\n\tLove for Scale
By Vadim Rizov\n<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Odyssey
Dir. Christopher Nolan, U.S., Universal\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe Odyssey was shot and finished on film\u201d\u2014an unusual line for the end credits scroll of a studio production, one almost certainly attesting to Christopher Nolan\u2019s ongoing mutual-admiration society with British visual artist Tacita Dean. Both are avid celluloid loyalists who have spoken together on the medium\u2019s irreplaceability at multiple Kodak events; he credits her with teaching him the term \u201cmedium specificity,\u201d and it\u2019s improbable that the coinage \u201cfinished,\u201d most often heard in the realm of experimental film, snuck in any other way. Both have pushed beyond standard film usages: there\u2019s not such a world of difference between the instinct that led to Dean\u2019s 2011 installation FILM\u2014which projects a 35mm loop on a 42-foot screen\u2014and Nolan\u2019s nearly two-decade quest to normalize IMAX. The shared goal, on some level, is to overwhelm with scale in service of highlighting the stock itself.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tThe first narrative feature to be shot start-to-finish on IMAX film, The Odyssey showcases lustrous ocean hues and $250 million worth of production value to sporadically radiant color effect. Projected on celluloid, it does meaningfully look like something that avoided a digital intermediate as much as possible. Nolan has taken a great deal of publicized time and trouble to get around the volume of the IMAX camera, whose sewing-machine clatter while operating previously precluded the possibility of recording dialogue. Having designed a new \u201cblimp\u201d to surround the camera and contain its noise (an innovation that required actors positioned around it to make eye contact via mirrors), he offers the first test-case for this as a feature-length narrative medium. After seeing Tenet in both 70mm widescreen and IMAX 70mm and decisively preferring the former\u2019s crisp compositions to the latter\u2019s unwieldy visual bulk, I wasn\u2019t surprised to find I don\u2019t think IMAX 70mm works here either. There are expected pleasures from familiar sources of IMAX\u2019s previously demonstrated strengths: long helicopter shots soaring over cliffs and other images that include humans primarily as reference points for scale. But screen-filling close-ups with lots of headroom do not make a convincing case for this as a compositional strategy. Perhaps it\u2019s the lack of visual texture and attention to color and set design; size aside, the visual effect is generally bland, and it\u2019s difficult to forget that you\u2019re watching a product designed for two entirely different compositional modes and releases. Sometimes, while bored, I would mentally reframe shots for widescreen, which was often easy to do when the set was systematically underlit at both top and bottom in ways that makes that part of the framing\u2019s loss negligible.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tNolan plays the expected hits of Odysseus (Matt Damon) making his way back home after the Trojan War, peaking early with two of the most famous setpieces. This rendition\u2019s Cyclops is very cool indeed, a synthesis of animatronics, puppetry and some kind of CG finishing appliqu\u00e9 that\u2019s decisively uncanny with its humanoid frame, lumbering with a center of gravity and slowness that places him surprisingly close to the smaller but similarly sinisterly lumpy creature in Dea Kulumbegashvili\u2019s April (2024). The transformation of Odysseus\u2019s crew into pigs by the goddess Circe (Samantha Morton) is admirably grody, with the witch sculpting men\u2019s faces into pigs like a rogue, real-time Tom Savini. Thematically, The Odyssey\u2019s larger arc aligns with Nolan\u2019s regular preoccupations. His male protagonists are nearly always haunted by either the possibility of losing their female partner or having actively contributed to their harm, and Nolan\u2019s Odysseus is the definitive wife guy, grinding for 20 years to make it back home. Waking on a beach as an amnesiac, Odysseus tries to recall how he ended up in this situation, something the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) warns against: \u201cYou want to remember, but what if memory destroys your happiness?\u201d We are nearly back where Nolan started, with Odysseus adrift in the literal boat Memento\u2019s Leonard Shelby occupied metaphorically.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tNolan\u2019s big adaptation contribution is to bend the text towards atheistic ends. Rejecting religion is a fine line to walk when your story involves multiple gigantic monsters, but Nolan cordons off the fantastical into the realm of Ray Harryhausen, functionally separate from any of the mythological faiths they were attached to. The opening title card sets the agenda: \u201cA time of apparent magic,\u201d that penultimate word setting the skeptical tone. There are no gods in the clouds debating the mortals\u2019 fates here, and Odysseus is constantly denying their will or existence, as is son Telemachus (Tom Holland). In this context, while \u201cZeus\u2019s law\u201d is often invoked and defined as the obligation to host strangers lest they be a god in disguise, its usage is bandied out by characters of varying levels of admirability, sometimes quite cynically. The only god Odysseus actually encounters is Athena (Zendaya), whom he converses with and who no one else can see, which is in keeping with the source material, where she\u2019s frequently either disguised or invisible. But Nolan has a final twist: Athena bears the same face as one of the victims slaughtered in the invasion of Troy, and Odysseus talking with her is quite possibly just a form of processing his trauma. Religion is a story we tell ourselves to reconcile with that which we can\u2019t rationalize or comprehend, a less preferable form of storytelling to the purely secular; the final voiceover spells out, with Nolan\u2019s usual lust for clarity, that we will forget the lessons of history until we revisit its stories.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWhy Nolan wants to use a lot of resources at this moment to triple-underline \u201cthe power of storytelling\u201d is clear enough. We are repeatedly told that we are watching a civilization nearing its end, in which the breakdown of the laws of hospitality is part of the larger decimation of the social contract. It turns out right-wing critics who preemptively decried the film were right to be wary, insofar as it stands against war, violence, and misogyny and for civility. While Nolan\u2019s dialogue is certainly not taken from Emily Wilson\u2019s 2018 translation, he might well have borrowed some guiding principles from her translator\u2019s note, which states that \u201cA translator has a responsibility to acknowledge her own agency and to wrestle, in explicit and conscious ways, not only with the multiple meanings of the original in its own culture but also with what her own text may mean, and the effects it may have on its readers. Because The Odyssey has become such a foundational text in our educational system and in our imagination of Western history, I believe it is particularly important for the translator to think through and tease out its values.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\tNolan takes that principle and extends it out to Circe all but explicitly saying she was raped, then having Odysseus confess that the invasion of Troy, while seemingly his greatest triumph, in fact traumatized him for life, echoing the historical hand-wringing of his Nolan predecessor Oppenheimer. The text can take reinterpretation, but the effect doesn\u2019t seem to land: my audience applauded at the final kill, the opposite of the desired response. Whom the gods wish to undermine, they first make ambitious against the inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Love for ScaleBy Vadim Rizov The OdysseyDir. Christopher Nolan, U.S., Universal \u201cThe Odyssey was shot and finished on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546725,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46,110690,110691,110692],"class_list":["post-546724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-keyword-1","tag-keyword-2","tag-keyword-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}