Review of ‘The Odyssey’: Christopher Nolan, powerful creator of images strangled by excess | Cinema: premieres and reviews

Film direction is a matter of emphasis. Of intonation, enhancement, affectation or moderation in the expression of what is being told through a story, events and dialogues, but above all with its images, thus defining characters and displaying a theme. Adding elements or subtracting decorations, that is one of the fundamental questions. Make academics classic; in spectacular classic; or in mammoth the spectacular. Christopher Nolan is one of the third parties: ask the director of The Dark Knight, Origin, Tenet y Oppenheimer. And even more so if what you have in your hands is The odyssey, maximum transcendence, epic height, mythical creatures. The British filmmaker always adds: with the textures, with the format, with the photography, with the music, with the editing… There are no limits to the emphasis. With the danger of drowning their own images.

Not always or in every sequence, but there is something of that in his personal version of Homer’s epic poem: an evident suffocation with which sometimes what seems to add, subtracts. Ambitious on the verge of pretentiousness, Nolan has an undeniable capacity for drag right from pre-production. It is not satisfied, it always aims to advance in language and technology. Until fainting. And there the tricky issue of the different formats in which the public will see your film is far from evolution, being much closer to empty pretension. Film and exhibit The odyssey with features (IMAX and 70 millimeters) that only a handful of cinemas around the world have is, to say the least, strange. Even more so when the variety of formats will make your planning (that is, your look) different depending on the room in which it is enjoyed. How is a very close-up cut across the forehead going to be the same as a close-up with a little air on top? Why is it that in Nolan’s ideal system and format, the IMAX 70 mm, 1:43.1, so tall that it is almost square, the lavish fall of a burning tower or the sail of a ship is seen in full, and in the 35 mm, 2:39.1, panoramic, that tower and that ship are cut off?

Having overcome the thorny issue of formats (the press screening was not in IMAX, but on a 70 millimeter screen with a grainy texture), let’s get to the fundamental core: The odyssey In itself, a good film with exciting moments, but not extraordinary or indisputable. Nolan, also a solo screenwriter, almost as it could not be otherwise, has pruned Homer’s work while being faithful to its spirit. And although the Briton is an aesthete and a creator of powerful images, he was never the best of narrators, which leads him to a certain dispersion and some passages that are not completely understood, mainly the story of Menelaus and Helen of Troy. In return, its cast is impeccable: each one in their role is perfect both physically and interpretively. And, best of all, it develops at least three of the Homeric fragments of fidelity, conscience, honor and careerism, which are all The odyssey, in a marvelous way. Canto IX of Homer’s collection of poems, that of the Cyclops Polyphemus, exciting and adventurous in the old way. The And XII, that of the sirens, in which Nolan shines as a screenwriter with a wonderful explanation of the content of the mythical siren songs, which moves even contemporary identification and which also distances himself from Homer’s text.

Now, quite a few images are weighed down by the excesses of editing and by the thunderous and unstoppable percussion of Ludwig Göransson’s soundtrack. In need of air, more images (and, therefore, seconds on screen), his beautiful and expressive compositions are continually sabotaged by the same artist who created them. But, of course, asking Nolan to be David Lean is useless, and surely unfair, because he walks another path of majestic creation. His career and style were never calm. In him (and in the vision that some of us have of him) there is a constant combat between his ambition and his results, between his spectacularity (which sometimes leads to bombast) and his fantastic ability to seduce masses of admirers, to bring people to theaters to see something as, in principle, out of fashion as an epic poem in images. Contemporary cinema needs artists as insatiable as the director of Dunkirk. But that doesn’t stop movies like The odyssey lead to an obvious strangulation of their own achievements.