At the 14.30 session Reading Cinemas West Lakes (Adelaide), cinema 6, for 13 AUD on their cheap-ish Tuesday. I was aiming to be the last person in Australia to see Christoper Nolan's latest on a big screen, as I may have been with Tenet (2020), but I had to share that honour with at least one other bloke. The house lights did not come up at the end.
Nolan maladapted Homer and directed. Ludwig Göransson's score is bombastic, obtrusive and often unnecessary. The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is sometimes effective but often jittery and uncertain of what it wants us to see; I can't imagine David Lean going for this. The length was excessive. Sepia, murky, grim. The third movement was witless after Uberto Pasolini's The Return (2024) and similarly suffered from a poorly cast Telemachus (here Tom Holland). Anne Hathaway does what she can as Penelope but never gets to stick it to her man like Juliette Binoche did. (Throughout she sounded much like Catwoman to me, without that prosthetic motorcycle.) And similarly for Odyssean Matt Damon against Ralph Fiennes, all John Brolin wannabe. (His performance was a long way from Cillian Murphy's triumphant effort in Oppenheimer (2023) and so the blame lay with him.) Robert Pattinson did what he could, camping it up. Benny Safdie as an Agamemnon we hardly got to see. John Leguizamo, effective, so long since Romeo + Juliet (1996). Himesh Patel!
So much for the sausagefest, another generation of Hollywood blokes going to war just like their elders did in The Thin Red Line (1998). Amongst the women was Charlize Theron in nothing more than a perfume ad, making me wonder why there wasn't room for Sharlto Copley too. Lupita Nyong'o, strong and underused. Zendaya as Athena, not persuasive, not great. Samantha Morton got an inspired scene as Circe which actually laid bare the problem with the whole thing: too much important material was dealt with only in cursory exposition. It made me wish that she was the focus of the whole show, that it was less All Our Tragic (2014).
The multitrack mashup was not hard to follow for the most part, or perhaps it just didn't matter. It's sexless; the Sirens were in longshot, the two matrimonial scenes all angst. I felt the trip to Hades was a bust. A wooden horse dragged up the sand, unheroically. The same horse, burning. An outro like the distended ending of Lord of the Rings: loads of not-very-convincing exposition, exit west, as if nobody saw how a master did that in 25th Hour (2002). "Zeus's Law", of hospitality for the stranger, totally bogus; the Greek gods themselves were capricious and not lawful. As everyone knows.
Before watching this I only read Emily Wilson's fine essay and listened to Jason Di Rosso's take which I interpreted as a pan. He did not interview anyone. Of course reviews are legion. Peter Sobczynski was emotionally unmoved; O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) makes for the better rewatch. Dana Stevens: matinee swords-and-sandals at all scales. Too much too shallowly drawn. Christos Tsiolkas: debts to Terrence Malick. Humourless. Too many strands. Damon showed "range and quiet strength as an actor" in the scene where he is tied to the mast so he can listen to the Sirens. (I wasn't as entranced.) Many ineptly-staged scenes such as the sacking of Troy. Daniel Mendelsohn had expectations that Nolan could finesse the material but of course there's more Nolan than Homer in the result. Pedestrian dialogue throughout. And so on and on.
