The Odyssey (2026) by Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan reinvents the Homeric legend as a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion, an epic ordeal presided over by capricious deities. The invisible odyssey of anguish is punctuated by flashback episodes, hallucinations, confrontations with the arbitrary gods of dysfunction. And all the time the spouses and children cannot move on with their lives. This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. It has gasp-inducing landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who, incidentally, avoids the sea’s traditional cliched colour – and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, his almost cherubic face turned into a careworn mask of sadness. He is the military commander from Ithaca appointed by the Greek king Agamemnon, played by Benny Safdie, his face always mysteriously masked in a Batman-type helmet. Odysseus reveals to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), the wife whom he is about to leave and whom he advises to remarry if he dies in battle, that the notional cause for the imminent war with Troy – the elopement of Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) with Trojan prince Paris – is a pretext. 

It is actually a commercial contest for trading routes. How clever it was for Nolan to use the sacking of Troy to talk about standards of fairness, and the violation of those standards. The idea that what happened at Troy was so horrible that something was broken in the world. That this was such a moral transgression which provoked almost ontological ramifications seen in our modern society. It's a message that is both very timeless, but also very timely. I remember when the 'villains' of the day were John McCain and Mitt Romney, and I'm certain that if you told the majority of Republicans circa 2012 what would be happening today they would be legitimately horrified. 

It feels like the world has become so much more insane, that people have become more irrational. Few people seem to have hope anymore and because of that they've decided they're going to do their small part to make the world a worse place. Nolan recreates the Trojan horse as a cross between the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes and Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias. My biggest takeaway on The Odyssey (and as with great art, I'm sure I'll have different takeaways on subsequent viewings): Civilization will rise again (hopefully). Our mistakes will be forgotten despite our intense regret. Individual humans can be redeemed, but humanity and its civilizations will continue to make the same mistakes. We will continue to destroy our fragile bonds, to open Pandora's Box, to become destroyers of worlds. But we will go on, sailing into the unknown West forever. Source: theguardian.com