The Odyssey

I watched the Odyssey this past week with Evelyn and some other friends. We saw it in IMAX 70MM during the afternoon.

I was blown away. I thought it was one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. The visuals, the acting, the sound, the action, the scope, the journey, the narrative of overcoming crazy obstacles over a long period of time, the secondary characters, the dog, all of it. I ordinarily start to get antsy during super-long films, but I was rapt the whole time. A lot has been made about the casting of different roles – I thought if anything it helped broaden the narrative into a human story as opposed to a Greek one. It was the most enjoyable moviegoing experience I’ve had in years. I walked out of the theatre thinking, “How is Christopher Nolan so much better at making movies than everyone else?”

I’m totally confident that the Odyssey will both win numerous Academy Awards and exceed $1 billion at the box office. A lot of people I know are talking about seeing it multiple times. If you enjoy movies at all, I recommend it wholeheartedly as a theatrical experience, preferably on IMAX. It rises to the level of great art.

Now, it’s not like me to randomly write a movie review. But a few things stuck out to me.

First, there was a lot of suffering involved in making this film. I don’t mean simulated suffering. I mean genuine suffering. It was unavoidable given Christopher Nolan’s insistence on practical effects and desire for verisimilitude. Particularly striking was Matt Damon’s physical transformation as a 55-year-old man into someone who could plausibly be in his mid-thirties in flashback scenes or could dispatch multiple combatants half his age, to his scraggly beard that took a year to grow (and couldn’t be faked given the size of the screen, the wind and spray and, again, Nolan’s desire for exacting detail). Imagine having to grow a crazy beard for months and months and then fast and train diligently to fill this role as a middle-aged man. I think it’s a big reason that past Nolan collaborators like Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman reportedly turned down the role. Kudos to Matt Damon for going through it. I think he deserves an Oscar.

It certainly made me want to hit the gym. Art requires suffering. Maybe going home does too.

Second, there was a theme in this movie about the degradation of fellowship and civilization and what comes after. It’s hard to miss that social media has made society less hospitable and unified for this generation. Nolan’s craft and painstaking shooting on the sea and in faraway lands with world-class human performers is kind of the opposite of using AI to magically conjure up images that allow you to control uncontrollable things like weather. His use of enormous IMAX cameras or a sixty-foot Cyclops puppet changes the act of filming into something itself technically difficult, again in contrast with CGI. Nolan himself refers to AI as a “Trojan Horse” that will bring all sorts of negative consequences. This film felt like the culmination of Nolan’s hugely impressive career - it’s one of the world’s greatest filmmaker’s $250 million magnum opus as expression of humanity in the face of onrushing technology.

(By the way, I’m a Nolan admirer but probably fall short of fanboy. I thought Tenet was truly bad, for example. Interstellar didn’t quite get me either. I admired Oppenheimer but didn’t love it. I did love The Dark Knight and Inception. The Dark Knight Rises had problems for me, and not just Tom Hardy’s voice. Memento and the Prestige were both very good.)

Third, this movie somehow got politicized in a way that is very dumb and unfortunate regarding various casting choices. I’m not someone who gets too hot and bothered about who a director decides to cast to depict a character – sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s art. Artists make choices, and you either enjoy them or you don’t. I got the sense that Nolan enlisted who he thought were the top-of-class performers regardless of identity concerns and virtually all of them delivered.

Last, the stacked cast actually gave me a sense of the aggregation of value enjoyed by the best in the field. Watching the movie, you’re like, “Oh shit, Jon Bernthal is in this too? Love that guy.” Getting the most acclaimed performers of this particular time to perform in an ensemble cast at a discount is something that only Christopher Nolan could pull off. The movie cost $250 million and it was somehow a bargain. Meanwhile, Los Angeles has lost 45,000 or so rank-and-file film and TV jobs in the past several years as productions have either evaporated or migrated to cheaper locations. These jobs are mainly blue-collar grips, makeup artists, production assistants, set designers, carpenters, cameramen, caterers and the like, but also include working-class actors and actresses and performers. It’s harder and harder to find work. Movie theaters are teetering and so are TV networks. The success of the Odyssey doesn’t mean that the film industry is healthy for normal people. It means that the best want to work with the best, and the winner-take-all dynamic that plagues the U.S. as data, capital, processing power and AI converge can take different forms. This film is a towering achievement, but not an answer.

The Odyssey is, to me, the pinnacle of our civilization’s ability to produce a profound and compelling work of art based upon one of the greatest stories ever written. See it on the biggest screen you can. May it inspire something worth suffering for.

And now to bring my kids to see Spider-Man next week.

I hope your summer is going great! To check out Forward Party candidates in your area, click here. To get a copy of “Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?” click here and use the code “UBIUBI” for 25% off. For 3 months off your mobile bill with Noble Mobile, click here or email matt@noblemobile.com and use my name to switch or explore. I got recognized for being on a reality tv show for the first time this week by an 18-year old girl who definitely would not have known who I was otherwise and felt strangely proud.