HOMER’S EPIC POEM GIVEN EPIC SWEEP BY FILM MASTER

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Greek mythology meshes with real time war, history with song, and poem with film.

A lot of the bones of this story survived orally, until humanity mastered writing, and storytelling through song gave way to written poems.

The Odyssey may have been the first written epic poem.

Now images on film tell the stories, and director Christopher Nolan helps modern civilization remember the heroic tales of the past with the truth, the lies and the fantasy of the present and near future.

In Odyssey (2025) Nolan takes the epic Greek poem by Homer and attempts to do justice to the truth of the tales – while not only honouring Zues and Poseidon, but ancient Greek and present day humanity.

Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, has conquered Troy but he has lost the ability to return to his Kingdom of Ithaka. In the real world, Ithaka is a rugged island within the Greek empire, and Troy is within the Ottoman Empire, found in an archeological dig on the coast of modern day Turkey.

Homer makes the difficult decision to leave his kingdom, wife and young son for what is certain to be a long drawn out war under the command of Agamemnon. Historicists suggest that the Trojan War occurring around 1200 BC only took a few weeks, whereas Homer describes a ten year war.

Now ten year wars were not uncommon in the sword and sandal era of warfare, with the Crusades taking many years, and the Anglo-French war dragging on for over one hundred years in 1200 AD.

Nolan uses a 2 h 52 m runtime to tell the story of all stories, perhaps the founding story of present day humanity inherited from Ancient Greece.

The ensemble cast assembled around Odysseus includes Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson, Polubus, played by Corey Hawkins, the son of Odysseus, Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, and the wife of Odysseus, Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway.

The sweeping epic film begins with the telling by the Bard, played by Travis Scott, as Nolan tips the camera to the oral tradition of singing the epic poem as opposed to reading the stories of the Trojan War. And Nolan’s newest trick is making the narrative float like the words and rhythm of a song.

Zendaya has recurring scenes as Athena, the daughter of Zeus, as the story revisits characters and themes like a song will repeat in a predictable rhythm. Athena appears only momentarily to give Odysseus guidance so as to prevent him from becoming eternally lost.

And Charlize Theron plays Calypso who has tricked Odysseus into remaining with her for 7 years, as part of Odysseus’ 10 year journey home to Ithaka. The long journey home is explained in part by Calypso finding Odysseus adrift in the sea and subsequently nursing him back to health.

The narrative involves several stories told by the characters that merge together as if part of the protagonists’ streaming contributions to the collective consciousness. Damon, for example, is tasked with telling the stories of being recruited to join the Trojan War, and then the story of the sack of Troy and subsequent return home.

Nolan has Odysseus telling these stories in the past tense to Calypso as Odysseus begins to regain his memory and understand that he had been on a journey home to his wife and son, before disaster struck his ship.

The other three years journey home involves difficulties with the tides and the wind on a ship that depends on wind in the sail for propulsion, as well as the need to obtain provisions, such as food and water for the next sea leg in the journey home.

The ship is an open sailing ship without the galley typically found in seaworthy sailing ships designed for much longer travels two millennia later.

Each trip ashore for food and water becomes a reiteration of humanity’s greatest struggles to have competing societies live in peace and harmony.

In Homer’s telling, under the eye of the Greek God’s, reservations toward strangers in different societies becomes a clash of wills between humanity and monsters.

Damon shows how Oddysseus’ difficulty in getting home may be in the form of punishment by the God’s for sacrificing his family and many lives for the cause of a distant war. Elliot Page plays one of the many haunting ghosts, Sinon.

Ludwig Goransson composes a score for the film. And Nolan uses the score to drive every scene, similarly to the use of a score in the Batman Trilogy (2005-2008-2012) scored by Hans Zimmer, and Oppenheimer (2023) also scored by Goransson, with a dark pounding score communicating as much, if not more, at times than the actors and actions being portrayed on screen.

