Christopher Nolan: Man of the North Atlantic

My review of "The Odyssey," in which the famous director transforms the ancient Greeks from Plato to NATO.

I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this afternoon.

Overall: a good movie, but not as fine as his 2023 Oppenheimer or his 2017 Dunkirk.

Nolan, of course, is an extremely gifted director, whose fame and broad appeal remind me of Hitchcock’s 60-70 years ago.

So, I’m more inclined to dwell upon the fundamental problem with his Odyssey than upon its various virtues: Even though much of the movie was filmed in the Mediterranean, Nolan lacks a love of Mediterranean scenery, culture, or people.

Practically everybody else on Earth has a soft spot for the Mediterranean, but not Nolan.

He is, instead, a man of the North Atlantic and of America’s Great Lakes. A British-American dual citizen, the son of an Irish Catholic advertising man in England and an American stewardess turned English teacher, he grew up spending 9 months per year in London and his summers in Evanston, IL.

Homer, who was reportedly blind, frequently calls the Mediterranean “wine-dark.” But it’s actually bright blue … except in Nolan’s movie, where it’s the dull blue-gray of the Pacific off Malibu.

Back in the 1980s, films were typically shot in bright colors (e.g., see 1984’s modest budget Terminator). When James Cameron’s Terminator 2 appeared in 1991 in a muted blue-gray palette, it seemed brilliantly novel. But 35 years later, practically all movies are still subdued in color, even Nolan’s colossal budget Odyssey.

In fact, quite a bit of the movie could have been filmed on the sandy western coast of Michigan across from Evanston, with little loss in realism or beauty.

I was also frequently reminded of the setting and color palette of Nolan’s Dunkirk, which was filmed on the huge beaches where the rivers of northwestern Europe pour sand into the north Atlantic.

Culturally, Nolan is more in tune with the Vikings and Celts than with the ancient Greeks.

Hence, the main prop in the movie is a 114 foot Viking longboat, the Draken Harald Hårfagre, which a Norwegian zillionaire recently had built because Vikings are cool. However, the scene in which Matt Damon’s Odysseus and his crew must play for their lives in a soccer match against Erling Haaland’s Team Norway may strike some viewers as anachronistic.

And, while most of the world tends to find Mediterranean people good-llooking and warmly extraverted, count Nolan out. He evidently strongly prefers people like himself of northern European ancestry, such as Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, and Robert Pattinson as the leader of the evil suitors for the hand of Penelope.

The three leads are basically fine (Damon has long been the star you sign if you can’t get Leonardo DiCaprio). Pattinson is interestingly well-cast as the villain trying to disinherit the proto-Hamlet Telemachus of his throne because Pattinson is so close to looking like the Platonic ideal of the Melancholy Dane.

Charlize Theron plays sorceress Calypso as a New Age hippie chick who waylays a wayward husband for seven idyllic, drug-enhanced years on the beach in Montecito, California before he finally breaks free and escapes to his wife in Pasadena.

Samantha Morton is good as Circe, a Celtic witch who casts a spell on Odysseus’s crew when they land in the Outer Hebrides or some place similarly far from the Mediterranean.

Nolan seems to have gone out of his way to avoid casting a Greek in any role, or even an Italian, Spaniard, Portuguese or Frenchman. Here’s …

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