Sure, the movie was fine, but I couldn’t buy Zendaya as Athena. Every time she popped onscreen, I thought, Hey, there’s Spiderman’s girlfriend again. I didn’t really have this problem with the other actors. I believed Matt Damon as Odysseus. He was stoic and brooding and exuded a type of weathered concrete utilitariness, a certain Jason Bourne-ness, rather than any kind of wiliness, but I wasn’t constantly pulled out of the fictional dream by his face. Same with Anne Hathaway. Briefly I was aware that she was the actress Anne Hathaway, but after that momentary interruption I was back in the dream. The only other character that stuck out in the same celebrity-distracting way was Charlize Theron as Calypso, which mostly just made me giggle. I leaned over to my trusty movie companion and said, dude ain’t going back home. 

I don’t really care about the interpretive freedoms that Nolan took with the film. What else was he supposed to do? It’s a movie based on an ancient oral poem from over 2,000 years ago that at some point was written down. Adapt away. I do think that in this adaptation he gave it a very contemporary, PTSD, war-fable spin. And I do think that it can be mapped a little too neatly onto contemporary world historical events, if that’s your interpretive bag. I don’t really care about the casting. I do think Nolan is up to interesting moves there, though I would have to sit through all that rumbling and screaming again to get a better angle on it. 

But I’m often curious how certain actors are believable as different characters while some actors are always themselves, and then further how some actors are always celebrities. So De Niro might be an example of the first one, or Meryl Streep, someone who convincingly becomes different characters in different movies even though we can step back and say yes that’s the same human being in those different roles. And an example of the second might be Tom Cruise, who I find persuasive but who is always relentlessly Tom Cruise, with all of those beautiful teeth. (Can you imagine going through life being that handsome? It would be spiritually deforming. Or great fun. Or both.) An example of the final category might be someone like The Rock. He is always The Rock no matter what. He’s never going to be anything convincingly but The Rock. 

But Zendaya and Theron aren’t like that, are they? I mean, I’ve only seen Zendaya in the Spiderman movies, but I find her persuasive in those. I realize she’s been in lots of other stuff and that she’s married to Spiderman, but I haven’t seen any of it. I haven’t seen that HBO show about the wayward teens. Hey, I’m a middle-aged dad. I can only handle so much intensity. 

I don’t think it’s her skill level as an actor or her ambient stock price of celebrity. I think it’s because she didn’t have enough to do in the movie. She didn’t have enough to say. Athena appears every now and then as Odysseus’s conscience, and she says some various Yoda-like stuff, and she makes that frowning forehead-face that she does so well, but she doesn’t ever become a character. She doesn’t do anything interesting. One of the details of Greek myths I always loved growing up is how the gods behaved like people. But Zendaya’s Athena is a flatly christian, beneficent advice-giver. A burning bush would have had more active screen presence. But that’s not an acting problem. That’s a writing problem. That’s an adaptation problem. That’s a Christopher Nolan problem. Maybe my spectrum of celebrity is wrong, and any actor could become someone else in my imagination with words enough and time. I can forget who they are if they’re given something interesting to say and do. Even The Rock could morph into Hercules and clean the stables of my mind.

Likewise with Theron as Calypso, who is motivationally ambiguous as a character. Does she want him to stay? Does she want him to remember? Does she want to him to keep hanging, maybe throw something on the grill for later? I think this confusion comes from how many bits are conflated within the Calypso character here: the Calypso character who Odysseus shacks up with for several years on his way home; the Lotus-Eating chapter where Odysseus’s men eat the fruit and forget everything and generally turn into college sophomores; and the staying with Nausicaä and her family, where he regales them with his adventures and is adored and has the chance to ditch Ithaca and its complications and start anew with the young, attentive, moon-eyed Nausicaä. 

I think here again I would have forgotten who was portraying Calypso if she’d had more to say. Instead she just cathects around the beachfront looking ravishing and pensive, dressed like an outdoor bar at a beach-themed chain restaurant. These two childless middle-agers should settle into a first class condo together. If Nolan had wanted to make that Calypso role interesting and dramatically potent he would have made some key changes. Calypso would have been much younger, bordering on inappropriate (trapped on an island with drugs and Sydney Sweeney?), or at some point in their should-he-stay-or-go debates, their three kids could have come out of the wigwam to ask about dinner (trapped on an island with a Pack-N-Play and Jennifer Lawrence?). No, this is not in the Odyssey, but then there’s a lot in this movie that isn’t in the Odyssey and the real question is how to make it dramatically coherent and relevant for us here today. I get the whole “we did terrible stuff to Troy” regret fable part, but what is Calypso bringing to the table to keep him there? What game is she slinging? Please let me witness some game. He stays there because he can’t remember, and he can’t remember because he doesn’t want to remember, because he is ashamed and horrified by what they did to Troy even though it was his idea, and they won because of his cleverness. The hero as self-hating schemer. But this is a contemporary and sexless spin on the poem, which really seems to be about how hard it is to stay faithful while out on the road. All these adventures and scrapes are exit ramps onto other modes of living, other situationships, other women. A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one, etc. 

Which reminds me of the main two bits missing from this movie: laughter and sex. Perhaps it’s immature of me to want any kind of humor, but I still do. And it’s the most unsexy film I have ever seen. There is one flicker of eros when Antinous makes his “I got you babe” case to Penelope. Of course he quickly ruins the moment by being a dude, but still it’s there, briefly. But there’s no indication of misbehavior or adventure or naughtiness on the part of Odysseus camped out with Calypso. It’s all very dour. It’s all very north England coast. I was cast back to my favorite mythology movie from my childhood, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, with its stop-motion animation robot owl. Goofy as hell and lots of fun. Nolan seems unaware that adapting an ancient text into a movie is inherently ridiculous. I did like how the cyclops eye was sideways but was made anxious by his nudity. I kept worrying we were going to have to witness Polyphemus’s giant cyclops dong. 

The siren song scene is indicative of the overall gestalt of the movie and of Nolan’s aesthetic more broadly. The song that is endlessly alluring just makes him scream his head off, as if he’s being tortured. I understand that it’s torturously tempting but again it’s not particularly cinematically interesting or convincing. It’s all very Abu Ghraib of Nolan, who as we know from the Dark Knight trilogy is above all interested in torture. 

Is Odysseus being tortured by the sound of the song or is torture the song made manifest? Is torture what the song is about? Is it art that both depicts and inflicts pain? As there are no honest anti-war movies because stuff blowing up simply looks too cool, a career-long over-emphasis on the depiction of people inflicting physical pain on one another would seem to indicate an attraction to, rather than of a revulsion from, violent human suffering. This is what life is about, Nolan seems to be saying. We burn each other’s houses. We stab each other’s eyes. We break each other’s backs. There are brief commercials of regret. But stay tuned. 

The audience sits lashed into the stadium seats of the Imax, thrown to the bottom of the well of this one man’s vision, humming along.