Pete Wright:
Welcome to The Film Board. I’m Pete Wright. Each month we take one new release and put it on the table to figure out what it’s doing, what it’s responding to, and whether it earns its place in the larger conversation about movies. This is a spoiler-filled discussion, opinionated, sometimes argumentative, but it’s grounded in the idea that movies don’t exist in isolation. They’re part of a long, ongoing dialogue. If you’re here because this film got under your skin, you’re in the right place.

For three thousand years, the deal has been the same. A man goes to war, the war ends, and eventually, battered, salted, half his crew fed to a cyclops, the man goes home. That is the promise of the oldest adventure story we have. You leave, you suffer, you return. The bard sings. The dog dies happy. Roll credits on Western literature.

With Christopher Nolan’s entry into the Homer-verse, the war is over. The gods may not be real. Athena has Zendaya’s face and a much darker job than Goddess of Wisdom. The suitors have a genuinely terrible afternoon, and somewhere in the back of a warmly lit room a man who spent a decade getting home is looking at the sea again, because the sea, as it turns out, is the only thing that ever told him the truth. Tommy Metz III, Ocean Murff, and Steve Sarmento are here, so pull up an oar, mind the whirlpool, and row.

Okay, we have the Homeric Cinematic Universe. Ocean, Tommy, Steve, hello, and welcome to The Odyssey.

Tommy Metz III:
Thank you so much, Pete.

Pete Wright:
Oh, this is very exciting. Or shall I open that as a question? Is this very exciting? Let us begin with our standard fare. Opening thought. I look at you three and I know who’s not the pure classicist of the group, because Ocean is on the record as never wanting to see a movie before 1975. This is a movie that exists after 1975, but it’s about something far older. Ocean, would you kick off our opening thoughts, please?

Ocean Murff:
First off, I don’t watch movies that are made after 1970. Sorry, before 1970.

Pete Wright:
Oh, seventy. I had the rule wrong.

Ocean Murff:
If they’re made before 1970, I’m out.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Tommy Metz III:
After 1970, you don’t watch. I just watched Train Coming at Camera.

Ocean Murff:
Exactly. I’m a big Charlie Chaplin fan.

Pete Wright:
Huge.

Ocean Murff:
Isn’t that what we’re talking about here? So, my opening thoughts. First off, this is a great sequel. I loved part one, Troy. Going into this, I was really excited about it. It looked amazing. Having seen it, I have almost nothing but positive things to say about it. There are certain things about the movie, and some of the casting choices, that I think are interesting in terms of the backlash about them, and even some of the decisions made there, which I’m sure we’ll get to. But overall, my impression is I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a great story.

I really liked the moral implication of what the Trojan Horse meant in this movie, versus it just being a device of destruction. I thought that was great. And I really enjoyed it also because I hadn’t read the Odyssey. I knew about the Cyclops, but other than that, I just knew about the Cyclops. I knew it took them a long time to get home. Other than that, I was going in not knowing what’s going to happen. So this was great for me.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding. Starting off on the right foot. All right, Tom, you are a noted fan of bravura filmmaking. How did you land on The Odyssey?

Tommy Metz III:
I thought this movie was extraordinary. I had an absolutely outstanding time. This is the type of movie where it’s very rare when this happens, when you feel its length but you don’t mind its length. It feels appropriately long. You feel like you’ve gone on an odyssey, because you feel battered and broken by this movie. And then, like Ocean already hinted at, to have this zillion-year-old story and find a way to connect it to today’s politics, today’s world, is just incredible. It’s the kind of chef’s kiss at the end that makes Christopher Nolan really an incredible filmmaker. I thought it was extraordinary.

Pete Wright:
All right, Steve. You’re the classicist. In case you didn’t know, if you look around the room and don’t know who probably has Homer memorized, it’s you.

Steve Sarmento:
Not memorized, no. As a high school English teacher, I did drag freshmen through the Odyssey. What I really enjoyed about this was it played the hits, which anybody that had to endure it in school knows — all the monsters, all those things. But Nolan, like both Ocean and Tommy said, really made this an update for a contemporary audience and focused on themes.

I just had a tremendous time. I think I’m probably the only person that saw it in the Nolan-approved format, because I’m fortunate enough to be in a city with one of the IMAX 70-millimeter screens, with whatever number of perforations, all that. It was a visual spectacle. It was so immersive, truly just an overwhelming, epic experience. See this on the biggest screen you can, for a big story, big performances. I loved this.

Pete Wright:
Okay. This feels maybe like a home run. I enjoyed my time with the movie. This is an interesting place for me. It’s one of those movies that I was looking forward to seeing because I’m a fan of Christopher Nolan, and I’m so in the bag for other films in Nolan’s catalog. I love the way he makes films. I love the technology that he continues to push forward.

He’s very James Cameron-esque in the way he is so inventive around the technology, in the way he just beats IMAX with a thrashing stick to invent new stuff to make the movies he wants to make. This movie is another in the incredible lineage of new cameras, new technologies to get the thing made, and to shoot the entire thing in IMAX. I think it gives us an opportunity to see performance detail that we haven’t been able to see before. Just their faces this big. It’s extraordinary.

