The Odyssey (5/5 Stars)

There is a primal quality to this most ancient of tales. It speaks to a deep seated fear of the ancient traveler, that these things you have, your wife, your family, your property, your place in the community, can be taken away by usurpers behind your back as soon as you are far enough away to be unable to defend them. What makes men respect the possessions of a man called to war across the sea, where fate and/or chance can delay or prevent his return. Well, there is this most well known and oft-told story of a hero of the Trojan War, one Odysseus, King of Ithaca, who was lost for almost ten years after the Fall of Troy (gone from home home twenty years in total), but did indeed come back, stronger than ever, and with vengeance for all those who sought to take advantage of his absence.

The Odyssey is a long convoluted tale with a lot of different set pieces. I believe it would be exceedingly difficult to parse this ancient material, honor those elements that are famous, and keep a core through-line. Christopher Nolan’s masterful adaptation not only does this, but adds material that enhances and develops his themes, making the movie version of the story, in important ways, superior to the original text. This movie is not only easier to follow, it means more, because it knows better what the story is about than the original text (or it is at least clearer what Nolan wants the story to mean).

Everyone knows the various encounters that disrupt Odysseus’s return home, the island of the cyclops, the sirens, Charbydis and Scylla. In many tellings, these well-known set pieces overwhelm the scenes at home because, in Ithaca, there is no action, just subtle political intrigue. The strength of this movie comes from Nolan’s focus on first establishing the Ithaca subplot, developing it in an important and dramatic scene in the center of the movie (in the Land of the Dead), and then paying those scenes off in the climatic ending.

How Nolan does this is entirely his addition to the story. He adds two characters not in the original text. In the beginning they are teenage boys, subject to the Ithaca draft for the Trojan War. One, Antinious, draws the short straw, but since he is the only son of his family, Odysseus (Matt Damon) allows another boy, Sinon, to take his place. Antinious promises to Sinon to take care of his family while he is gone.

At the end of the Trojan War, Antinious (Robert Pattinson), we learn, has broken his vow to Sinon and not taken care of his family. Indeed, we find him squatting with a bunch of other suitors in the home of Odysseus, putting pressure on his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) to choose another husband. The situation is fraught with danger. Penelope intuits, I think correctly, that any man she chooses to be her husband would eventually see her son (Tom Holland) as a political threat and kill him. And she can’t just crown her son the king, because, not being of age, he again, would be a target for assassination. The best thing she can do is what she does here, proclaim her confidence in her lost husband’s survival and stall for time. Realistically, she can only do this until her son comes of age. Then her son will have to claim the throne and all hell will break loose.

Sinon (Elliot Page) dies at the beginning of the movie (i.e. the end of the Trojan War), but comes back onto the screen at the midway point in the Land of the Dead to warn Odysseus of the dangers at home. He speaks of Antinious' pledge to support his father and how, when he showed up in the Land of the Dead, his father was the first to greet him. Sinon provides Odysseus a token that Antinious will recognize as the promises he didn’t keep. This exchange is paid off handsomely in the final scenes. Again, there is nothing in the book that provides the character arcs of these two added figures. In the text, Odysseus doesn’t know any of the suitors by name. Nolan added Sinon and Antinious and they do much to hold together the frame of the movie while Odysseus goes on his many journeys between the flagposts.

It is also a testament to Nolan that he puts much effort into strengthening the weaker segments of the journey, as opposed to omitting them entirely or gliding over them, so that all scenes have their merit (a good idea in a 3-hour movie). A particularly good example is Odysseus' encounter with the land of the giant cannibals. The text is unsatisfying. Odysseus loses the majority of his men, and all of his ships but one, in the space of a few pages against a foe with no special characteristics. In the movie, these beings have been transformed into truly terrifying armor-plated giants that have mystifying control over the forest they dwell in. They look so cool, that this usually forgotten part of the story is being used for the movie poster. The scene is also a good example of Nolan’s use of practical effects as opposed to digital trickery. (It involves casting 7 foot tall actors as the giants, and using a 4 ft 11 inch stunt double for Matt Damon. An old Hollywood trick)

The world of 1000 B.C. was an unforgiving place, and within that unforgiving place was an even more unforgiving element, sea travel. One could see a person off on a sea voyage and not only have no idea if they would ever come back, but really have no idea of what actually befell them when or where. Once the boat passed the horizon literally anything could have happened to them. On the open sea/ocean, there are no witnesses. It is no surprise that in Shakespeare there is a consistent trope of shipwrecks and miraculous survivals. Since there was no way to tell if someone died in a shipwreck, there always existed some hope that they could come back someday. This primal hope of the return is as deep-seated as the fear of the traveller mentioned above.

