Maybe you read The Odyssey in school, and that process can turn Homer's epic adventure full of gods and monsters, magic and murder, love and some very bloody revenge into a pretty dry and dusty academic exercise.
Well, Christopher Nolan is here to remedy that.
The Odyssey is a sprawling, gorgeous, spectacular take on the material that's also...
Pure Hollywood bursting with big names like Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Zendaya.
I am Glenn Weldon.
Joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is my co-host, Stephen Thompson.
Hey, Stephen.
Hello, Glenn.
Also with us is the co-host of NPR's daily economics podcast, The Indicator, from Planet Money, Waylon Wong.
Hey, Waylon.
Hi, guys.
Also with us is writer and host of the film spotting podcast movie Deathmatch.
We saved him for last because he's going to do a bit.
Chris Klemek.
Hey, Chris.
Look at that horse.
Look at that horse.
Look at that horse, Glenn.
There you go.
Well, you all know the Odyssey.
There's this guy Odysseus, which is funny because it's like his name is Trip.
He was the hero of the Trojan War.
And now he's trying to get back home.
That's Matt Damon.
Specifically, he's trying to get back to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus.
They're played by Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland.
But he's been gone so long that dozens of men have taken up residence in his castle, feasting on his food and attempting to convince Penelope that she should marry one of them.
The guy campaigning the hardest is the oiliest and most sniveling of the bunch, Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson, of course.
Odysseus, meanwhile, can't seem to get home, and it's not like he doesn't stop to ask directions.
No, it's just that the Aegean Sea is a dangerous place full of cyclops and giant cannibal warriors and witches and sirens and nymphs and whirlpools.
And sea monsters.
The whole thing is filmed entirely in IMAX and clocks in at just under three hours.
Stephen, what'd you make of it?
Well, Glenn, you know, this summer on Pop Culture Happy Hour, I have been tasked with, you know, leading discussions of films such as Scary Movie.
Sure.
Jackass Best and Last.
Mm-hmm.
Minions and Monsters, the Moana remake.
And I had only one ask after I had covered all those films.
I said, just let me do this one.
Just something a little different.
Uh-huh.
And darned if it isn't a massive, sprawling, beautifully made, not entirely without flaws, but I found very enjoyable, epic adventure film that still felt true to what I had managed to glean from an early and failed attempt to read The Odyssey.
It felt true to the endless kind of echoes and reverberations of the various ways that this work has influenced thousands of other works.
This story felt, even though I had not been able to finish the Odyssey when I had tried to read it, the story still felt familiar, but in a fresh retelling.
Is it extremely loud?
Yeah.
It is a Christopher Nolan film.
Does that final battle go on a little longer than it needs to?
It's a Christopher Nolan film.
But I really, really enjoyed it.
I was swept away by it.
Not every performance fully resonated with me, but
Man, you know, everybody is somebody in this movie.
Every face is a familiar face.
It's true.
I found it to be gripping and interesting.
And I think it came to some really interesting ideas about regret and heroism.
There you go.
All right.
What about you, Waylon?
Oh, yeah.
I like this a lot.
I think it takes a little while to get going, but then I felt like once it locked in, then I was like all in and then the rest of it just absolutely flew by and it was completely riveted.
And I actually reread the poem very recently in preparation for this movie because I was so hyped for it.
And so I was constantly thinking back to the poem, which I had a great time reading.
And I really liked Christopher Nolan's treatment of the material.
I was very aware of what he had added and subtracted since I'd read it so recently.
But I think they were all really smart choices, kind of in support of the specific kind of story and the themes he wanted to bring out, which I really liked.
And in some ways, this is like...
Mm-hmm.
And I appreciate that the movie kind of looks that complexity in the face and does try to kind of really figure out who this guy is and what he wants.
So I really liked it.
Okay.
That's great.
Now, Chris, I don't want to say you're a Nolan apologist.
I don't want to say you're in the tank for Christopher Nolan.
That would be unfair to you.
I will just say you like Tenet a hell of a lot more than I did.
Sure do.
So what'd you make of this?
I love Tenet.
Thank you, Waylon.
Thank you, Waylon.
I mean, just because the guy has not only never made a bad movie, he's never even made a just okay movie.
He's never made a movie that I have only wanted to watch once.
Not in the tank.
The point being that even his quote unquote failures are utterly singular.
This is the kind of big weighty blockbuster that I like because it's the kind that no one else would have attempted.
They're not going to be like, oh, Nolan passed.
We need to get Sean Levy to do this.
Like, no, that's never happening.
