Damon get home part 4.
The Rating: 6 / 10
The Review:
Christopher Nolan is one of the most highly respected directors in the film industry and for good reason. His catalog of films inclused bangers like the iconic Dark Knight trilogy, the World War II epic Dunkirk, and Inception which is one of my all time favorite movies. His movies and filmmaking style have also been very polarizing over the years with most people leaning heavily on either side. This does make for some great conversations like when I tell people I'm not a huge fan of Interstellar or that I thought Tenet was a terrible movie or that I could barely sit through the painful slog of a movie that Oppenheimer was.
And now, here we are with The Odyssey, a movie that has been heralded as the greatest thing to happen to cinema since...I guess since Nolan's last greatest thing to happen. More and more I feel like Nolan himself really believes how important he is to the cinematic landscape as his movies get more and more indulgent as they come out. The excuses he's made regarding criticisms have been as hollow as the movie itself. Casting issues? White savior trope? It's a fantasy, get over it.
I do have some issues with the casting although choosing Matt Damon to play Odysseus just shouts that the main goal here is global marketing acceptance and not any sort of authenticity to the time period or the source material. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Matt Damon, The Martian is an absolutely fantastic movie and he is brilliant in the lead role, but as is the case with a lot of the parts that he takes on, all I see is Matt Damon and all I can hear is the "Maatt Daamon" from Team America. If you don't know what that is, a quick internet search will fix that.
The main issue I have with the movie is how every scene drags on which stretches out the run time to almost three hours in the most unnecessary way. Conversations get redundant and are filled with excessive exposition which is an unfortunate hallmark of Nolan not trusting the audience to understand his heightened level of filmmaking prowess. The movie also quickly becomes an exercise in Odysseus and his crew facing imminent death and then running back to the safety of their boats and moving on to the next challenge where they do the exact same thing.
The challenges, including a cyclops, a witch, and some giant armored dudes, are reduced to the most basic of obstacles and there ends up being no sense of real danger because we already know that Matt Damon is going to save the day. More drama and intrigue is given to the troubles back home in Ithica where Spider-Man and Catwoman are constantly fighting off Batman and his army of generic would be suitors. Oops, sorry, I mean the characters that Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, and Robert Patinson play in this movie. It's just hard to immerse them into this world when they're all speaking modern American english which is especially odd since Holland is from London and normally speaks like someone from there.
If you are going to see this movie in a theater it is, of course, worth seeing it in a premium format theater like IMAX which, as we all know, is how Christopher Nolan intends for it to be seen. I watched it in an AMC Dolby theater and was impressed with the visuals and booming soundscape. I can't say it was a beautiful movie to look at as the colors are very muted with lots of grays, browns, and shadowy landscapes which I felt was very appropriate for the overall dark and gloomy experience that it turned out to be.
That's all I really have to say abot the movie so thank you for reading this review. I always really want to love Christopher Nolan's movies, he just keeps making it harder and harder for me with each new release. A lot of people do love his movies so maybe it's just me. That's the beauty of cinema though, we all enjoy what we love in the ways that we choose to love them.
No comments :
Post a Comment