Speaker 1: The last time there was this much hupla around a
Christopher Nolan film, it was Oppenheimer, which cleaned up at
the Oscars in twenty twenty four, taking home seven Academy Awards,
including Best Picture and Best Director. This time, Nolan has
shot an entire film in Imax and assembled yet another
all star cast. Will he do it again? It's The Odyssey.
I'm Ronald Young Junior, and I'm leaving the theater.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 3: This is Ronald and I am leaving the theater after
seeing The Odyssey. The Odyssey written and directed by Christopher Nolan,
starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Youngo,
Samantha Morton, Zendeia, and Charlie Sterren per Usual. For a
complete listing of the cast and crew, go to the
link in our show notes because I definitely left some
names out.
Speaker 2: I am not here alone.
Speaker 3: I am watching this screening in La or I just
watched the screening in la and I'm here with Night.
Speaker 2: Rosie Knight.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the show, longtime fan, first time guest on
the Nope, I didn't land that well anyway, I'm glad
you're here.
Speaker 2: How are you?
Speaker 4: I'm glad to be here. It's very fun to watch that.
Speaker 5: And it starts to be Reunited after Pop Culture Debate Club,
which we did a couple of times together.
Speaker 3: Good Pull. We don't talk about that show here, but
it's okay. I'm not hurt or anything. It's okay. No, no,
I'm gonna leave it in there. I need everyone to
know my pain, all right. So The Odyssey is Christopher
Nolan's reimagining making of Homer's classic the Odyssey, which is
a bunch of Greek mythology and stuff. You probably learned
about this in school. This plot follows Odysseus after he
fights in a war against the Trojans and he has
to take the long way home because he keeps getting lost. Meanwhile,
his wife and son are trying to fight off people
who are trying to usurp his throne home in Ithaca. Okay,
that is the plot the movie, Rosie Night, What did
you think of this film?
Speaker 4: Okay? So I do hate to say, this is a
tough day for me.
Speaker 5: Because I am, as most people know who recognize my voice,
I am a Christopher Nolan sink, let's say, But I
gotta say I actually thought the movie banged.
Speaker 4: I loved it. It's very annoying.
Speaker 5: I actually thought it was like incredible, and it was
very tailored to my exact taste.
Speaker 4: So yes, I was.
Speaker 5: I went in with the expectations and I was honestly
pretty blown away. The imax of it all was amazing
to see a full movie in imax for the first
time ever.
Speaker 3: It's so funny because about a third through the movie,
I was like, this movie stupid, and then halfway through
the movie, I'm like, oh, what are you doing? And
then somewhere in that last third, I was like, Yo,
this movie is incredible.
Speaker 2: What is happening here?
Speaker 3: You're absolutely right, I feel like the it's There was
a part of me that said, I don't think the
writing of this movie is that great, but I think
the execution of this movie, like what they actually what
you actually see on screen, which is more than just
the lines that they're delivering. And there are some banger
lines in here, but there was just a lot of
parts of story that I was questioning, pacing and all that.
But then again, when they get to the point that
they're trying to make, it gets a lot better. That
being said, there's a lot of this that kind of
reminded me of Exception of a man tried to get
home to his kids, and emotionally the beats felt a
lot like inception.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you call it.
Speaker 5: Now, I will just say I don't know if you've
ever watched any of a Christophanilla movie, but that's basically
every fucking movie he makes, Like it's always about a
dad going back to his kid, A wife has died,
I have to see. I actually think the constraints of
the two thousand year old plus poem, which is like,
you know, this epic that was written probably by hundreds
of people over like hundreds of years, so it's kind
of hard to adapt. I found those constraints kind of
helped him because like he couldn't kill Penelope, like just
don't do it, like that's not in the story.
Speaker 4: Do the story or whatever.
Speaker 5: You're sorry if it actually is, and he changed that,
but good for you. So no dead wife. Yeah, it
definitely has a lot of his usual themes family. I
think the big thing that stuck out to me though,
and I was actually talking to in my X ray
vision group chat.
Speaker 4: About this already.
Speaker 5: It's definitely like a very heavy anti war movie. And
I think that is a reaction to Oppenheimer, where he
thought he was making an anti war movie but he
actually wasn't and it ended up being way more kind
of controversial. But the big thesis of this movie is
definitely like an anti war movie, which I was.
Speaker 4: Not expecting, and I felt for me the movie worked.
