INITIAL THOUGHTS ON NOLAN’S 2026/THE ODYSSEY

 The Odyssey, 2026

Initial few thoughts on seeing/in parts sitting through The Odyssey on a Cineplex, ie a smaller, screen.  

First thought is that I have mixed feelings that I’ve been thinking about. But not so mixed they end up in irresolution.

All the effects, the filmmaking that runs from spectacular to spectacle, are on balance a plus. So is the undauntedness in Nolan to take on such a mega project (and to a majority of opinions he succeeds.) 

Then I think of different meals that I’ve had. And the few that stand out were meals at the right time, right place and the right people I ate with all coming together. The food was *almost* an afterthought. Not really though. The food was fine if unmemorable. Memorable was the above three coming together. 

Which is to say by strained analogy, I typically am relatively impervious to special effects especially when the content isn’t much. But then again, back to the strained analogy, I’ve had a few meals where the food was so good that it in itself remains memorable, when the other three were fine but nothing special.

So in The Odyssey the effects ranging as I say from spectacular to spectacle are awesome and, so, in that way memorable but with a caveat. The effects are so abiding, so relentless, so loud, so crashing down on me, that they start to exist for their own sake. 

And so they, to the ears and eyes of my mind, do so at the expense of the clarity and audibility of the dialogue. I often strained to hear what was said and at times couldn’t make out chunks of it. 

I’ve read that this is part of Nolan’s approach: he wants the audience so immersed in the movie’s visceral experience that not making out every word is inconsequential. If so, then that’s for me a problem because for one thing, it loses the balance between speech and action, and for another, losing speech is losing substance.  

Speech in Homer illuminates character, events, the reasons for action, internal dilemmas, relations between and among characters, and choices, moral and otherwise. So then obscuring speech  doesn’t merely inconvenience us, it lessens what distinguishes The Odyssey from a series of spectacles.

And I come to a few more minuses. I’m unpersuaded that the movie suffers from bowing to woke. And to a point I’m unpersuaded that movie suffers from its infidelity to the poem. But going back to some meals, they seem delicious when eaten but then not long after I can barely remember what I ate. It was just another meal out. 

The Odyssey isn’t exactly like such a meal, the effects are too memorable, even if to a fault. But what after them is the movie’s emotional and intellectual resonance?

Matt Damon, handsome, sturdy and certainly manly looking, isn’t essentially swashbuckling, leaderly, vital, cunning, magnetic. charismatic or anything like that. He is quiet in his leadership, world weary, with no real cinematic pop to him. And in that he betrays the Odysseus of the epic, majestic, militantly soldierly, hungry for glory, savage, cunning, sexy, and manly in the sense of charging in amid understood risks. 

I can see an argument that how I’ve negatively described him is how the Trojan war has left him. But surely we ought to get at least a peek at him as he was formerly, larger than life, so as to give meaning to what he has become. But we don’t get that. We never get that. 

We essentially see a pretty limp and passive Odysseus whose objective correlative is the pittance of the raft he finally, straining credibility, floats away on back to Ithaca. It reminded me of a surfer rafting out on his board to catch a big one wonderfully to surf back in on. But our depleted surfer just keeps going. 

So when does his great soldiery come so we see it? When? Well, it arrives in the movie’s biggest unintended cartoon-like, unintended caricature-like scene. He, with some fraught help from Telemachus, slays the suitors. The movie is suddenly like a ludicrous action flick where one guy can take on and take out a seemingly endless horde of rushing oncomers.

What contributes to it being like a cartoon is that we’re asked to believe not that a hero can’t perform heroic feats—the very stuff of epic—but that Damon’s mere life-sized, subdued, diminished Odysseus suddenly becomes an unstoppable action hero. The problem is improbability bred in part by discontinuity in character

In fact as I joked to friends, but it’s true, that scene generated an ear worm in my head, traces of which days after still linger:

“Oh-ho-ho-ho

Oh-ho-ho-ho

Oh-ho-ho-ho

Oh-ho-ho-ho

Everybody was Kung Fu fighting

Those cats were fast as lightning

In fact, it was a little bit frightening

But they fought with expert timing.”

I get the argument that it’s foolish to complain about, say, the casting when so much of the poem and this movie is magic, myth, monsters, unnatural catastrophes and Gods and Goddesses. 

But isn’t a flaw in this argument that when it comes to earth bound matters like Helen, or Sinon, or men fighting men, ought we not get at least some reasonable verisimilitude, especially in the slaying of the suitors, which is such an important scene in the movie?

