Notes On The Odyssey

I went to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey at the Lekki IMAX in Lagos, with company, which I am increasingly convinced is the correct way to see a film like this. There is something about watching a huge piece of cinema with someone beside you, reacting to the same ridiculous spectacle in real time. It makes the whole thing feel less like watching a movie and more like attending an event.

The film is ridiculously star-studded too, but thankfully it never feels like a parade of famous people wearing ancient clothes. The story does enough of the heavy lifting that the recognisable faces become part of the experience rather than the entire point of it. I especially loved the smaller celebrity cameos; seeing Travis Scott appear genuinely made me sit up in my seat. There is something very funny about watching an ancient Greek epic and suddenly recognising Travis Scott, but somehow it worked.

What really pulled me into the world, though, were the landscapes. The beaches, cliffs, caves and enormous stretches of water don't feel like scenery placed behind the characters. They feel ancient and imposing, almost as though the landscape itself is participating in the story. With the film using real locations across places like Greece, Morocco, Italy, Malta, Iceland and Scotland, that physicality comes through beautifully.

There is something about a landscape that can do more than tell us where a story is happening. The right landscape can carry a mood all by itself, making us feel small, nostalgic, uneasy or strangely at home. That is perhaps what makes landscape in art so interesting too; sometimes a place can become the story.

The Odyssey understands this particularly well. The world feels old, enormous and occasionally hostile, which is probably appropriate for a man who has spent most of the story trying desperately to get home.

The colour was another thing I loved. Rather than filling the screen with bright, poppy colours, the film has a restrained, almost desaturated quality that gives everything a heavier, more epic feeling. It makes the world feel less like a fantasy postcard and more like something recovered from an old story, still carrying a little dust from wherever it had been sitting for the last few thousand years.

Colour can tell us how to feel about what we're looking at just as easily as it can make an image beautiful. Warm reds and yellows can make a place feel alive, while colder or more muted tones can make the same scene feel distant or melancholic. The Odyssey uses that restraint extremely well.

Then there was the sound. The combination of the soundtrack, the enormous screen and the scale of the imagery made the cinema itself feel like part of the film.

The cinema was also so cold that I briefly wondered if this was another Nolan production choice. At one point, the woman beside me had to take the scarf covering her hijab and use it to cover her arms. So yes, we were apparently not only entering ancient Greece; we were also being asked to survive its winter.

My relationship with the mythology made some of my reactions to the film more personal. I had previously read Madeline Miller's Circe, which gave me a much deeper connection to Circe's character and eventually pushed me to reread The Odyssey. Because of that, I didn't quite connect with Nolan's depiction of Circe as much as I wanted to. It reminded me how much our previous encounters with art influence the way we experience new interpretations.

I felt something similar with Scylla, the six-headed monster opposite Charybdis. The Cyclops received such an incredible visual treatment that I found myself wishing Scylla had been given more time and presence. I understand the choice to keep her mysterious and partially hidden, but personally, I wanted more of the monster I had spent so much time imagining.

And maybe that's one of the most interesting things about art. We never really experience a new work completely on its own because we bring everything we've seen, read and felt before into the room with us. A painting reminds us of another painting, a song changes the way we remember something, and a film can make an old story feel completely new while also reminding us of the version we already carried around in our heads.

That is also why I think seeing something like The Odyssey with company makes the experience better. Solo cinema dates are great, but there is something special about leaving a film with somebody and immediately asking, "Did you see that?" You get to compare what stayed with each of you, argue about the things you loved, complain about the things you didn't and discover that two people can sit through the exact same film and walk away carrying completely different versions of it.

For me, that was the real pleasure of the night. The Odyssey isn't just an enormous movie; it is a collection of artistic decisions working together. Landscape, colour, sound, performance, cinematography and mythology all become part of one enormous visual language, and for a few hours, the cinema gives you somewhere else to exist.

Sometimes the artwork is hanging quietly on a wall. Sometimes it is forty feet tall, accompanied by an orchestra, projected in the dark, and cold enough to make you question whether you should have brought a blanket. Either way, you’re still sitting in front of an artist asking you to look at something and feel it differently.

If you’re in the mood to keep looking:

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- Alex