The solution to this anxiety is to instill in society a “Golden Rule” culture, which extends hospitality to strangers. In turn, those strangers are to respect the house and possessions of those extending the hospitality. In The Odyssey, this is known as “Zeus’s Law” and it is mentioned frequently in the movie. Nolan adds one more thing that the writers of the Odyssey could not have possibly known. The story was born in a period of darkness, between the collapse of the Golden Age of Egypt and the Near East (of which Troy was a principal city) around 1100 B.C. and the revitalization of Ancient Greece, circa 600 B.C. One of the cited causes of this first dark age were invasions by “Sea Peoples”. (This phrase comes from contemporaneous Egyptian Heiroglyphs). Nolan makes a connection that the original Trojan Horse is a violation of Zeus’ law since it takes advantage of hospitality, and also makes a connection that the sack of Troy is an invasion by “Sea Peoples”. This is not ahistorical per se (the Mycenaeans did invade by ship) but it would certainly be a surprise to the Mycenaeans to be described as such. Nor would anyone in Ancient Greece conclude that the Trojan Horse was a harbinger and/or the cause of the dark times to come. Instead, they celebrated Odysseus’ cunning. Again, this is an addition by Nolan, but it is not unwelcome. Really the most satisfying element in this movie is Nolan’s ability to meld modern morals onto this ancient tale and still keep and earn its climatic ending, that most primal of cautionary tales. I bet this tale lasts another 1000 years.

Mickey17 (3/5 Stars)

A “Straw Man Argument” is a logical fallacy where an opposite position is distorted into an extreme version and then argued against. Instead of addressing the actual argument, a straw man argument presents a simplified or false version of the opponent’s stance.

Science fiction polemics, by their very nature, are straw man arguments. Because they take place in the future, the proponent gets to lay the groundwork for several hundred (maybe thousands) of years of distortion by making the audience assume that across the vastness of time and space the opposite argument when enacted into policy will naturally result in an inevitable and disastrous slope towards dystopia.

Here, in writer/director Bong Joon-Ho’s newest movie, Mickey 17, we are introduced to a world where the world is beset by environmental destruction and rampant organized crime. The remainder of the human race desperately seeks to leave a doomed Earth for a distant planet. A buffoonish politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his Machiavellian wife (Toni Collette) lay on thick plans of cultish demagoguery for the new settlement, which an utterly naive populace consumes without a hint of critical thought. One especially pitiful creature, Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) signs up to be an expendable, which apparently is a category of human being that agrees to be cloned for the purpose of suicidal tasks that range from being exposed to radiation, to being a test subject for biological weapons, to being a guinea pig for the development of vaccines. We are introduced to Mickey 17, who provides an elongated voiceover explanation as to the gruesome fate of versions 1-16.

For various reasons that need even more elongated voiceover explanation, this particular spaceship can only have one expendable on it, so Mickey is tasked with every single suicidal task the mission requires. He’s a great help. Indeed by his multiple sacrifices he saves many lives and is hard to imagine the mission succeeding at all without him. You would think these people would be grateful. But they aren’t, because apparently the future is full of shitheads. (Except for the one black woman. Black women, as we all ought to know, are magic negroes imbued with a sense of heightened morality brought upon by the extreme intersectionality of their historic victimhood).  They treat him as if everyone was still in grade school and he came to class with the wrong kind of shoes. I don’t think Mickey Barnes is even being paid.

Would society in the future actually not care about the experience of cloned people? Would we treat them as second class citizens? I ask you, given the world as it is today, why that would be a probable outcome? There have been many science fiction books and movies about cloned people. Can you think of one example where the author isn’t sympathetic to their plight? Do you hear anyone today arguing that clones might be a decent source of cheap slave labor? Wouldn't it be odd if our culture in the 20th-21st Century started out uniformly sympathetic towards clones and then turned with uniformed antipathy against them sometime in the future? And yet, in every single one of these science fiction books and movies, the creator assumes that this will be the case. If there is basically no one with antipathy against clones today, who exactly is Bong Joon-Ho arguing with here?

