Christopher Nolan's Worst Enemy
I’m done with the Odyssey discourse, but not Christopher Nolan. Something I’ve been noticing for a while needs to be said about this guy’s work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed more Chris Nolan movies than I’ve disliked. Loved the Batman movies, though like most people I’m lukewarm on the third movie, which has a lot of issues. Interstellar was good. Loved inception. Tenant was hot garbage. By and large I enjoy his films, they’re usually very memorable and they almost always generate great memes.
But for all his many virtues, he has a very glaring problem that has begun to rankle me in recent years. It was very much front and center in the Odyssey and one of the biggest reasons that the film was worse for it, in my opinion. He has a wheelhouse that works best for him and something like the Odyssey was not part of that wheelhouse.
Two issues need to be gotten out of the way right off the bat: Action and Sound. For whatever reason, Nolan films have terrible sound mixing and they only get worse the more time goes on. I’ve heard it said that IMAX cameras sound like a jet engine taking off and this means they have to redub a lot, but whatever the reason I’m sick of it. Couldn’t even watch Tenet without closed captions. And his action scenes are very weak. He could benefit for bringing in another guy to punch those scenes up. The Odyssey had some of the weakest fight scenes I’ve ever seen in his body of work.
But that’s not the main issue. My biggest issue is that Christopher Nolan is a man of big visions and narrow scope. Which is to say he likes his movies grounded. The problem is that he does this big idea genres like Fantasy and Sci-fi and grounds them so hard that it becomes almost detrimental.
Granted, his gritty, grounded reimagining of Batman was very much welcome after the garish, goofy offering of Batman & Robin. A movie so poorly received by Batman fans it put the entire franchise on ice for almost a decade until Batman Begins. I was in the theater for that one and let me tell you it was the first time I’ve ever been in a theater that stood and clapped at the end. (Well deserved imo).
As time has gone on, though, a lot of the cracks start to show in its armor. The Batman trilogy was written more like crime capers where a guy in a bat suit occasionally pops in. Every bit of mystery and superheroic act had to be explained by technical marvel or a plausible scientific explanation. Even Batman’s almost otherworldly abilities of borderline superhuman stealth got explained away as “Lol, ninja training, bro.” This formula started falling apart in Dark Knight Rises. Nolan didn’t want to embrace the over-the-top nature of a comic book superhero like Batman and this meant when those moments showed up, it was evident he didn’t quite know how to tackle them.
Similarly, Interstellar was a grand concept executed on the hard sci-fi side. Not that this isn’t bad. If anything, it fits his style a lot more than Superheroes, but when going to an alien world, the best he could imagine up was “Water planet with big waves”. Unexpected, sure. Exciting and fantastic? Not as much as you think an alien world should be.
Inception is a movie about going into dreams and he wisely chose to lean into surrealism over complete fantasy. You can do almost anything in dreams, but again he kept the ideas on the ground instead of going with the truly fantastical. Hell, he even main the Subconsious Police alerted if the dreamer started becoming TOO aware they were in a dream. (Honestly, that’s not terrible. I’ve had dreams where I woke up as soon as I realized I was in a dream). But you get the point. He kept it real in a dream world. Its most fantastic elements were Escher paintings, rolling hallways, and a train in the city street.
I don’t even know where to start with Tenent. It was more of an idea he wrapped a movie around and it just didn’t gel the way he wanted.
Nowhere is this flaw more prominent than the Odyssey and his conscious decision to parse down the myths, monsters, and gods to ideas or whispers instead of actual present beings affecting the story. The man has to be dragged kicking and screaming to the more fantastical ideas and presents them with as little fantastical elements as possible. He brings us the Cyclops, but cuts out all of the dialogue between it and Odyssius resulting in a moment that feels less like a military commander outsmarting a child of the gods and more like a D&D adventuring party stumbling across the lair of a high level beast, then sneaking out.
The gods do not speak to him, present themselves to him, or make it know they even are gods. This was intentional on his part–right down to using the unreliable narrator trope to make it seem as if Odyssius might have imagined them while hopped up on mushrooms. It’s a Rorschach drawing similar to the ending of Inception, where you’re given the notion to believe what you want without a definitive answer. Not a fan.
This isn’t the first time Hollywood has leaned away from fantastic elements to distance themselves from the over the top weirdness of genre fiction. They’re afraid of looking too cartoonish or campy. It makes them feel unserious. It wasn’t until Spider-man and X-men made piles of money doing it right that they saw a cash cow and took comic book superheroes more seriously in a cinematic sense. Even then, they still ran away from what fans wanted.
Its for this reason I think Chris Nolan was a bad fit for The Odyssey. A story that has endured for almost 3000 years does so for a reason and stripping away the fantastical elements means making up for it in other areas like Troy did. That movie oozed charisma and good writing. The Odyssey not so much. But it carried Troy, which is a classic to this day. I don’t see The Odyssey faring as well in the long run.
Fantasy, Sci–fi, Horror, Romance, Westerns, genre fiction of all stripes works best when it leans into its unrealism. They’re all fantasy of some kind and that’s what draws us to them, makes them unique, and elevates them out of the mundane. Stripping it down can work, but Nolan’s interpretations leave much to be desired. He is a technical genius and a phenomenal filmmaker, but these are elements that he simply does not work well with.
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John A. Douglas is an independently published author and the author of the Age of Adventures fantasy series including its two starter books: The Black Crown and The Lionheart: Icon of Justice.
You can grab your copies here.
