1.Incompetence. Nolan’s direction of the effects, the vistas, the action and the technical aspects of “The Odyssey” is interesting and often dazzling. Not the sound, though: the early dialogue scenes are muddy and difficult to hear, and the sound volume contrasts are self-indulgent and even painful. Yes, that’s also AMC’s fault, but a director must be cognizant of how his or her work will be shown.
1.Nolan’s direction of his cast, however, is terrible, even amateurish. When a competent actor like Matt Damon sleepwalks through a starring role, as he does here, that’s the director’s failing. Moreover, Damon’s Odysseus never seems intelligent, and that’s the hero’s primary characteristic according to Homer. We know Damon can play smart characters: he burst on the scene as a young genius in “Good Will Hunting.” With his face half obscured in a messy beard, Damon is also almost expressionless. Nobody else is much better, either, at least in Part 1. Anne Hathaway, a favorite of mine, gives some shockingly hacky deliveries. Zendaya, as the O’s protector/consultant Athena, has a frozen face: Can she act? Athena is the Goddess of Wisdom, and she sure doesn’t show it. My experience as a stage director taught me that few dumb actors can play intelligent characters convincingly.
Spoiler Alert: I should add here that the big surprise at the end of the movie is that Athena isn’t really Athena. More on that conceit later.
Which reminds me: Nolan’s casting was also unforgivably inept, although in such situations it is hard to say whether better direction could have made such casting work. Casting very black Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, as I have written already, is not inherently wrong, but her performance is wildly over-the top, even hysterical, and double casting her as Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife who slaughters him in “The Oresteia”(which has nothing to do with “The Odyssey,” but is shoehorned into the film anyway) makes no sense. [ Another bad direction note: At one point a huge, Darth Vader-like figure appears in the middle of the Greek army. Apparently this was supposed to be Agamemnon. How was an audience supposed to know that?] Clytemnestra was Helen’s half-sister, not her twin sister. It literally feels like the double role was contrived just to make it worth Nyong’o’s time. Helen and her twin do overact exactly as egregiously. Charlize Theron, who can act, plays Calypso almost as dead faced as Zendaya. She looks stunning, as always, and she could have made a great Calypso, if she had anything to do.
The most incompetent casting of all, however, was sticking poor trans-male Eliot Page in a small role in which he looks just silly. Ellen Page was an impressive actress, so I assume Eliot can act too, though I don’t know what roles a 5’1″ male with an androgynous voice can play credibly—certainly not this one. Page is also almost expressionless as Sinon in two scenes, the latter in which his face is covered in mud. Sinon is a character in “The Aeneid,” and adds nothing to Homer’s tale. Was Nolan virtue-signaling to the trans mob at the expense of the rest of the production? Was he trying to meet the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences DEI quotas?
My final note on the director’s incompetence is the length. There’s no justification for it. I have no intrinsic objection to long movies; heck, I’ve directed four hour plays and musicals, arguing that a play or movie should be as long as it needs to be to tell a great story well. However, directing a long movie takes skill: once the audience starts looking at its watches and begins to think, “Theoretically, this could go on forever,” you’re cooked.
And speaking of long, yikes. I thought I could get this slog done in one post. I was wrong. See you on the other side…
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** My homage to the late Red Buttons, one of the stars of the first “The Poseidon Adventure” (The Odyssey has be thinking about Poseidon.) Invited, in his dotage, to see the remake of his famous disaster film, he and his caretaker encountered a reporter as he left the theater. “Mr Buttons! You had a memorable performance in the first version of “Poseidon.” What did you think of the movie. “It stinks!” Red spat out, and walked away.
Ethics Alarms 
Clymenestra is Agamemnon’s wife right?
Right. Not Achilles. Wrong “A.” (Achilles was gay.) %$#@!. Proofed the post twice and missed it both times. FIXED. Thanks.
“Achilles was gay.”
Achilles also had a son and wanted to keep Briseis. He was bi-sexual, if anything.
(Pet Peeve: I hate it when people look at the ancients and think they thought about things the way we did. “Gay” was not really a thing. Closest you come to that is Aristophanes in the Symposium.)
-Jut
I too went with open eyes and hope. I did enjoy the cinematography of the “Aegean”. I agree the dialogue was muddled. What happen to sound technicians?
The hype up about the casting was a nothing burger for me. Both were minor parts with minimum screen time.
I missed what I call the verticalaity of the relationship between Odyseus and the deities. There was none. The horozontal relationship between Odyseus and his men was also lacking . He dismissed them both with one line-“Every man for himself!” ( or something like that, remeber I couldn’t hear the dialogue).
The suitors for Penelope were just stock background characters. Their presence on the screen was irrelevant until the closing bit of action.
I do wish i could find and listen to an independnent sound track. i read that was intersting, but again could not make it out.
Since there were a lot of audio issues in this project and other recent cinema events, I hope Hollywood would give diction and propjection lessons to the stars. If not either provide captioning or a libretto.
We are told that Eliot’s role was the moral center of the entire movie, see, because he symbolizes O’s guilt over what war made him do.
Zendaya, as the O’s protector/consultant Athena, has a frozen face: Can she act?
Her RBF is her whole schtick. I don’t know what’s appealing about her at all, and for some reason she seems to get great movie roles. She plays the same person in everything she does. She’s not particularly pretty. If it wasn’t for Spider-Man, I doubt people would know her at all. To be fair, I hear she’s excellent in Europhia, but I’m not watching that to find out.
Jack: “I will issue a disclaimer: It is possible that the second half of “The Odyssey” redeems the first half. If so, out of the hundreds of films I have seen over my life, it would be the first movie that accomplished that feat after such a soporific, pompous, annoying beginning. It would be like “The Terror of Tiny Town” suddenly turning into “High Noon.””
Closest I could come up with is 2001: A Space Odyssey, but only because the beginning was so slow and self-indulgent, while the ending was a bit less so, and even somewhat interesting.
-Jut
“Closest I could come up with is 2001: A Space Odyssey, but only because the beginning was so slow and self-indulgent“
Only movie during which I fell asleep….I was 13.
PWS
Politicizing a story isn’t necessarily a killer of a film, as long as it’s done lightly and with tact. Tarantino often succeeds here the way he criticizes U.S. drug policy.
Lethal Weapon did so subtlety, with anti -gun posters sprinkled through shots, but making “cop killer bullets” a central plot and action device was pushing it.
Runaway Jury and John Q both just simply jumped the shark. Their plots were so distorted by the message that you’d need middle-school understanding of the world to possess the ability to suspend disbelief to make these two watchable.
Sully suffered the same way, whoever decided to villainize the NTSB in order to fabricate tension just… Stop. Work somewhere else. You don’t need to make the inquest Sully’s heroic action.
I thought The Day After Tomorrow did it well. The film wasn’t overly preachy about climate change, and was easy enough to sit back and enjoy like similar disasters of is period like War of the Worlds and Armageddon.
I think your jaundiced eye observation is worth contemplating.
On the one hand, I do think markedly dumbing down Odysseus is suspiciously consistently with the woke trend of nullifying/emasculating men.
On the other hand, it’s a legitimate directorial choice, along with the anti-war/PTSD messaging, even if I’d prefer it not associated with Homer’s epic.