Damon undertakes a physical transformation, simultaneously losing body fat while gaining muscle mass for several scenes as one of the greatest sword and sandal warriors. Damon also has a bit of an acting renaissance, obviously being pushed by Nolan’s magic film formula to provide more, and at times, uncommon acting art for the movie Gods.

Even the actors in reserve seem to be compelled to produce a scene stealing splash of acting, such as John Leguiamo as Eumaeus, the blind loyalist in the Ithaka court, and Jon Berthal as Menelaus, and Lupita Nyong’o as the twin sisters Helen and Clytemnestra.

Hathaway, who also played Selina in Nolan’s Batman, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and  Brand in Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), flourishes in The Odyssey as Penelope, occasionally dropping an intertextual acting reference to Selina and Brand.

The loyalty of Ithaka’s Queen, still waiting for the return of her King after 20 years, is juxtaposed with an increasing exasperation just as the suitors become impatient and Odysseus gets that much closer to home.

Hathaway and Holland play off each other in several scenes. Holland portrays the son of Odysseus and Penelope as a bit fearful of the group of 108 drunken suitors eating in his father’s banquet hall every night, while also becoming emboldened to end the drama and become King as heir apparent.

Homer was the greatest of Greek poets whose songs were repeated for centuries in every Greek household as part of the historical cultural record of the ancient civilization.

Nolan does service to Homer and the Greeks by creating a cinematic masterpiece that will undoubtable dominate the summer box office and benefit from a number of reiterations going forward into the near future.

NOLAN PLAYS TRICKS BY BENDING TIME AND SPACE

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The mind can often be a soft bag of tricks. And the closer one looks inside the more often an even deeper mystery can be found.

The filmmaking of director Christopher Nolan explores the truth and lies the mind can project onto reality, with characters often lured into moments of unsuspecting trouble with a bit of psychodrama.

This projected storytelling deals in the nuances that the brain processes – such as the changing perceptions of time and space, in light and shadow, not just in memories, but in movie real time.

The director’s lens captures existence as a hodge podge of real and imagined images assembled through a labyrinth of storylines. This understanding of memory and dreams is an integral part of surviving reality.

Nolan’s exploration of the inner storyboard begins with Momento (2000).

Guy Pearce plays Leonard, a protagonist with no short term memory, who is tasked by his deep past with hunting down a mystery man involved in his wife’s murder during a home invasion. 

The narrative is complicated because Leonard cannot remember his hotel room number let alone whether or not he has already caught his wife’s killer.

Leonard is stuck in a perpetual short term memory loop.

Carrie-Anne Moss plays the unforgettable love interest, whom Leonard impossibly cannot remember either, even after spending the night together with her.

Just two years later, in Insomnia (2002) Al Pacino portrays a Los Angeles police detective called to duty in the endless daylight of the Alaskan summer months.

Nolan draws a parallel between the detective’s guilty conscience and the bright nights of the far north as reason enough to lay eyes wide open awake at night.

Dreams are simultaneously more real and more fantastical than any comic book.

The Nolan journey into filmmaking began at the tender age of 8 when he received from his father a Super 8 camera. The young creative constructed sets from egg cartons and empty toilet paper rolls, while using stop motion techniques with his Star Wars figurines.

The director would even toss his mother’s baking flour into the air to mimic the smoke from explosions.

These early beginnings in the primitive studio lot constructed on the family’s ping pong table as a child cinematic star led to studies on film about guilt, false consciousness and denial, and all the subtle psychological quirks that complicate life and meaning. 

Nolan then goes on to create narrative devices for blockbuster filmmaking by combining the labyrinth of the mind with the set designs involving city architecture and the rugged landscapes.

The anvil of the plot often becomes not so much an exploding set ablaze by action heroes as the character deconstructing psychologically, and then overcoming a moral conundrum to emerge again into a state of grace.

The mystery of a guilty conscience pales in comparison to Nolan’s storytelling accented with the masks and mystery of DC Comics when the director is chosen to steward the Batman reboot. 

The Dark Knight Trilogy follows protagonist Bruce Wayne along a much darker journey of self-discovery that initially is enlightening for him, but then eventually, that sense of adventure and personal exploration leads to a confrontation with death.

