Nolan took the very complicated challenge of taking a legendary tale and making it into a realistic-looking movie. How do you include all sorts of fantasy elements, gods, and Hell itself, without making a complete fantasy-coded movie? In my opinion Christopher Nolan made the best he could under the conditions of this challenge.
Some scenes of this exercise I found to be particularly well done. The Circe episode remains one of my favorite ones, as we can witness Nolan venturing into the horror registry, and quite successfully putting on screen an incident that, when reading the book, left me puzzled about how it could be translated on screen outside of an Harry Potter-style adaptation.
Some other aspects are just harder to translate. The weaker part is probably the captivity of Odysseus by Calypso, which just looks like an advertisement for French cheese, and doesn't quite work because of an accumulation of issues regarding cinematography, casting, and costumes, which all together just gives off this "bizarre" vibe.
Modulating between the impressive pieces of translation, and less impressive ones, as I said, I'm overall rather impressed with the way Nolan has risen up to the challenge.
Does it suffice to make a good movie? Well, not a transcendental one as advertised (and surely expected by Nolan aficionados), but a sufficiently entertaining one. I can't say I got bored any time during those 3 hours.
In a sense, this movie can't possibly be much more than a good entertainment, because the challenge Nolan took is impossible to fully solve. The Odyssey is a case where the story is hard to distinguish from the medium. The contents of the story arguably worked remarkably well as a poem. I guess it would be appreciated by fantasy lovers if made into a full-on fantasy movie. But it's just too far removed from a grounded adventure epic to work flawlessly without some amount of awkwardness (and no amount of deafening soundscape will make up for this fact).
At any rate, I enjoyed watching the challenge, and was entertained, which is good enough for me. 👌
Nolan took the very complicated challenge of taking a legendary tale and making it into a realistic-looking movie. How do you include all sorts of fantasy elements, gods, and Hell itself, without making a complete fantasy-coded movie? In my opinion Christopher Nolan made the best he could under the conditions of this challenge.
Some scenes of this exercise I found to be particularly well done. The Circe episode remains one of my favorite ones, as we can witness Nolan venturing into the horror registry, and quite successfully putting on screen an incident that, when reading the book, left me puzzled about how it could be translated on screen outside of an Harry Potter-style adaptation.
Some other aspects are just harder to translate. The weaker part is probably the captivity of Odysseus by Calypso, which just looks like an advertisement for French cheese, and doesn't quite work because of an accumulation of issues regarding cinematography, casting, and costumes, which all together just gives off this "bizarre" vibe.
Modulating between the impressive pieces of translation, and less impressive ones, as I said, I'm overall rather impressed with the way Nolan has risen up to the challenge.
Does it suffice to make a good movie? Well, not a transcendental one as advertised (and surely expected by Nolan aficionados), but a sufficiently entertaining one. I can't say I got bored any time during those 3 hours.
In a sense, this movie can't possibly be much more than a good entertainment, because the challenge Nolan took is impossible to fully solve. The Odyssey is a case where the story is hard to distinguish from the medium. The contents of the story arguably worked remarkably well as a poem. I guess it would be appreciated by fantasy lovers if made into a full-on fantasy movie. But it's just too far removed from a grounded adventure epic to work flawlessly without some amount of awkwardness (and no amount of deafening soundscape will make up for this fact).
At any rate, I enjoyed watching the challenge, and was entertained, which is good enough for me. 👌