The answer I don’t think is any one segment of society that actually has antipathy towards clones. I believe Bong Joon-Ho’s argument is against capitalism and he is setting his scene way far into the future to suggest an inevitable outcome of the march of capitalism towards some dystopia where the lives of human beings become valueless in the face of corporations or contracts. It is telling that he wouldn’t be able to make that argument today, since all that has occurred since the introduction of capitalism as a ruling orthodoxy in society (starting say in England circa the Industrial Revolution) is the steady democratization of political power, an exponential rise in the standard of living, and the universal acceptance of human rights, at least in societies that use capitalism. There are still plenty of places that do not have capitalism, and the people there remain slaves to power monopolies. I’m not sure why Bong Joon-Ho, if he is so concerned about the plight of humans, can’t direct a satiric gaze at North Korea, the totalitarian state across the border, where people are treated like animals as we speak, not far off in the distant future.

One of the more influential pieces of culture in the past few years to originate from South Korea was Squid Game, a contemporary story about a group of capitalistic elites (mainly composed of gay texans and at least one Chinese man) pit debt-laden and put-upon South Koreans against each other in fights-to-the-death. Have any of these people ever heard of North Korea? Squid Game could take place there, except of course, for the prize money element.

Mickey 17 draws parallels (and maybe inspiration) from a better movie about science fiction clones. That would be 2009's Moon by Duncan Jones starring Sam Rockwell. That is a much better critique of capitalism. The main difference is that the original Sam Rockwell astronaut sold his genetic material to a corporation and gave them the permission to use and dispose of his clones on a remote lunar base. In that movie, the original guy is sitting at home getting paid for the work his clones are performing. His clones, although expendable and not privy to the truth, are treated with a nominal amount of respect. No one goes out of their way to insult them and the robot on the base is programmed to be helpful. It is a much more interesting take on the subject since it is much closer to an actual moral quandary that someday could occur.

Moon came out in 2009. At the time, it was impressive to see Sam Rockwell interact with himself on screen. In 2025, although I enjoyed the performance of Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, I am no longer impressed all that much by seeing two of the same actor interact with himself. It’s not all that much of a novelty any longer. It is always nice to see Steven Yeun show up in a movie. It would have been better if he was around longer and was more important to the plot. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette ham it up as real idiots and that go about doing real stupid things. One wonders how they could ever be put in charge of anything, and then one remembers that this takes place in the dystopic future where everything is possible.

Has it really been six years since Bong Joon-Ho made his previous film, the great Parasite. Do you notice the integral difference between that movie and this one? Parasite takes place in the present day. So, to make it believable, there couldn't be the underhanded straw man cheating that is possible in science fiction movies. Joon-Ho was forced to present characters that would be believable in our time. That constraint made for a much better movie. He should do more of that and, please, more often.

TENET (3/5 Stars)

 

Boy, do I miss movie theaters. If there ever was a type of movie that necessitated big screen viewing, it would be a Christopher Nolan movie (The Dark Knight, Inception, Dunkirk). He specializes in IMAX photography and elaborate action sequences. He has not made a small movie for over a decade, the last being The Prestige in 2006. When I set out to watch Tenet, an original spy thriller (as opposed to the 26^th installment of James Bond or the 8^th Mission Impossible which was itself a remake of a TV series), I tried to see it on the largest screen possible, a big TV at a friend’s house. Terrible choice. Phones rang, people talked throughout, a young child spent half the time screaming and running around. It was hard to concentrate. By the second half of the movie, I had no idea what was going on.

 

Recently, I tried to see it again, late at night and very few other people around. Unfortunately, I still cannot say I completely understand the movie. I guestimate I am about 2/3rds into understanding. It is complicated. The downside of originality of course is that you are showing something new.

 

Tenet involves objects with reversed entropy. They are inverted in time. Now, the way human’s experience entropy is the progression of time in the presence and always going forward. When an object is inverted, it appears to the human to be going backwards in time. A sort of helpful example is an inverted wall that holds many inverted bullets. A character known only as the Protagonist (“John David Washington”) aims a gun at the inverted wall and the inverted bullet is shot out of the walled and is caught by the gun in the Protagonist’s hand. That is as simple as the temporal acrobatics get. Other temporal acrobatics include: fistfights, car chases, a heist, a military operation known as a temporal pincer move. These are incredible sight, but underneath the surface there remains a nagging question: What on earth am I watching?