Christian Bale stars as Batman for all three films in the trilogy, as Nolan creates a continuous story in part by recasting the same protagonists. The interest in the storyline is increased exponentially from installment to installment with how Batman will respond to deeper, more complicated villains living in darker realities.

Wayne initially is set off by a confrontation with Gotham City’s drug lords. The young mind escapes mob control by choosing a self imposed exile where he is given opportunities to find clarity.

Eventually Wayne must choose right from wrong. One choice causes tremendous inner harm, while the other choice subjects him to tremendous physical risk from a future nemesis.

Liam Neeson as Ducard, the vigilante, gives way to Heath Ledger as the Joker, the criminally insane, who gives way to Tom Hardy as Bane, the terrorist. Nolan adds secondary characters who are less villainess personalities and more people who have become corrupted by the harsh street reality of megacities, such as Dr. Crane played by Cillian Murphy, Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart, Selina played by Anne Hathaway, and Miranda played Marion Cotillard.

In Inception (2010) the competing memories inside dreams, and the extraordinary ability to consciously change dreams, seems too complicated to be captured on film. But Nolan uses a didactic dialogue to explain the reason why and how various realities are merging on screen, and who is real and who is just a dream, even though the characters are not always so sure themselves.

For inception, Nolan recreates the cast of the third installment of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Returns (2012), with some exceptions, such as putting Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role and replacing the comic book nightmare with the psychoanalysis behind dreams. 

Marion Cotillard, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, and Michael Caine are all recast. In this way, Nolan’s filmmaking becomes simultaneously intertextual and self-referential, as if the director looked inside himself to find a movie about the ability to alter destinies through the manipulation of dreamscapes.

The characters find their way through multiple plot lines fragmented by various time schemes to show how memory and dreams create a unique perception.

Nolan finds the eccentric character performances of Murphy a good fit with the director’s particular telling of the inner nuances of the mind. Nolan first casts Murphy as the unethical psychiatrist in the Batman Dark Knight Trilogy and then as the victim of dream manipulation in the science fiction fantasy masterpiece, Inception.

In Dunkirk (2017) Nolan cast Murphy as the depiction of human frailty, playing a shell shocked survivor escaping the beaches off the French coast as the German Army storms across the continent to occupy Paris.

Nolan illustrates the inner strength of the retreating English by providing example after example of individuals overcoming adversity – that often poses to be insurmountable adversity.

Nolan also taps the mind of physicists when depicting the time and memory relativities of space travel in Interstellar (2014), starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. 

Nolan depicts the time folds within the mind – but also the less subtle decisions that bend this way or that way along the moral divide. Humanity is portrayed dancing unknowingly with time hiding behind bookcases.

The realistic storytelling, even in comic book land, is compelled by a narrative device pulled from the deep subconscious where good and evil compete for dominance.

Murphy is cast again by Nolan to play J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project leader in the development of the atomic bomb for the United States military, in the biopic Oppenheimer (2023).

The camera follows the development of the first nuclear weapon in parallel with the collapsing consciousness of the scientists involved. The genius of invention fragments into argument as all involved begin to question the impact on humanity of what they are working on.

An even larger ensemble cast than previously used allows Nolan to bend the plotlines a bit more into an extra dimension, with characters filling in the added scene sequences with very particular artistic contributions.

Emily Blunt, for example, plays Oppenheimer’s wife, while Florence Pugh plays Oppenheimer’s lover who he knew before he was married. This multi-dimension love interest adds tension to the scientific method.

Love and nuclear fusion may have a lot in common other than the people involved.

SFF(Biopics) 2024 CHRISTOPHER NOLAN WINNER (FIRST 9)(DIRECTOR)(FILM)(OVERALL VISION)

SFF(Biopics) 2023 CHRISTOPHER NOLAN WINNER (ICONIC MOVIES)

MURPHY DELIVERS LACONIC PERFORMANCE FOR MASTER

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Christopher Nolan uses the splitting of atoms as a narrative device in this compelling biopic about the nuclear physicist behind the invention of the atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico was meant to design a weapon that would bring an abrupt end to the long and gruesome carnage of World War II.