Speaker 5: But I was speaking some other friends outside who had
similar issues, like you said, with pacing, but all of
them agreed that once you get to the third act
and it wraps up, it actually kind of works. And
for me it worked because I felt like it was
very lyrical and weird and kind of like an oral
story because you just jumped between so many different characters,
and but it worked. I felt like he got the
dream like weirdness down.
Speaker 3: That was perfect. I think dreamlike weirdness is a great
way to talk about. As a matter of fact, I
think he kind of stretched as a filmmaker in this one,
because and I mean we're talking about a person who
did Interstellar. He's good at imagining things. He's good at
inception tenant, he's good at imagining things. As a matter
of fact, I'm hoping that he's imagining something new for
his next film. I don't want to see another historical
drama from him, But knowing what he was capable and
how he executed, especially the scene there's a scene where
I'll just say, pigs, there's pigs, and that scene was
it was body horror, and I don't like body horror.
But I was watching the whole time with my hands
on my head. But I was watching the whole time.
So I feel like he's definitely stretched himself as a
filmmaker here in a way that I mean, I already
know this is a front runner for Best Picture. It's
everything that Hollywood likes. It is a big, spectacular, epic film.
I think my only quibbles with it really come down
to things that took me out of the movie several times.
Speaker 2: Every now and then.
Speaker 3: Telemachus, playing by Tom Holland is just like, hey, mom,
so and so and so, and I'm just like, what
do you mean, Mom.
Speaker 5: Let's talk Okay, So let's talk about this because we
were This is actually something really interesting that Nolan decided
to do. So there was a recent adaptation of the Odyssey,
which was the first woman to ever adapt the Odyssey,
and it was very like plain language and she also
changed it to iambic pentameter, which is the Shakespearean kind
of thing rather than how Grecians would have said it.
And I think because of that, he went for this
like loose, easy, free, so it doesn't feel forced. And
I actually think for like ninety five percent of the
movie it works really well because a lot of times
when you watch like Lawrence of Arabia or like an
old timey Cleopatra, they're doing such accents that it ages
it they do.
Speaker 4: It's campy.
Speaker 5: They're all talking in like very high British. So I
think that the casual nature for the most part really
loves ubim. But then like at one point, I'm pretty
sure that Tom Holland did throw a sword and go
Dad's swords or something, and I was like, but generally,
I do want to give credit to the whole cast, actually,
including Tom Holland and also.
Speaker 4: The Punisher himself.
Speaker 5: You know, John Berthall, he's really great in this movie,
and he did.
Speaker 2: Not stretch as an actor in this movie.
Speaker 5: Now he didn't, but this is actually the thing that
worked for me about this movie. Right, John Bernhal's being
John Bernhale, Robert Pattinson is being Robert Pattinson's Zenda is
acting as a beautiful young woman, but she's barely in
it right, so she's basically Zendeia. But the way that
they put the story together and they cast everything, there
were truly moments where I was so engrossed that I
was not just thinking, Oh, that person's seen an air one.
That person sent a text, which, like with Nosferatu, like
Egger's last.
Speaker 4: Movie, I really struggled with that with Lily Rose.
Speaker 5: Depp, I do feel like, also you mentioned the horror,
I do feel like this is the Christopher Nolan who
for the first time has like watched Robert Eggers and
Denny Villeneuve. It feels so influenced by June in a
really positive way.
Speaker 4: Like I feel like this.
Speaker 5: And Dune three coming out this year is gonna tip
us onto a kind of period piece Swords and Sandals,
grand epic, because Hollywood's been wanting to do this since
the fifties.
Speaker 4: But it has always struggled, always struggled.
Speaker 3: I agree, and I think I don't know. I'm like,
I'm a I'm not a sword in Sandals park guy.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: But I will say the one thing that this does
well is it could have ended as just a sword
in Sandals movie. But I think what Doune does well
and what movies like this do well, is that they
state their ethos enough, and they land their ethos enough
that you realize, oh, this wasn't about the war, this
wasn't about We're not gonna see like fifty dudes painting
abs on their stomach saying oooh like for three hundred
this is like they're basically saying, no, there's something else
going on here. Because by the time this movie gets
to a state, it's point where he's kind of like
talking to his when he's talking to his wife at
one point in the movie and he starts to kind
of state the ethos of the film. I was blown
away because at some point he says, ten years of
rage flew into Troy.
Speaker 2: In one night, and I was like, oh no.