Instead, we go from world-weary hero to humble beggar to John Wick. And the way a bad end to a holiday tends to cast its shadow retrospectively, so does this action sequence. 

Which brings me to my last minus for now. What am I left with at the end of the three hours besides relief that the movie’s over? Am I enthralled, left in wondrous contemplation, exhilarated by what I’ve seen? Do I feel like I’ve been engaged by a compelling movie? 

Not I. 

The two biggest things on my mind on leaving the theatre were: guilt over eating that damn big tub of buttered popcorn; and the ear worm, which I hummed to myself as I went to my car.

It’s of course fine to adapt, modernize, even experiment with classics, all up to a point. For me that point is when the original is so departed from, that its reworking becomes entirely detached from its source. I’m unsure if Nolan’s movie  crosses that line. I can see it argued both ways.  

I wouldn’t want to see something called Romeo and Juliet—I love West Side Story by the way—wherein the kids are both gay, their families hate each other and they tragically die trying to help each other fulfill their sexuality. I wouldn’t want to see something called King Lear, where Lear stomps through the whole play as a kind of Tennessee Williams’ Big Daddy all in the interest of attacking the patriarchy. 

Understanding the poem most generally and most broadly, it’s about a heroic, cunning, ferocious, soldier and king of a man on a long, long, long, 10 years long, perilous, travail-filled and temptation-filled journey to find his way home, home being his literal home and a metaphor for finding himself, coming back to himself. 

In the poem Odysseus slays the suitors, has Penelope’s heart; Athena and Zeus cool out the armed families of the slain; Odysseus resumes his crown and rules over a now peaceful Ithaca. What’s past is past, Troy no less than anything else. Nolanesque utter remorse and utter self flagellation in Homer’s Odysseus? There are none. 

In the movie,  Odysseus (disguised as a beggar) strings his bow, reveals himself, and as noted—as aided by Telemachus—slaughters the suitors in a ferocious fight that leaves him near to mortally wounded. But instead of reclaiming the throne, he abdicates it with Telemachus become King. Odysseus after his expression of guilt, shame and remorse:

“What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if...one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn't possibly be there anymore. What if…when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?

We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that's ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt.

To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home.

What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain—and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow—what if he knew exactly what he'd done?

[Penelope: What all of you had done?]

One man's idea. One man's trick to break Zeus's law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.

[Penelope: You are the people from the sea.]

Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus's law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn't bear to see the ruins of what he'd done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.”

sails into self-imposed exile with Penelope. He seeks atonement for the horrors of Troy and the men he lost. And so as is disturbingly clear, this ending is not Homer’s poem. It is Nolan’s something else.

Maybe a larger than life, heroically compelling  Odysseus—not the quiet, sometimes passive, world weary Matt Damon one who suddenly transforms himself into John Wick—might have pulled this ending off. But as it is, it is of a piece with an Odysseus who is basically the same size as life.

For me, just as final slaughter is an action cartoon, so going the other extreme way all of Odysseus’ self flagellation is consistent with his just noted relative under-sizedness (as against the poem’s heroic figure). His final sailing away with Penelope stirred in me very little in the way of emotion or  thought.

To end with my meal analogy, all in all, emotionally and intellectually, the movie was like a meal that is delicious in some ways, with some spectacular, flaming table side preparation, but then over as next to nothing, with most of my thoughts on other things. Similarly, for all that is in The Odyssey that is impressive, what does it come to in the end for me? It’s some amazing not-to-be-forgotten spectacle and, truth to tell, not much else that’s  impressively memorable.

AI AND ME ON MURDER BY PROXY AS FILM NOIR AND WHETHER FILM NOIR IS A GENRE OR A SYYLE

me: An example is the UK 1954 Murder By Proxy., which is conventionally called a film noir and has some noir features, night club setting, a seeming femme fatale, a down and out ordinary guy who gets taken in by and manipulated by her to work through a seamy murder, But he’s committed no crime. He’s manipulated into being a Pi solving a murder and exposing real evil. And the femme fatale, though at times alluring, tough and manipulative is mostly a frightened, put upon runaway. away. In the end the murder is solved; the man who the woman manipulated into marriage falls reciprocally in love with her and they “live happily ever after”. It’s almost as is the director is tantalizing us with the appearance of film noir only to subvert it. 

AI: I think that is an excellent example, and in some ways more persuasive than your deliberately exaggerated “conversion and salvation” case because it shows how subtle the boundary problem really is.

