Nolan’s Epic Snooze

1 star

To be fair, I’ve never really liked the story of The Odyssey. Sure, some of the adventuers that Odysseus encounters on his trip home from the Trojan Wars sound pretty exciting – battling a one-eyed monster, battling a witch who turns his men into literal pigs, battling his sense of hearing by being tied to a mast while sailing past a rock where hot naked women sing to him – but being forced to read about them in a high school English class soured me on Homer and his epic poems.

Of course, that changed when I finally saw the 1954 Kirk Douglas epic Ulysses, which brought all those stories to life on the big screen. Not only did the dimple-chinned actor make the main character look and feel heroic, but, thanks to the cinematic talent of Eugen Schüfftan, who did the visual effects for the silent classic Metropolis, the battles he fought were exciting to watch. They didn’t look ‘real’ – I’m not sure they did back in 1954 – but they’re exciting.

So I was pretty psyched to see what director Christopher Nolan would do with Homer’s tale given his obsession for practical effects and large film formats like IMAX. If anyone could make the decades-long meandering of the lost commander and his troops look and feel epic, it was Nolan. Right?

So what happened? Why is Nolan’s The Odyssey such an epic bore?

A big part of it stems directly from the director’s obsession with practical effects and large-format cameras. He is so meticulous in his attention to detail in creating an atmosphere here that his actors and audience feel immersed in Homer’s world, to the point that he forgets to breathe life into the story. It’s very cold and calculating, the exact opposite of what makes an adventure film work. I stared at the screen for close to 3 hours and never once forgot that I was staring at a screen. When I watched Kirk Douglas on his voyage home from Troy, it never occurred to me that he wasn’t on a fully realized boat sailing on the open ocean or that the Cyclops was so obviously a big guy (Italian actor Umberto Silvestri) in a rubber mask. I didn’t care. I was swept up in the story.

That didn’t happen for me when watching Nolan’s film. Not once in the three hours I sat there staring at the screen.