Speaker 3: And then as they start showing you, it was just
such first of all, was remarkable restraint, because you really
think that you're just seeing vignettes the whole time, But
when they actually get to the point, it's you realize
that this was all done with intent, which immediately makes
me want to watch it again. That being said, I
need Hollywood to understand that I need Hollywood to say, hey,
this isn't just sword and sandals. We're actually making something
that's good here and that matters. And that's what Doune
and movies like this do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think like with any genre stuff that's like
the big issue that Hollywood often has is like the
same way of seeing it right now with the back rooms,
where it's this idea of like, oh, quickly find someone
on YouTube, right, like find something like on YouTube. But
it's like Caane Parsons is a once in a generational
talent who's like sixteen years old who made a super
weird movie, Like you can't replicate that, but what you
can do is support independent artists, right, So this is
the same thing where it's like, what you can do
is give artists with a vision a lot of money
to do great genre stories that can be analogous. Because
something I did not expect from Christopher Nolan, who, by
the way, in the past I have complained a lot
about his tendencies to be like he's not a very
international caster, and when he is, he he doesn't usually do.
Speaker 4: A great job. With Dunkirk.
Speaker 5: He really missed the mark on that historically, I felt
like here he was learning from a lot of his
own mistakes, Like this was a cast that looked how
I would a want to see a fucking movie look,
but be also like, this is what it would be
like in ancient Greece, like think about trade routes, thinks
about pillaging and raping, like it's gonna be diverse.
Speaker 4: I think there's a lot of choices.
Speaker 5: He makes that is gonna make this age so much
better than a lot of his other movies. I actually
think this is a lot of people are gonna say
this is the best movie, and I do think they're
probably right. I only have a couple of Christopher Nolan
movies i'm a fan of, but this is definitely now
I've probably got three, you know, with this.
Speaker 3: It's funny because I'm I like again when I by
the time I walked out of it, I enjoyed it.
And the more I talk to you, the more that
my score on this is like is is adjusting. I
love Christopher Nolan like you, and I feel like when
I think about this as a part of his cannon,
it obviously fits his most recent cannon, if you because
Dunkirk Oppenheimer all of.
Speaker 2: Those, Tenant is the only one. Tennant is kind of
the odd man out.
Speaker 3: Now if you think of it as last four movies,
it's Dunkirk, Oppenhauer to Oppenheimer, Tenant and the Odyssey, and
Tenant's really.
Speaker 5: Like more of the last bastion of like the Batman sci.
Speaker 2: Fi era, you know, the Interstellar inception all that.
Speaker 3: So because of that, it makes me say, I don't
know what he's going to do next, but I will
say he is a very sharp filmmaker right now, and
it's gonna be I mean, it's gonna be very I
mean I almost feel like you might need to quit.
Speaker 2: Like I don't, Like there's a part of me I'm like,
where do you go from here?
Speaker 4: I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 5: It does feel like he's kind of done. This is
a magnum opus Like it felt to me like all
of his British tendencies, all of his storytelling tendencies, all
of his film nud tendencies to be the first director
to ever direct a full feature length film completely in imax,
like it's all led to this. I think if I
was gonna see him do anything, I would love to
see him like take a twenty five mil budget and
do like a mid budget like crime thriller or something
like he used to do. And again, not a huge
fan of all of his work, and I will say
I do think the reason this is really good is
also because he had so much source material to work from.
Speaker 4: I think that helped for me.
Speaker 5: I would love to see him adept something where he's
not just directly ripping off an anime movie, So like,
let's do an original movie next Christopher, a little bit
lower budget. But I know, really Universe was probably gonna
ask him to do the Iliad, and honestly, I would
be there on the first day.
Speaker 4: So I can't complain.
Speaker 3: Okay, So here at leaving a theater, we rate movies
out of five stars. I know this is your least
favorite thing, but it's out of five stars and you
can use decimals. Let me just tell you what the
scale is so you understand it. So one is this
it's irredeemable basically. Two is I didn't like this. I
hated it, didn't like it. Three is I would watch
this again. That is the most basic down the middle.
I would watch this again when you start to get
above three, when you get to like three point twenty
five three point five. You really enjoyed this movie. Four
is typically where a lot of the Oscar films live,
and most of the movies that you really like they
live around the four range, and then five typically. Just
so you know, the first movie I ever gave five
stars to was Godzilla minus one, and I also gave
it to the one with Lupinia and Jungo as the robot.