Murder by Proxy (also released in the U.S. as Blackout) seems, from what you describe, to borrow heavily from the iconography and narrative setup of Film Noir while quietly withdrawing from noir’s deeper commitments. The audience is invited into familiar noir expectations: an ordinary, vulnerable man adrift in life; a mysterious and sexually charged woman; a seedy urban underworld; deception; apparent criminal complicity; a surrounding atmosphere of danger and corruption. Classical noir teaches us how to read those signs. We assume the protagonist is being drawn toward destruction and that the woman is either predatory or fundamentally untrustworthy.

But what is fascinating in the example you give is that the film apparently reverses the moral logic embedded in those conventions. The protagonist is not morally compromised but essentially decent. He is not descending into criminality but, unknowingly, performing detective work. The woman is not a true femme fatale weaponizing sexuality for selfish ends but a frightened and vulnerable person acting under duress. The apparent labyrinth of betrayal turns out not to be a universe structured by corruption and doom but simply a mystery awaiting moral clarification. The ending — justice restored, reciprocal love established, future happiness possible — fundamentally rejects noir fatalism.

That is why your phrase “tantalizing us with the appearance of film noir only to subvert it” strikes me as exactly right. It suggests something important about artistic classification generally: genres are not merely bundles of conventions but systems of expectation. A work can borrow the external conventions of a genre while strategically frustrating the expectations those conventions create.

One might say Murder by Proxy is syntactically noir but semantically not noir. Its vocabulary is noir — nightclubs, danger, sexual ambiguity, crime, urban seediness — but its meaning is closer to a romantic thriller or suspense mystery. (I borrow syntax and semantics there partly because your earlier discussion of Bostock v. Clayton County and pragmatic meaning showed you are already thinking in exactly these structural terms.)

This points toward a broader principle in aesthetics: style provides signals, but genre involves fulfilled expectations. If a western ends by denying frontier conflict, if a tragedy ends in genuine flourishing, or if a noir ends by affirming trust, love, justice, and moral intelligibility, then the work may be using the language of the genre while speaking a different philosophical language underneath.

Your examples persuade me that calling noir simply a style is inadequate. Better to say: film noir is a stylistic vocabulary joined to a characteristic moral and existential vision — and when that vision disappears, what remains is noir-like, not noir proper.

AI AND ME ON TAYLOR SWIFT’S THE LAKES VIEWED STRICTLY AS A POEM

 The Lakes, Taylor Swift

Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?

I'm not cut out for all these cynical clones

These hunters with cell phones

Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die

I don't belong and, my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I'm setting off, but not without my muse

What should be over burrowed under my skin

In heart-stopping waves of hurt

I've come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze

Tell me what are my words worth

Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die

I don't belong and, my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I'm setting off, but not without my muse

I want auroras and sad prose

I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet

'Cause I haven't moved in years

And I want you right here

A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground

With no one around to tweet it

While I bathe in cliffside pools

With my calamitous love and insurmountable grief

Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die

I don't belong and, my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I'm setting off, but not without my muse

No, not without you

C (ChatGPT)

Taken as a poem, I would say it flirts with self-pity but ultimately rises above it.

There are certainly elements that can sound self-pitying. The speaker portrays herself as misunderstood and alienated by a shallow modern world populated by “cynical clones,” “hunters with cell phones,” and a “namedropping sleaze.” She repeatedly insists that she does not belong, and the opening line—“Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?”—shows an awareness that her suffering and self-dramatization are becoming the subject of her art. A skeptical reader might hear this as a poet casting herself as a uniquely sensitive victim of an unworthy age.

Yet the song’s strongest feature is that it seems self-aware about this tendency. The opening question is almost teasingly ironic. The speaker recognizes that she may be romanticizing her own melancholy. Rather than demanding sympathy, she examines her attraction to sadness, solitude, and artistic exile. The line “Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry” is so consciously literary and picturesque that it borders on parody of the Romantic poet’s longing for escape.

What saves the poem from mere self-pity is the quality of its imagery. “A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground / With no one around to tweet it” is not asking the audience to feel sorry for the speaker; it contrasts authentic beauty with the culture of performance and publicity. Likewise, “I want auroras and sad prose” expresses a yearning for transcendence, art, and nature rather than simply a complaint about personal suffering.

The poem’s central emotion is less “poor me” than estrangement—the feeling that modern life is noisy, commercialized, and spiritually thin, and that the speaker longs for a place where beauty, grief, love, and art can exist without being turned into content. That theme has a long literary pedigree, especially in Romantic poetry associated with the English Lake District, including poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

So my judgment would be: the poem contains self-pitying gestures, but its irony, self-awareness, and imaginative imagery prevent self-pity from becoming its dominant note. Its prevailing mood is wistful yearning rather than self-pity.