You get Dennis Dugan.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yes, this does feel like the culmination of everything that he's done.
And more – I was thinking, Glenn, as we were watching this movie last night,
I know you and I – it might have been on this show, but like you – one of your knocks against the film adaptation of Cold Mountain a generation ago is like you didn't like that
Everyone we meet along the journey is a famous person, right?
It's like –
I think this has the inverse effect here because almost everyone in this cast are now part of the Christopher Nolan players.
And I love that.
I love that.
Like as with Wes Anderson, he has sort of developed a rep company of A-list stars as he's gone along to the point that I didn't even realize that like.
I mean, I knew the top line cast, but I didn't know that like Himesh Patel and Elliot Page would be coming back, right?
And we see them in the first minutes of this movie.
And just knowing that these are contemporary actors that we have other associations with.
I mean, dear God, how many movies is Zendaya in this year?
Anne Hathaway's in six movies this year, I think.
No one works harder.
Yeah, but I mean, I love that because that just kind of reinforces like it's the oral tradition.
You know, this is an old story that this generation of storytellers are telling to us.
And after we're long dead, but hopefully the planet and the species survive, depending on the outcome of Interstellar, I guess.
This story will still be told.
So yeah, this is what I want from a blockbuster.
This is what I want a auteur filmmaker who has the kind of access to funding and resources, the ability to get his way.
This is the kind of ambition that I want.
I'm very, very happy with this.
Okay.
I also think this is a terrific movie.
It is also exactly the Odyssey that I wanted.
And, you know, Chris, you'll remember, you reminded me last night, when this film was announced...
And it was announced that Christopher Nolan was making The Odyssey.
My take was him?
Because what's he going to do?
He's going to Nolan-esque it.
He's going to make it kind of grounded and dour.
He's going to leech all the fun, all the fantasy out of it.
He's given to a certain amount of cinematic sprawl and spectacle, but he is famously disinclined to the emotive side.
The expressionistic aspects of the human experience.
And it's stuff like wonder and awe and fantasy.
Like, rightly or wrong, we think of that as Spielberg's domain.
But this is the guy who turned the frickin' Batmobile into this brutalist doorstop.
I mean, Interstellar is a very emotive movie and the best performance of Matthew McConaughey's career by a lot.
You know, I mean, joke all you want about the meme of him, you know, watching his children grow up as a series of video messages.
But I don't think he's ever been better than in that movie.
Look, Interstellar was so long that when I came home, I had to fend off suitors who had amassed to steal my part.
The problem is that it didn't have a Muppet in it doing bits with Ryan Gosling, Steven.
I agree.
Here's the thing.
You can't do the Odyssey and take out the gods and monsters.
People have in 2024 The Return.
That's Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, Pasolini film.
They did it.
When you take the magic, the gods and monsters out of the Odyssey, what you're left with is a story about a deadbeat dad who goes out for some smokes and keeps driving.
It is boring.
It's classical antiquity Jerry Springer, and I don't want it.
I am delighted that he has kept the magic.
The gods and monsters are on the call sheet.
They are bringing everything they need to.
They're
Doing it with epic sweep and grandeur and to your point, Chris, budget.
This is a big-time Hollywood budget.
This movie is made to get butts in seats and keep them there for three hours.
I should add, though, it's more...
Monsters than gods
I think nolan's approach and we can't we're not going to spoil this but nolan's approach to involving the gods in this is the most i think classically nolan-esque thing about this film because it is very restrained and circumspect it is both logical and psychological and it's also i think one of the smartest things about this film
But the effect at the end is you've got
This old-school, cheesetastic, Saturday afternoon, swords and sandals, Ray Harryhausen, stop-motion skeletons.
But there's also modern tentpole action movie, Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood, with a bit of, I don't know, prestige.
Not the prestige, but like prestige...
It's kind of like stiff-backed.
I don't know.
There's something.
It's a grown-up film with some frickin' kick-ass sea monsters.
Glenn, he is very British.
He is a British man.
Yeah.
I mean, I love Dunkirk.
I think he should have won his directing Oscar for Dunkirk.
Oh, I thought he did such a good job on that film.
That quality that you are identifying is Britishness.
I like that at the end, it's basically like Jason Bourne returns to Ithaca.
It's really exciting.
The action is staged in such an exciting way.
And the lead up in the poem is also very exciting because Odysseus is like skulking around.
He's disguised.
You're just kind of waiting for all bedlam to break loose.
And then when it does, you're like, yeah.
Get the suitors.
And it happens in the movie, too.