The Wild Robot also got five stars. So there's movies
that are just so satisfying that their imperfections are not
outweighed by how I feel when I move out of them.
Those are movies that get fives. So now you know
the ratings there were five. You can use decimals if
you need them. What would you rate this movie out
of five stars?
Speaker 5: No, I think going by your rating, I think just
being objective, being sensible. I mean, this is like a
solid four star movie for me. I think I would
highly recommend people go and watch it. I think the
cinematography is amazing. I was not bored even though it's
fucking long.
Speaker 4: That I like the weird choices, but and I do
feel like it pays off.
Speaker 5: I do feel like maybe some people would leave, so
I'm not giving it five. It's not perfect, but I
do think it is definitely much better than just good.
Speaker 3: So so let me just say something about you that
I think is incredible. You are a very sharp reviewer,
and you understand things very well, and you're very good
at articulating things, and you're very fair when you don't
like things, because I know you don't like Christopher Nolan.
And I know that because when I was sitting here,
I was trying to think of what my score was
going to be. And when I walked out of this film,
I thought, this is a four star movie. I four
right down the middle, and I wasn't sure what you
were going to say, because it seemed like you enjoyed
it more.
Speaker 2: So I'm like, where could it beat? Where could it land?
Speaker 3: And you just solidified that, Yes, it's one hundred percent.
This is a solid four star movie, one hundred percent
one through three, four stars out of five. I don't
think it's more. I think a lot of critics are
gonna lose their minds and give it like it's probably
gonna have a ninety five ninety six percent Rotten Tomato score.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's even higher than that.
They're gonna be run with that. I think it's a
four star movies. I think you set your expectations saying
I'm going to go see a very good movie. Get
your popcorn. It's two hours and fifty two minutes long.
There was sometimes where you felt every minute of that
two hours and fifty two minutes. But what it does
in that time, I mean, it's good. And then we
sit at the end, we saw the credits. The credits
are less than six minutes long, which your point, less
than seven minutes long. What you pointed out was probably
because they used a lot of practical effects. They didn't
use a lot of like houses and digitals and all
that which have all these staffs that make the credits
much longer. So one last thing I'll say before I go,
what did you think of Ludwin Gordson Ludwig Gornson's score.
Speaker 4: I did love it. I'm a Ludwig fan.
Speaker 5: It was obviously very Dune influence, very Zimmer Hans Zimmer influence.
I think what I really liked about it was the
more like electronic elements that he bought in that kind
of brought something new to it for me, and I
think like that is something what I liked about this movie.
And the reason is that for for me is like
there is unique It's not in a original film. We've
seen Greek myths, but there is unique choices that are
made throughout that makes it very satisfying and enjoyable. And
I think the score is one of them, because it
would have been very easy to go like John William's
Danny Elfman even like classic, and it's so much weirder,
and I think it worked.
Speaker 3: I absolutely agree, and with that, I'm leaving the Theater
as a production of Oh It's Big Roun Studios. I
mixed this episode, and per usual, I am working very hard.
I am currently in LA right now. By the time
you're hearing this, I will be on my way to
New York because I am recording a new podcast. I
have not announced it yet, but I am announcing it
very soon. You can only hear that announcement on Patreon.
They are going to know the truth. They are going
to know exactly what's going on. Patreon is a very
good source of support for me because I'm working hard
putting out all of these episodes of Leaving the Theater.
For you sometimes it's harder than it looks, even though
I know I make it look easy.
Speaker 2: It's real, real labor. It's a labor of love, but
it's labor still labor.
Speaker 3: If that means something to you, go to patreon dot
com slash Oh It's Biggron, or go to the link
in our show notes. Show art from Heather Wilder. Theme
music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. For more information about
the Odyssey or Rosie Knight, check out our show notes.
You can follow me on Instagram, Blue Sky, TikTok, threads,
or letterbox at Owens Big Rond that's at O h
I T.
Speaker 2: S b I g R O N.
Speaker 3: You can find out more about this show on other Owis
Big Brown Studio shows by following us on Instagram at
Owiz Big Round Studios. Leaving the Theater will be back soon.
Thanks for listening and thanks for being.
Speaker 2: On the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you having me.
Speaker 3: Leaving the Theater is a production of Oh It's Big.
Speaker 5: I just try to do a cheery point and instead I'll.
Speaker 2: Get it for you.
Speaker 4: Sorry, with that, With that,