———-

Me

Do you not find the last verse cuts against a reading of this poem as ironic, the irony otherwise trumping the self pity? 

“Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die

I don't belong and, my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I'm setting off, but not without my muse

No, not without you”

She wants to be taken to a kind of poetic utopia, which she makes adjacent to death. And she’s initially passive about it: “Take me…” Moreover, her reference to “my beloved” is anything but ironic. She wants to separate herself or be separated from where she nor her “beloved” don’t belong. And rather than being in a poetic utopia, where creativity can flourish, she wants a utopia of passive sadness, “a perfect place to cry” along with her intimation of deathwardness. She does in the end move from “Take me…” to “I’m setting off…” though again her reference to her “beloved” as her “muse” displaces any suggestion of irony. 

Which all seems hard to put together with:

“A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground

With no one around to tweet it

While I bathe in cliffside pools

With my calamitous love and insurmountable grief”

I read these lines as contrasting an image of artistry flourishing despite all circumstances preventing it—a rose growing up despite icy ground, indeed from icy ground—with a self deprecating self reference to the poet luxuriating in cliffside pools with her overweening grief over past failed love. 

I find it hard to put these lines together with the concluding verse as I read it, self pitying, wallowing in melancholy, death inclined and ultimately passive.

————

C

I think you’ve put your finger on the strongest argument against my initial reading.

The final refrain is notably different from the opening question, “Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?” That line establishes distance from the speaker’s melancholy. It is self-conscious, even amused by its own grandiosity. But the conclusion does not preserve that distance. The refrain is repeated without qualification, and the emotional center of gravity has shifted toward sincerity. The beloved is no longer merely a participant in a fantasy of exile but the indispensable companion of that fantasy: “I’m setting off, but not without my muse / No, not without you.” There is little irony in those last lines.

What interests me most in your reading is the contrast between the rose image and the conclusion. The rose seems almost to rebuke the speaker. A rose growing out of frozen ground, unseen and untweeted, becomes an image of artistic vitality that does not require recognition, withdrawal, or self-dramatization. It simply grows. The image has a kind of stoic dignity. By contrast, the speaker imagines herself “bathe[d] in cliffside pools / With my calamitous love and insurmountable grief.” The adjectives are so extravagant that they invite scrutiny. One can hear self-mockery in them, but one can also hear indulgence.

In fact, I wonder whether the poem’s tension is precisely that the speaker recognizes a nobler ideal of art than the one she can actually live. The rose represents the ideal: beauty flourishing under adverse conditions without complaint. The speaker, meanwhile, remains attached to the Romantic posture of the suffering poet seeking refuge from a vulgar world. The poem knows that the rose is admirable, but it cannot stop dreaming of Windermere.

That would explain why the ending feels unresolved. If the poem ended with the rose, or even with “with no one around to tweet it,” the irony might decisively overcome the self-pity. Instead, it returns to the fantasy of removal: “Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die.” The repeated desire to escape, to cry, to withdraw from a world where she does not belong, is difficult to dismiss as merely ironic performance. The speaker may know she is romanticizing her sorrow, but she remains emotionally committed to doing so.

Indeed, one might say that the poem’s deepest irony is not that it mocks self-pity but that it cannot quite relinquish it. The speaker sees through her own Romanticism and yet still longs for it. She recognizes the attractiveness of the rose growing unnoticed from frozen ground, but she continues to imagine herself as the exiled poet and her lover as the muse accompanying her into a melancholy literary paradise.

So after considering your argument, I would modify my original judgment. I would no longer say the poem rises clearly above self-pity. Rather, it dramatizes a struggle between self-awareness and self-pity, and by the end the self-pitying impulse may actually have the last word. The poem knows the pose is a pose, but it loves the pose too much to abandon it.

———-

Me

One point here. If it were the case that the speaker knows that she cannot separate herself from self pity even as she understands and longs for an ideal, the red rose as artist thriving despite and indeed through diversity, then that abiding self awareness would rescue the poem. But the last verse seems to me an utter lapse into passive, melancholic, one might say melodramatic, and unaware escapism. There is to me no wry winking behind this last verse aware of this lapse and, so, having the implicit last self aware word.

————

C

I think that is a very plausible reading, and it gets at a distinction that is often overlooked: a poem about self-pity is not necessarily self-pitying, but a poem can become self-pitying if it loses critical distance from the emotion it depicts.