 

I think a large problem this movie has is not that it introduces this wacky idea about inverted entropy, it is that the rest of the story is highly obscure. For instance, we do not know the main character’s name or anything about him. We do no know who is sending these inverted objects back through time or why they are doing so. The movie globetrots around the planet from London, to India, to Monaco, to Russia. It is hard to get a solid footing at any one place. All the characters are new and they speak like spies, that is, in vaguely threatening tones. I like to think I am a perceptive viewer, and I take as evidence that my understanding of previous Christopher Nolan films with their myriad temporal and structural complexities. Figuring out the puzzle is something I usually enjoy. Tenet is just one level too much. There are times when I think about this movie, and I remember a scene that doesn’t quite make sense and I’m not sure if there is an explanation somewhere or is it just sloppy storytelling and there actually is no explanation, perhaps the opening scene which involved an inverted bullet. Am I too know where that inverted bullet comes from? How did it get there? Now, I have seen the movie twice, and I still am not certain of it. I think two viewings are enough to conclude a movie is indeed confusing and not merely complex.

 

A fun thing about Christopher Nolan movies is that they sometimes are windows into the toys of the very very rich. I recall seeing Inception and being impressed very expensive suits of everyone in the first class section of the international flight. Here, we are introduced to a “Freeport”, which is where rich people store paintings to avoid taxes. Robert Pattinson walks around it in a very expensive suit and looks more adult than I have ever seen him.

 

The bad guy leaves something to be desired. He is supposed to be a nefarious Russian oligarch but is played by Kenneth Branagh. Now, I know I’m supposed to be impressed by the reputation of Branagh, but I confess to not really liking him too much in anything besides Henry V, which was in the 1980s. His Shakespeare adaptations are poor and I refuse to see him embody Hercule Poirot. Here, he is kind just too soft and flabby to really have much of a nefarious screen presence. Of course, he is not helped by the confusing narrative. The Russian oligarch has a supermodel wife played by Elizabeth Dibecki. This woman is too tall. I’m not sure she is actually that tal. I think the movie may have added some inches. Either way, not my thing. As stated before, Robert Pattinson looks the part in this movie. John David Washington, as the protagonist, does a decent job. His character is a bit of a blank slate, so not much acting is required, but he does what is required in the action sequences, particularly the bit where he has a fist-fight with an inverted antagonist.

 

I can’t really recommend TENET other than to say, if you do see, try to see it in a theater. This is a movie that will be definitely worse seen at home.

 

The Lighthouse (4/5 Stars)

“The Lighthouse” is firmly rooted in that David Lynch territory where realism and continuity are sacrificed to effect and mood. What we are seeing on the screen is not so much what the characters are experiencing but what they feel they are experiencing. And what they are feeling looks to be the sailor’s version of cabin fever. There are two men, an experienced lighthouse operator played by Willem Dafoe and his new apprentice played by Robert Pattinson. What happened to the last apprentice that worked here asks Pattinson. He ended his own life, explains Dafoe, after going mad.

“The Lighthouse” was directed by Robert Eggers, written in cooperation with his brother Max Eggers. Writer/Director teams of brothers (Coens, Wachowskis, Nolans) have led to some of the more confidently weird movies in existence. This team of brothers can be added to that shortlist. The Eggers are relatively new. They have only one other mainstream movie (The Witch) which I have just added to my Netflix queue.

There is much to the “The Lighthouse” that makes it a unique experience. To start, the movie is shot in black and white and has a narrow aspect ratio. The time of the story looks like the late 1800s or early 1900s. There is only one location, a lighthouse on a deserted rock. The original score blares ominously, and much delusions of mermaids and pigeons. Then there is the ACTING, which involves much yelling in Irish/Scottish/pirate brogue. The dialect is given special mention in the credits because it is not of this time and seemingly not of this world. Willem Dafoe, not a particularly handsome man, and Robert Pattinson, who I insist does not look normal, successfully inhabit this alien land. They spend much of the time drinking moonshine and colorfully cursing each other.

There is some character background and plot but it doesn’t much get in the way of the weirdness. To summarize, Robert Pattinson is new to the lighthouse, drawn to the job because the wages are higher for work on desolate rocks in the middle of nowhere. Willem Dafoe appears to have been there forever. He is a hard taskmaster, but when a storm grounds all work (preventing the new man from leaving at the end of his tour), and there is nothing to do all day but get piss drunk and dance, the professionalism of the lighthouse suffers quite a bit.

This is one of the those movies I would love to hear a director’s commentary for (not that these things are done much these days) because I can only imagine how crazy it was to be on the set with Willem Dafoe cursing up a piratical storm. I bet there are a lot more good stories there.