Cillian Murphy provides another laconic performance, this time in the lead role as nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, part of an ensemble cast of talented actors that includes Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr and Jason Clark as special counsel Roger Robb. These established performers are then supported by a number of actors performing the roles of nuclear physicists known and unknown around the world at the time, such as Tom Conti, working with the aid of the hair and make-up department, as Albert Einstein.

Robert Downey Jr has a substantial role in the back story as Lewis Strass, a colleague and admirer of Oppenheimer who incrementally becomes an adversary by 1954.

Hair and make-up have a role throughout the film as the 3 hour runtime ages the characters through several stages in life experienced along the way.

Murphy humanizes Oppenheimer who was well known at the time, literally appearing on the cover of Time Magazine, but whose iconic stature has slipped into the many fissures of historical time since then.

Nolan explores the reasons for this marginalization, as part of the overall vision for the film, in typical Nolan fashion, throwing on layers upon layers of esoteric information presented for a broader audience often with the use of aesthetics.

The score provides significant energy to the narrative throughout the film which allows Nolan to develop the characters and the script with the use of thoughtful dialogue without the film falling flat. Scenes filled with deeper dialogue that might otherwise drop away are pushed forward with the score.

Scenes also oscillate between long scenes and short scenes as well as short scenes interchanging between the main narrative and the back story, sometimes creating uncertainty as to which is which, but overall providing kinetic energy to move the narrative forward. The three hour runtime moves quickly as a result.

The initial scene sequences create a bit of exasperation as the back story about an inquiry into whether Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be renewed drags on a bit until you beg the question just when the director is going to ‘get on with it’ and start telling the story everybody came to the theatre to watch.

Murphy humanizes the famous physicist as much as he can by having a passion for love and family as Americans were encouraged to do in the 1940s and 1950s. But Oppenheimer is motivated by physics and nuclear science as much if not more than Kitty and his two children.

Similarly to Inception  (2010) in which Nolan explores dreams and time within dreams, the aesthetics used in depicting transcendental realities becomes one of several elements that complement the characters on their journeys along the narrative line.

Nolan also keeps the camera moving, and as a result, like the atom being split, the narrative becomes a series of unique compositions, with nearly every scene being different with an ever changing tone and atmosphere to the overall film project.

All of this great imagination being crystalized in story boards and then film footage, is edited well together under the supervision of a clearly master filmmaker infusing all his experience and dedication to the art of cinema in telling the story of the biopic character. Americana never looked so good in this capture by the meticulous camera hand, and objective eye of a non-American filmmaker with an international cast of actors.

Murphy captures the leading American physicist in his fanaticism about science, space and the matter of substances. Oppenheimer, like many scientists, believed that science not humanism could end global conflict only to discover the achievements in science can be used just as quickly for evil as for good.

The development of the atomic bomb exemplifies the debate in many scientific journeys that unleash the power and magic of God only to discover that humanism may manipulate what has been discovered to a very myopic end.

Kenneth Branagh plays an enigmatic scientist with a very clinical view of the world but who is also possessed with the confidence of a person believing in the ability to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Branagh previously played Victor Frankenstein in the retelling of Mary Shelley’s 19^th Century Gothic novel (1818) about medical science, in the film Frankenstein (1994).

Emily Blunt puts on a character specific mask to her design of an assertive, independent female protagonist that self-medicates the emotional difficulties encountered in life with alcohol.

Kitty has the botanist’s clinical ability to assess situations. But both Kitty and Robert love and want to live with love and children and find a way to make family life work in and around their scientific obsessions.

Nolan had created a below the grid long gradual incremental promotional campaign for the film that began with early releases about his next film project and which actors had answered the casting call. Unfortunately, the film release date was announced well in advance, and the premiers eventually became hijacked by other films being released on, in and around those release dates.

Oppenheimer is well worth the trip to the movie theatre.