And it's such a bloodbath, but it's so satisfying.
To Glenn's point earlier about the gods and monsters, I was kind of thinking about
Christopher Nolan sitting in front of like a dashboard of like dials you know and there's like a God's dial there's a monster's dial there's a humor dial right like all these like different things at his disposal that you can kind of crank up or down depending on how you want to interpret the Odyssey
And I was actually quite surprised by the fact that.
I think that God's dials like turned down a little bit more than I expected given what kind of presence they have in the poem.
And I like that kind of element of almost ambiguity it inserts that –
The movie is like a little skeptical of magic.
It's not skeptical of monsters.
Those definitely exist.
They're real existential threats.
But in terms of like, are there gods that are really like pulling the strings here and
You know, this issue of like, does Odysseus have free will or is he simply at the mercy of like Poseidon who's angry with him and not giving him favorable winds?
I actually think the movie kind of leaves that open ended and I really liked it.
Yeah, I think the film deploys gods really cleverly as a way to bring out the kind of thorny humanity in this story and to kind of assess the
The moral weight of the actions in this film.
We're not going to spoil it, but this film has this kind of Nolan-esque turn where you're kind of seeing something play out through a different prism.
I think that the humanity that comes out there, I found actually profound and really appreciated and kind of
Lent weight to this as more than just, we're going to put a bunch of epic flash and battles and money on the screen.
The fact that it's still boiled down to these very human ideas and the fact that gosh, darn it.
Christopher Nolan can just like make me cry about a dog.
Oh my gosh.
Just like two hours and 20 minutes into your movie.
Like all of a sudden I'm crying about a dog and then I'm like, oh, I'm not crying about the dog anymore.
Back to the action.
Can we talk about what I think is going to be the most divisive thing about this film, which is the performance of Matt Damon.
Oh, interesting.
Going into this film, I thought he was wildly miscast for the role of Odysseus.
Leaving this film, I thought he was wildly miscast for the role of Odysseus, but it worked.
I actually thought Damon was fine.
I mean, I think Damon is able to carry the weight that this character is carrying, and I think he's able to pull that off effectively.
For me, the performance I thought you were going to mention is Tom Holland.
Where I was never really able to forget that I was watching Tom Holland on the screen.
I didn't feel like he really got lost in that character the way others did.
Matt Damon, maybe I've just seen Matt Damon in so many movies over the course of so many years that he has become this kind of blank canvas.
I don't mean that as a knockoff.
I think he's versatile.
Waylon, check me on this.
This is what I'm talking about here.
Because in the poem, Odysseus exhibits one and only one singular trait.
He is cunning.
Over and over again, in slightly different ways, he uses his gif or gab to trick and to confuse.
He is a creature of intellect, of wit and cleverness and mostly guile.
And Damon, fine actor, not your go-to guy for guile.
Like solidness, yes.
Even a solid quality.
For Odysseus, you need a glint in the eye.
You need a rhinus, a knowing quality.
I mean, if we're looking around Clooney, that's Clooney's whole vibe is already Odysseus in the Hollywood Hills.
Like that's, that's like who he is.
You know, I'm going to split the difference on this, and I'm going to say that, yes, I agree with you, Glenn, that Odysseus is known for his cunningness and his trickery and his wit in the poem.
I think that Christopher Nolan was like,
My Odysseus is different.
He dialed down the trickiness, the cunningness, and the humor part of Odysseus.
Because Odysseus in the poem, he's very smart and clever, but sometimes he comes off as just like a huge jerk.
He's just kind of trolling people.
When he comes back to Ithaca in the poem, he even leads his dad on, his elderly father for a long time, and doesn't let him know he's actually Odysseus.
It's like, why would you do this to your dad when you've been gone for 20 years?
You're like, is this guy just...
Really mean?
And I think Christopher Nolan kind of discards that part of Odysseus and you see the cleverness when he's figuring out how to evade the Cyclops and that kind of thing, but that he really is more interested in exploring the kind of regret and remorse of Odysseus and the kind of
You know tortured soul within Odysseus
That's like I've done all these horrible things and I violated like the moral code of men and gods
I want to go home but like am I being punished and do I need to atone for the terrible things I've done even as I'm trying to get home
I think Christopher Nolan was like more interested in that question which is maybe why he cast Matt Damon in that role you know
And that's why it works because he's deconstructed Odysseus and reformed it to be a – and this is not a knock – a very conventional Hollywood hero with an uber conventional Hollywood narrative arc that involves the processing of guilt and remorse.
