The iPhone Face Odyssey

Tom Holland and Zendaya are going to have SUCH a huge summer because they are in the two movies expected to be among the biggest, if not THE biggest, movies of the season. Of course, there is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but there is also The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s modernish adaptation of Homer’s classic. Holland plays Telemachus, Odysseus’s sh-tty son (I f-cking hate Telemachus, learn to love my wrath for that bitch prince loser fail son who wouldn’t know fealty if it literally shat on his face), and Zendaya is rumored to play the goddess Athena (GREAT goddess casting, can’t wait to watch all the weird classical art bros lose their minds over a woman of color portraying a Hellenic goddess). A new trailer for The Odyssey dropped yesterday, and it is heavy on Holland as Telemachus.

Christopher Nolan desires nothing more than to make movies about men who love so hard they simply MUST abandon their families, so The Odyssey is right in his wheelhouse, as Odysseus, played here to some degree of disbelief by Matt Damon, leaves to do the Trojan War and takes 20 sweet years getting back (I know it wasn’t that easy, but Odysseus and his dumb war bros ruined a lot of cool women’s lives along the way, he sucks and his dumb war bros suck, too).

We also see a lot of Robert Pattison as Antinous, one of Penelope’s suitors, as well as Anne Hathaway as Penelope, who is, of course, Odysseus’s wife who spends 20 years cleverly keeping suitors like Antinous at bay, not only honoring her husband but preserving Telemachus’s inheritance (only for her dickhead son to be like, you slut, you whore, get out of here, because Telemachus is literally the worst). The trailer is heavy on Odysseus fighting to return home to the wife he does not deserve and the son he does. There is also Charlize Theron as Circe. More good goddess casting.

A lot of people are already taking issue with the modernity of Nolan’s approach to the material, though. Everyone has an American accent, there is a lot of “iPhone face” on display—basically no one in the main cast is believable as a person who lived in antiquity. Meanwhile, the antiquarians are complaining because the armor is all wrong. Literally I could not care less about the armor issue, the imagery in what we have seen of Nolan’s film is 100% consistent with what contemporary audiences EXPECT this world to look like, and that is, frankly, more important than strict historical accuracy. You want that, go to a museum and look at a vase.

As for the American accents and iPhone faces everywhere, I don’t know how much that will end up bothering me in the full context of the film. To some extent, not a lot, because part of the job of adaptation is making the text interesting to a new audience in a new medium, and The Odyssey is goddamned old—literally the “youngest” estimates of the written version is older than the oldest parts of the actual Bible. The Mycenean world in which the events of The Odyssey take place is so far from us today it might as well have happened in another galaxy.

If using contemporary speech and not worrying overmuch about visual historical accuracy makes it easier to bridge the gap between text and audience, I don’t really mind it. And Nolan is outside talking about the movie, and it does sound like he has a pretty good grip on the story he wants to tell. He’s a damn good filmmaker and at this stage, which is literally the marketing stage, we should just go with the flow and not assume he’s f-cked up The Odyssey until we’ve seen the actual film. Although I will warn everyone, I have a deep love-hate relationship with the raging misogyny inherent in Hellenic storytelling—ask me about my campaign to rescue Hera from thousands of years of misogynistic mythology!—so any take on The Odyssey that is not a feminist deconstruction of deeply misogynistic myths is automatically less interesting to me. I do not expect Christopher Nolan to do anything interesting on that front. I expect his Odyssey to be very heavy on men being bros being dudes, and the father-son stuff with Telemachus.

I am far more bothered by how grey and colorless everything is. Although, I am holding out some hope that because Nolan is withholding the gods and goddesses so far, maybe those parts of the movie will really pop in contrast. Like the bits with Circe are a lot brighter than anything else in the trailer, and while it is a pretty standard take, that the mortal world be flat and colorless compared to the realm of the gods, there is a lot of room for visual interest within it.

I think The Odyssey is going to be absolutely huge, I bet Nolan punches all the right buttons to appeal to mass audiences, much like Gladiator did 20-plus years ago with a similarly Hollywood take on antiquity. I think I will continue to be very frustrated that no matter how cool and groovy a woman is in Greek myth, the story can’t end until some man has either gotten her killed or told her what a dumb bitch she is. I also think I will continue to be very frustrated with Christopher Nolan for burying the dialogue under the score track in his sound mix, and for never using the “warm” filters on his color grading. Christopher Nolan Learn To Love Color Challenge!