Hello and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we run through the biggest new cinema releases and why you should be excited for them, although this week there’s just one very, very big one…
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
The Odyssey
After finally finding a way to end the decade-long Trojan War, Odysseus (Matt Damon) sets sail for his home island of Ithaca, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland). But he’s waylaid by all manner of monsters, disasters and distractions, and the journey takes another ten years to complete. Meanwhile, believing him to be dead, a host of suitors led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson) has descended on his home to force Penelope to remarry.
Homer’s The Odyssey is one of the oldest and greatest stories in the world. An epic poem in every sense of the word, it’s captured imaginations for millennia. At its heart it’s a simple story of a man trying to get home – something Matt Damon is famously well accustomed to by now. But its episodic structure is rife with symbolism and meaning, from the lotus-eaters dreamily forgetting their lives in favour of indulgence and pleasure, to the tempting song of the sirens luring ships to their doom, to the sorceress Circe (played in the film by Samantha Morton) turning men into pigs, to the nightmare choice of facing the monstrous Scylla or being dragged to the depths of the whirlpool Charybdis. There are also plenty of big action scenes, with monsters like the cyclops Polyphemus and the cannibalistic Laestrygonians ready to wreak devastation on the crews of Odysseus’s ships.
Despite its obvious cinematic potential, there haven’t been many straight adaptations of the Odyssey (although there have been plenty that take inspiration from it, most notably the Coen Brothers’ brilliant O Brother Where Art Thou?). There are plenty of filmmaking challenges behind this – the narrative dances around different time periods thanks to various flashbacks and storytelling within the story, making it hard to write in a way that general audiences will be able to keep track of, the monsters and combat need to be done justice, and the sheer scale of the story and setting is inaccessible to anyone who lacks the credentials to demand a huge studio budget. Enter Christopher Nolan, a man who is no stranger to a non-linear narrative (Memento and Tenet both played with their chronologies to great effect), epic scale (see the vast spacescapes of Interstellar and folding cities of Inception) or muscular action scenes rooted in practical effects (like the fights in the Dark Knight trilogy). He’s also got the clout in Hollywood, following his Oscar win for Oppenheimer, to have studio execs willing to put whatever numbers he wants on a cheque. In short, this is the perfect film for him to make.
Questionable accents and anachronistic “dad”s aside, it looks like Nolan has put together a largely faithful adaptation. Even with a 3 hour runtime there are bound to be some parts that didn’t make the cut, but there’s no apparent attempt to de-mythologise or rationalise the tale’s more fantastical elements – something that has often bothered me about other films based on Greek myths, like Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules film. There are gods (including Zendaya’s Athena and Charlize Theron’s Calypso), monsters and witches all present in the cast list and/or the trailers, although it doesn’t look like we’ll get all the Olympian bickering that helps and hinders Odysseus’s fleet in the original story. But at the same time, the screenplay hasn’t forgotten the human story at the heart of the legend. Penelope’s ruses to fend off her suitors are every bit as heroic as Odysseus’s plight, and it’s clear from the trailer that Nolan and Hathaway will give her the screen time she deserves, while Pattinson’s Antinous seems a bigger antagonist than the more famous likes of the cyclops or Circe.
The cast that Nolan has assembled for this is one of his best yet. As well as the aforementioned Damon, Hathaway, Holland, Pattinson, Zendaya, Morton and Theron (already an impressive list), there’s Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Jon Bernthal as her husband Menelaus, Benny Safdie as Menelaus’ brother and leader of the Greeks, Agamemnon, Elliott Page as sneaky Greek warrior Sinon, Mia Goth as Penelope’s slave Melantho, Himesh Patel as Odysseus’s crewmate Eurylochus, and John Leguizamo as loyal swineherd Eumaeus.
The Odyssey is such an iconic story that I was worried it might be too big even for Chris Nolan to chew, but the early reviews have shown that’s not the case. It currently has 98% on Rotten Tomatoes – a real achievement for a blockbuster like this – with an ocean of praise for Nolan’s grasp of the spectacle of it all, as well as on the depth of the script. And as with all of Nolan’s more recent films it’s been shot in Imax, and is the sort of movie that deserves to be watched on the biggest screen and in the highest definition you can find it in. If you have any love for blockbuster cinema, you won’t want to miss this.
- The Odyssey on IMDB
- The Odyssey on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
There is literally and figuratively only one option – go and see the Odyssey on the biggest screen you can find.
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- Evil Dead Burn – A worthy entry to the Evil Dead franchise, with both the shock and gore of the original and later films and a trace of the humour of Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. There are a couple of moments that are particularly wince-worthy, particularly in the opening scene on a secluded fishing lake. The deadite mythology is expanded, the performances are committed, and the visual effects are suitably gnarly.
- The Invite
- Toy Story 5
Trailer of the Week
The teaser trailer for Digger was really more of a retrospective on Tom Cruise’s career than anything about the film itself, but this week the first full trailer has been released and it looks like great fun. Cruise stars as tycoon Digger Rockwell, whose eagerness to drag the arctic’s natural resources kicking and screaming into his control unleashes a disaster that threatens the planet. He’s forced to take action to save the world, although his motivations seem to be more about his own PR than protecting Mother Earth. Also starring John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Burn Gorman and Emma D’Arcy and directed by Oscar winning Alejandro G Iñárritu, this is a smart satire with a cartoonishly over-the-top performance from its leading man, reminiscent of his studio producer Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. Digger will be tunnelling into UK cinema screens in October.
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