And that's what Matt Damon can do and does here and does it well so that he does things all the time in this movie that –
Homer's Odysseus wouldn't do, but Nolan's Odysseus, yeah.
And that's how I know it's working.
Because like, no, I buy this.
I buy this Odysseus.
I don't think it's Odysseus, but I buy this Odysseus.
Yeah, yeah.
Is there anything to say about the whole American accent?
It's one of the many, many things that a lot of people had a knee-jerk reaction to when the first trailers dropped.
Is there anything to say about that?
I literally did not care.
It did not bother me at all.
You know what might have bothered me?
If everybody had tried to do some kind of fakey fake old English accent.
To which I would refer any of the complainers to Wolfgang Peterson's Troy, the movie where they're like, well, it's ancient Greece, so we need Brad Pitt to try to sound like he's from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
That makes sense.
My favorite example of this is The Last Temptation of Christ, right?
The Scorsese movie, where it's like everybody just talks like that David Bowie sounds like David Bowie.
Harvey Keitel sounds like Harvey Keitel.
It's a D's and Do's.
And honestly, I think that's fine, except I think for whatever reason, Tom Holland stuck out to me as like, I'm just watching Peter Parker.
Oh, no.
Again, we have to acknowledge that the adoption of a British accent to emulate the real or imagined past is nothing but a convention.
There's no reason for it to exist.
To Americans, it makes it sound like there's a gloss on it that everybody's very heightened and removed.
But to Brits, it's always sounded like just, you know, oh, these are some posh jerks I went to school with.
There's nothing that separates it, right?
I mean, it's kind of ironic that Pattinson's American accent is better than the American accent of any of the British actors that Nolan put in his Batman movies.
They're doing the American accent the way that Brits always do.
They with the hard R, very nasal, yonder lies the castle of my dad.
That's kind of what they're doing here.
But I'm fine with it.
It goes away immediately.
You just don't notice it.
Well, we don't we don't have that many Brits here.
Right.
I mean, there's Samantha Morton.
Oh, yes.
Samantha Morton.
Yeah.
Can we talk about Circe for a second?
Because that sequence, I was like, oh, so now we've just entered a horror movie.
That was too scary.
All of a sudden, it was Evil Dead Rise.
So scary, but so well done.
The squelchy sound design of that scene.
I mean, that's cinema.
It was really scary, though.
I think you just nailed it, Waylon.
That's cinema.
That's what it felt like watching this movie.
Like I was watching it on a big screen.
That's A.
But B, like this is old school.
This is Hollywood, man.
This is what audiences need right now.
This is what the theater industry needs right now.
This is let's bring it.
That's what I feel.
Is anyone else troubled by the like the Holland Zendaya, John Bernthal triumvirate in this movie, which, you know, everyone who goes to see this is going to see a trailer for Spider-Man.
It's it's leaning more into that that reparatory company thing.
It's like it also playing this summer on alternate nights.
The same cast brings you Spider-Man.
No, I love it.
I mean, to your point earlier about how Nolan has developed this kind of repertory company, his like little troop of traveling actors, I think that actually does a lot here in terms of like Hamesh Patel, a face I love, an actor I love, that I really only see kind of pop up in,
Well, he was in Station Eleven, right?
Yeah.
But he pops up here as Odysseus' kind of seconding command.
I don't even remember his name, if his name is ever said.
But you kind of immediately trust him and are really, like, focused on this guy being like, oh, okay, like, he seems like a cool guy to follow.
And I think it's just because of the aura he's
Hamesh Patel brings to the screen based on what we know of him as like a Nolan player.
And I appreciate that shorthand.
I thought that was really cool.
You find his eyes in every scene that he's in.
He's such a compelling presence among Odysseus's men who you all know, you know, I'm going to get attached to each and every one of these dudes.
So, Stephen, the one thing I wanted to ask you about is the score.
It's not Hans Zimmer.
It is Ludwig Gorenson.
Any thoughts?
I mean, Gorenson is on an absolute winning streak.
This score is part of the kind of mammoth sound design of this film where you may actually have your fingers in your ears.
For stretches of it, Nolan makes loud movies.
And Goranson, man, top of his game.
I mean, just a gorgeous, big, sweeping, but still surprising, still taking these interesting tonal shifts.
And I was sort of fascinated with the way that it pivoted into an original song at the end.
I wasn't looking for an original song.
Yeah, me neither.
It's James Blake with Travis Scott.
Travis Scott, the first face you see in this film.
My initial reaction to it was like, what an interesting combination of vibes.
