Episode 83: FM/FW Mini E09: The Odyssey

Okay, the Odyssey.

I've spoken before about how I grew up on DC Comics and the whodunits of Agatha Christie in past episodes.

Well, you can add another one to the list, the Greek myths and legends.

These stories from my childhood have always stayed with me.

More recently, I've seen and enjoyed most of Christopher Nolan's films.

Even so, I had some trepidation about how he might treat such a central legend as the Odyssey.

After all, Hollywood success with Greek myths is a decidedly mixed bag.

In Nolan's film, Matt Damon plays the hero, Odysseus.

He has been away from his kingdom of Ithaca for 10 years fighting the Trojan War.

Indeed, he was the Greeks' chief strategist who came up with the Trojan horse that led to their victory.

Now he's ready to return home with his crew to reunite with his wife, Penelope, Anne Hathaway, and his son, Telemachus, Tom Holland.

Despite the guidance of the goddess Athena, played by Zendaya, Odysseus has his work cut out for him through many trials, including the enchantress Circe, Samantha Morton, a one-eyed giant cyclops, Bill Irwin, oversized murderous knights, and the lure of the sirens.

Meanwhile, Penelope is besieged at home by a crowd of suitors, led by the cowardly schemer Antonis Robert Pattinson.

They want Penelope to declare her husband dead and marry one of them to become the new King of Ithaca.

From what I can tell, this film has been received with unanimous praise from film critics around the world.

So I feel like a lone voice singing against the choir when I say I'm not a fan of this film.

From the beginning, it felt like characters were muttering, so that I struggled to hear what they were saying, particularly against background sounds or loud music.

And there were other technical aspects that underwhelmed me.

Despite the beautiful cinematography, there were too many scenes in the dark where I couldn't work out what was really happening to whom.

More than that, I thought the film lacked character development for its non-central characters.

Most notably, Odysseus's comrades felt like an amorphous mass, so that I didn't much care what happened to them.

This was even true for his right-hand man, played by Himesh Patel.

While he had more character development, it felt incomplete, and I wasn't exactly sure what really happened to him at the end.

Even Robert Pattinson as the cowardly Antonis, already promoted as Oscar material, felt too lightly painted.

He had one effective scene where he tried to seduce Queen Penelope, but not much else going on.