The question, then, is whether the final refrain retains any such distance. Your argument is that it does not. The opening lines establish a reflective consciousness capable of examining its own tendencies: “Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?” The speaker seems aware that she habitually turns herself into the heroine of her own sorrows. If that awareness remained active throughout the poem, then even the grand gestures toward exile, poetic death, and grief could be read as knowingly theatrical.

But the ending may be read as abandoning that perspective altogether. The speaker no longer asks whether her melancholy is romanticized; she simply inhabits it. “Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die” is not presented as a fantasy under examination but as a wish. “I don’t belong” is not interrogated. “Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry” is not challenged. The movement from “Take me” to “I’m setting off” introduces some agency, but it is agency directed toward withdrawal rather than engagement. The beloved becomes “my muse,” not a corrective to the fantasy but an accomplice in it.

Your point about the rose is especially telling. If the rose is indeed an image of artistic flourishing despite adverse conditions, then it embodies the opposite of the speaker’s desire. The rose does not flee the frozen ground; it grows from it. It does not require an audience; “no one around to tweet it.” It does not seek a sanctuary of poets and grief. It simply exists and blooms. In that sense, the rose may represent a vision of artistic integrity that the speaker momentarily glimpses but does not embrace.

On this reading, the poem’s final movement is not tragic self-awareness but regression. The speaker encounters an image that points beyond her self-dramatizing melancholy and then returns to precisely that melancholy. The conclusion does not expose the escapist fantasy; it recommits itself to it. If there is irony, it lies largely in earlier parts of the poem and not in the ending itself.

What makes your reading compelling is that it takes the final stanza seriously as a conclusion. Critics and readers sometimes privilege the poem’s most self-conscious moments and allow them to govern everything that follows. But endings matter. If the poem ends by affirming the fantasy rather than questioning it, then the burden falls on those who see continuing irony to show where it is operating. Simply pointing to the opening line may not be enough.

So I would put the issue this way: the strongest defense of the poem against the charge of self-pity is the presence of self-awareness earlier in the text. Your objection is that the poem finally ceases to exercise that self-awareness. If that is correct, then the ending is not a knowing performance of Romantic melancholy but a surrender to it. In that case, the poem’s last note is indeed passive, escapist, and melodramatic rather than critically reflective. That is a defensible literary judgment, and I think it follows naturally from taking the final refrain at face value rather than filtering it through the irony of the opening.

———

Me

Ok. Good exchange. I think we’ve helped each other along to a better understanding of these words and their aesthetic evaluation.

————-

C

I think so too. What I particularly appreciated about your reading was that it forced attention to the poem’s structure, not just its isolated lines. It is easy to point to the opening self-consciousness and conclude that the entire poem is governed by irony. Your insistence on asking what the ending is doing is a more rigorous critical move.

The rose image especially became more interesting to me through this discussion. Initially, I took it as evidence that the poem had enough self-awareness to prevent its melancholy from becoming merely self-indulgent. But your juxtaposition of the rose with the final refrain highlights a genuine tension. The rose flourishes where it is planted, unnoticed and unaffirmed; the speaker dreams of escape to a poetic elsewhere. The two impulses are not easily reconciled. If the poem were to endorse the rose’s example, one might expect a movement toward acceptance, endurance, or creative perseverance. Instead, it circles back to Windermere, tears, exclusion, and the beloved-as-muse.

What emerges for me is a more nuanced judgment than either “this is self-pitying” or “this is ironic.” The poem begins with an awareness of its own Romantic tendencies, briefly glimpses an alternative ideal of artistic flourishing, and then ends by embracing the Romantic fantasy anyway. 

Whether that final embrace is a flaw or an honest representation of a psychological reality is a further question. One could argue that people often do recognize healthier ideals and yet remain emotionally attached to less admirable ones. The poem may be true to that experience even if it is aesthetically vulnerable to the charge of self-indulgence.

In any case, your reading persuaded me that the ending deserves more weight than I initially gave it. A poem does not necessarily earn immunity from sentimentality merely because it exhibits self-awareness at the outset. Self-awareness has to remain active. If it disappears at the crucial moment, then the poem’s final emotional stance may indeed be the one by which it should largely be judged.

Thank you for the thoughtful challenge. These are the kinds of discussions that make literary interpretation rewarding: not simply deciding whether a poem is “good” or “bad,” but testing how its different images, tones, and structural choices support—or undermine—one another. In this case, I think we’ve arrived at a richer understanding of both the poem’s strengths and its possible weaknesses.

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