I haven't gone back and listened to that song again and again.
But I think it fits the grandeur and vibe of the film.
And I always love hearing what James Blake does.
All right, this is one of those times when we all really dug it.
And sometimes that makes for, you know, kind of a one-note conversation.
This one was really good because we all, for different reasons, are telling you, go and see this film in the dang theater if you can.
My God, it's such a great experience.
It's such a great old-school movie-going experience.
Up next...
What is making us happy this week?
Now it's time for our favorite segment of this week.
And every week, what is making us happy this week?
Waylon Wong, kick us off.
Okay, I'm here to recommend a content creator on TikTok called Jenna Anderson.
Her handle is Jenna Sequa.
And I don't know how much of the audience, like Nolan head audience, is also interested in High School Musical, but I am.
And she had this really, really fun video that my algorithm served me where...
She talks about the Marxist themes in High School Musical 2 and she walks through them very methodically and kind of, yeah, like links everything back to Marx and talks about like class struggle and like is the kind of the weakest Marxist argument of this film that class struggle can be resolved with a talent show.
It's really delightful.
I actually learned a ton and it supports my kind of overarching theory, which is that every text is an economic text.
And so that includes High School Musical 2.
So you should check out this video by Jenna Sequa on TikTok about the Marxist themes in High School Musical 2.
That is a great and very you pick.
I love that.
All right, Chris Klimek, what is making you happy this week?
What's making me happy is Isaac Butler's new book, The Perfect Moment.
This is about the, I don't know what phase of the culture wars we would call it, you know, through the Reagan era.
And this really centers around the fight around 1990 or so to reauthorize the NEA, you know, after controversies arose over like Robert Mapplethorpe.
This is an era of history that I thought I knew all about, and really, reading this book, I knew two paragraphs deep.
This is a fascinating, well-researched, well-reported cultural history written with a sense of drive
And suspense.
That taught me a lot about these events from 35, 40 years ago and how they continue to echo now.
So again, the book is The Perfect Moment by Isaac Butler.
I recommend it.
Great pick.
Thank you very much, Chris.
Stephen Thompson, what's making you happy this week?
Well, we just spoke about one high-minded literary adaptation.
Ancient Greek texts are my passion.
I wanted to pick something that carries, you know, similar cultural weight.
So I wanted to talk about the 28th season of Big Brother, which just premiered.
Remarkable parallels to The Odyssey.
The Odyssey has its grand quest and its trials and wars and sirens and whatnot in Big Brother.
Brings together, in this case, 17 players, locks them in a house, and surveils their every move while they scheme and plot against each other and are also very bored.
Big Brother has long been the distant third best CBS reality show after Survivor and The Amazing Race.
Okay.
This show is perfect to have on while I fold laundry, while I pay bills, while I noodle on my phone.
It engages roughly 32% of my brain when it's on.
So that is The Return of Big Brother, a show I will definitely watch for at least a few weeks if you love The Odyssey.
You will also find that Big Brother is a show available to watch on TV.
All right.
It's on CBS.
You can stream it on Paramount+.
On Christopher Nolan's favorite medium, terrestrial broadcast television.
I was going to say, these are all on-brand picks.
Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson.
All right, what's making me happy this week?
Upcycled Vintage Art is an Instagram account in which an artist finds some old art.
Usually the kind of, you know, thrift shop landscapes that somebody originally bought because their colors match the couch, right?
You know what I'm talking about.
Those kind of bland...
Scenery, seascapes, whatever.
She takes the art, the painting.
She matches the colors exactly.
She matches the style, the approach exactly.
She also matches the patina, the aging on the art.
And she adds...
Maybe a dragon, maybe an ant, maybe a hobbit.
Some element of fantasy that blends in so perfectly with the original in such a subdued, very skillful way.
That it looks like it's always been in that painting.
It is a great idea, and it is so perfectly realized, so perfectly executed, that it is an endless source of fun.
That is Upcycled Vintage Art by Heather Castles, and you can find that on Instagram.
And that is what is making me happy this week.
If you want links for what we recommended, plus some more recommendations, sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash pop culture newsletter.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Waylon Wong, Chris Klimek, Stephen Thompson, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you, Glenn.
Thank you.
This episode was produced by Hafsa Fatima, Lennon Sherburn, and Mike Katziff, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.
And Hello, Come In provides our theme music.
Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next week.
It should be Edith Piaf.
I only just learned that the bong, it is that same Edith Piaf song that we hear throughout Inception, just like slowed down to like one one hundredth speed.
The best.
The best.
