Odyssey - By Way of Nolan

Courtesy of my children, I watched The Odyssey today. I went in with low expectations, because bringing a magnum opus like the Odyssey to life is no cake walk. Homer's Odyssey is a lengthy poem. It brings together numerous mythic characters across a span of twenty years - ten years spent fighting at Troy and another ten years trying to sail back home. I am not well read on Greek mythology, but I read a prose retelling of the Odyssey when I was in school, and a few years back I skimmed through the actual poem - a verse translation I have at home. I've since forgotten the names of most of the characters, though I roughly remember the story. In Bengali literature, we have the story of Sohrab and Rustam, rooted in the Persian Shahnameh. Sohrab and Rustam is not an adaptation of the Odyssey, but the two are cut from the same cloth - a wandering hero, a father-son thread, and a legendary landscape. So I was quite interested to experience Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.

AI-assisted filmmaking and large-scale cinematography on a huge canvas are common now. But mythology, being mythology, has its own way of broadening a reader's imagination to an almost unbelievable height. A one-eyed monster, a sea witch, a nymph who keeps a hero captive for seven years, goddesses, a hero larger than life - all of it lends the reader an image with no real limit. So I sat down to watch with a critical lens. I went to the cinema hall with the idea that, given the nature of the movie, it would be heavily AI-based and would lack emotional depth. The movie certainly used technology to the extent it needed, but the emotional chord was not missing. The cinematography and the understated performances, coupled with a mythological ambience, made it feel truly like a poem in motion to me. I did not expect it to have a prose-like narrative and screenplay. The artistic flair was there, and it made the film feel like listening to a story of a faraway land - the kind we used to hear in our childhood.

It took me the first half hour to forty minutes to settle in. Gradually, I found my footing and my interest. If it had been a regular two-hour movie, I probably would have found it difficult to relate to the characters and the storyline. Given the grandeur of the movie's scope, it rightfully demanded a full three-hour runtime.

Christopher Nolan is a widely acclaimed director, and striking a balance between mythological weight and audience appeal - one that holds people in their seats for nearly three hours - is no easy job. He mostly pulls it off. The canvas really is enormous. I read that the movie was shot mostly in real locations across six countries to ensure physical realism instead of indoor artificial shooting spots. This genuineness showed in the movie.

The cast, to me, was well thought out - Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus all played their roles well, though I'm not so sure about Zendaya as Athena.

Finally, the closing soundtrack "When I'm Home" by Travis Scott was a triumph. It blends beautifully with the film's themes. We stayed put in our seats until the last credit rolled, and the cleaner waited with a broom in her hand to clean the hall. The song was deep, melancholic, and fitting.

"Don′t, don't, don′t, don't ask

What the feelin′ is

It's not easy, it′s not easy,

I will, I will know what it was

When I'm home..."