Vick pics "The Odyssey" as the film to see this season
- by Vick Silkenpen
Movie Critic
The Odyssey: For many semesters, I taught freshman composition at the university in the English department. Quite often, the unit book I used for students to write essays about was Homer’s epic poem in the rhythmic meter of dactylic hexameter. Part of my task was to make the adventures of Odysseus returning from the Trojan War accessible while grasping how this journey of the hero archetype is also a seminal frame for Western literature.
I tried to make it fun and informative such as pointing out the term of “moly” as a magical herb used in the book by Odysseus as an antidote to the deadly drugs used on him by the witch Circe (a sort of holy moly given to him by Hermes) and allowing him to be immune to her magic so he could save his crew since she turned them into pigs.
A version of this is used very effectively in director Christopher Nolan’s new film interpretation as the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) uses her drugs, spells, and hands to magically fashion and shape-shift the crew into their more feral natures as pigs until the more wily Odysseus (Matt Damon) arrives to spring them. This scene is just one among many fantastically entertaining ones.
Nolan has done so many incredible films, such as The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, at least three Batman films, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, Memento, and more. His position is secure as one of the best. But taking on a remake of The Odyssey required not only superior expertise but also bravery, since dozens of film versions and TV miniseries adaptations already exist, including silent films. By using a huge cast and numerous locations, Nolan manages to immerse us in his vision of a theater experience to remember. He figured out ways to silence very noisy IMAX cameras during shooting and used various creative inventions to enhance the dialogue sequences.
The casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus seems a bit chancy. Still, you soon have no doubts he was a good choice as we watch him lead with various methods of willfulness while eventually wrestling with guilt and depression concerning his past hubris, sacrifices, regrets, and decisions.
Nolan balances all his adventures with the suffering of his patient wife Penelope back in his island kingdom of Ithaca, and Anne Hathaway plays it with a smoldering but explosive intensity in her expressive eyes and manner.
Tom Holland as their confused and searching young prince son Telemachus comes across as sincere and just as he goes on searching for the missing father, but ever vulnerable at the hands of the hordes of Penelope’s vicious and ambitiously greedy suitors led by the deceitful Antinous, played by actor Robert Pattinson.
But Nolan’s real talent in his version may lie in how he gives the viewer a sense of the original poetry through his editing and tweaks, never forgetting its mythopoeic possibilities.
The Gayly online. 8/2/26 @ 2:44 p.m. CST.