There are a lot of celebrities in this film, but most people are probably coming to this feature due to its director, Christopher Nolan. He has garnered a reputation of being a blockbuster filmmaker whose cinematic vision is must-see and of the highest caliber and quality, especially from a technical perspective. He's been a proponent of IMAX, a film standard that has risen to be known as the highest quality. In fact, this feature, which is Nolan's 13th, holds the distinction as the first to be shot entirely using IMAX's 70 mm cameras. Walking out of it, I had the same feeling as I did walking out of Nolan's previous six. I appreciated the craft and the technical achievement, but emotionally I couldn't care less.
It's interesting that Nolan made this film following Oppenheimer (2023) because both are about men who do something in connection to a significant war that has dire consequences for many and for a long time after. This film deals or reckons with those consequences more than Oppenheimer. However, this film makes the same mistake as that 2023 Oscar-winner. It doesn't make the mistake as egregiously, but the mistake remains. Both films are about the horrors of war and the atrocities of war. Yet, Oppenheimer doesn't give voice or perspective to the true victims. Instead, it stays in the shoes of the perpetrators. Martin Scorsese was initially accused of the same thing. He split the difference in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), but even he perhaps didn't go far enough.
Matt Damon (The Martian and The Bourne Identity) stars as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, an island in Greece. He has a wife and a son. However, he left them in order to fight with the Greeks in the Trojan War. The Greeks attacked Troy, which is a city in a neighboring country. The journey to get there takes a long time and the time it will take to win the war is long, and Odysseus knows it. He also knows that he could die. He knows his wife will be queen in the meantime, but he knows that eventually, men will come in order to pressure his wife to remarry. He wants to come home before that happens, but he and his soldiers get lost at sea, which ends up causing him to be gone for 20 years.
The reason that he gets lost is because he defied the gods. The Greeks keep reiterating that they believe in gods, the main one being Zeus. It's stated that Zeus' law is one that everyone has to obey. It seems to be a law regarding hospitality in one's home, but it also can be applied to other places and situations, perhaps even during war. It's revealed that innocent women and other innocent people got slaughtered at the hands of the Greeks during the Trojan War, which was done in a manner that defied Zeus' law. Odysseus might not have done so himself, but it was his plan that facilitated the crime and he did nothing to stop it. He didn't create on atom bomb like the protagonist in Oppenheimer, but Odysseus' tactics in Troy result in a comparable amount of death and destruction.
Nolan's 2023 flick talked about the atom bomb destroying cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Nolan never gives us the perspective of the Japanese people who lived in those cities or simply Japanese people in general. Defenders of that film argue depicting the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki would have been too insensitive or itself offensive. I would push back that one doesn't need to depict the bombings to portray the Japanese perspective. Scorsese provided the Native American perspective through a Native American character without leaning too much into depicting the atrocity or horrible crimes. Those defenders now don't have a leg to stand on here because Nolan does depict the war crime as it were. He shows the Trojan War and we get numerous shots of innocent people, including innocent women being slaughtered, like beheaded for example.
Nolan had the opportunity to give voice to those victims and to those people, but he doesn't. To his credit, he does depict the consequences that come to the perpetrators. One could argue that he did so in Oppenheimer as well, vis-à-vis what happens to the Robert Downey Jr. character. It's not the same as here where the punishment fits the crime. However, what sours the milk is that Odysseus is technically a war criminal, yet the ending of the film wants to portray him as a hero, or rescuer. He's the architect of so much death and destruction, but he gets a happy ending where he rides off triumphantly into the sunset. What's the lesson of that?
Tom Holland (Spider-Man: No Way Home and Uncharted) co-stars as Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. He doesn't want his mother to remarry. He also believes that his father is still alive. What happens to him and how he's told to obey Zeus' law no matter what is likely the lesson here. Unfortunately, he feels like such a non-presence that I ended up not being that invested in him as a character. His mother, played by Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Dark Knight Rises), is Penelope and she's under pressure to remarry. She has suitors who have basically invaded her house. Telemachus wants to stop these suitors by finding his father. Yet, the whole plot line involving the suitors ended up feeling so disconnected from the bigger themes of war that Telemachus' journey felt tacked on to me.
It felt tacked on because it is separate from the main plot, which is Odysseus with his men on a boat, attempting to sail home. Odysseus and his men get lost at sea and end up landing on various islands. These islands are where they have various action and adventures. The excitement comes in these moments. Yet, the monsters introduced don't get much more than one scene and are no more than flashes in the pan with not much depth or dimensionality. There's great technical achievement and visual effects, but I didn't feel like the film made us engage all that much with these creatures or the men in this journey that encounter them.
Himesh Patel (Enola Holmes 3 and Tenet) plays Eurylochus, the second-in-command of Odysseus' boat and his soldiers. He's there to doubt or second guess Odysseus' actions once they're on the boat with good reason, but Nolan's film never delves into him as a character. There has been a debate online about the diverse group of actors in this film, the so-called colorblind casting. I'm not opposed to such casting but I perhaps take issue when those diverse choices are for characters that don't get much depth or dimension. Eurylochus is one-note. We learn nothing more about him, despite him being in almost every scene with the protagonist of this film. Does he have a family? Does he have a wife and child that he wants to go home to? Unless I missed something, we get nothing beyond the superficial about Eurylochus.
Rated R for violence and some language.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 53 mins.
In theaters.