I did not go into it really looking forward to the story of the Odyssey. I was kind of take-it-or-leave-it. I wanted to see it because I thought it was going to be a great parade of pixels and light. And the longer I get from my experience with the movie, the more I kind of like the story. I’m really into it. It adds some really huge set pieces. I think you guys are right on the way it becomes an analogue for our modern universe, and the way it updates the quintessential, stereotypical hero and mentor. Those became tropes because of Homer, right? This is the story that created those words. And he was able to make it non-dumb.

Come on, the Trojan Horse could have been really dumb, and he made it terrifying and fantastic. We’re going to talk about all of that. Let’s start with the major themes at work in this thing. What sticks out to you as quintessentially Nolan-esque? The themes coming through that he has decided to modernize? He’s playing the Nolan hits here, coming off of Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, using these ancient idols as a way to speak to modern audiences.

Tommy Metz III:
It really feels like a companion piece to Oppenheimer — re-examining what is legacy, what is shame, what is hubris, and slicing through the mythos we have for those things, showing how flawed everything can be, how there can be a rotten core in the middle of all these supposed heroics or incredible advancements of science or warfare, whatever it is.

It seems like a re-examination, because there were so many parts where — you brought up the Trojan Horse just to start. I never thought about it that way, about what it was like to be in the horse. I kind of thought they brought folding chairs. I don’t know what I thought it was. But it never occurred to me how dangerous and scary and gross it was to be trapped in there. And then — we don’t want to get to the end yet — but then what the Trojan Horse ends up ultimately becoming. It’s always been a hero’s journey. The way I’ve always read it, the way I was always taught it, is the bad guys were inside the castle, so the good guys tricked them, and hooray, they won, and all is right with the world, and then they get to go home. That’s not a story that Christopher Nolan is interested in telling. And I’m glad for it.

Ocean Murff:
I guess — and maybe this is part of my ignorance, by how I came at this — I’ve always viewed the Trojans as the good guys. I thought the Odyssey was the story of the bad guys winning. So the people in the horse, the Trojans, were the good guys, defending honor and civilization and all of that, and the Greeks were coming in trying to conquer and destroy everything, and they were the bad guys, and this is a story about the bad guys winning. So, and you can let me know if this is just my ignorance of the whole thing — I’ve always thought of the Trojans as the good guys and the Greeks as the bad guys. Is that not how it’s supposed to be read?

Steve Sarmento:
Well, it depends. You get into all the mythology — Helen of Troy, whether she’s abducted, all that — because they’re going to get Menelaus’s wife back, who’s been kidnapped. And again, with all of these mythologies, whether you’re reading the Odyssey or Virgil’s the Aeneid, which is more from the Trojan perspective, you get so many different versions based on who’s telling the story and when it’s being told. It’s like comic books. There are those core moments, but there’s always a bit of a cultural spin on characters and motivations. So I can see where that’s — it’s like in Vietnam they call it the American War. They don’t call it the Vietnam War. That’s what we call it.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, but I guess part of it too — even if we were relating it to comic books, and how — because I did a lot of looking up things and researching about what happens with these stories. I did love Troy. But it keeps that comic-book setup of the Greeks being the really cool characters, and the bad guys are typically cool, and the good guys are just trying to defend what they’re doing. So I’ve always viewed it as — and also because they came in to destroy.

The one thing about it is they didn’t come to conquer Troy. They came to burn it to the ground. And it never made sense to me why they didn’t stay and rule it, because it’s still a valuable port. Helen was the impetus for Agamemnon to come and get more power and control the Aegean Sea. But they didn’t stay. They destroyed the place and then went home. Instead of thinking of it as an actual continuation of territory and an expansion of power, it was really just a form of total destruction.

And the theme that I liked in the movie — bringing it back to the movie — the theme I liked about his journey was that he didn’t want to go home. And I think, while some things were said more out loud, part of why he didn’t want to go home — this is my thought — I thought he didn’t want to go home because he recognized that they went over there under a false pretense and did an unjust thing, and destroyed those people for no real gain or purpose, and then just went back home. He was like, how do I go home and face people when I not only defied the law of Zeus and the will of the gods by using a gift as a way to do this, but what I did really did not serve any greater purpose? It was only for the purposes of destruction. So part of the Odyssey, to me, was him trying to come to grips with the fact that he was the architect of such a massive scale of destruction of a people.

Tommy Metz III:
And that’s Nolan bringing a lot of that text to this movie that is not as prevalent or as discussed in the original text. You don’t have that. It’s a heroic song. It’s a poem told about heroes winning a war and coming home. That’s what it is. So you’re right in what you found, but that’s Nolan, more so. And by bringing in the real historic Sea Peoples, that whole element, into the story, is also a way of forwarding that kind of idea.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah, I think the other thing Nolan really brings is — it’s mythology, right? But we don’t really have the gods. We don’t see the puppet masters. This isn’t Clash of the Titans. And that makes sense for a contemporary audience if we’re going to take a more psychological approach, because we’re in a different era where people understand psychology. Back when Homer is writing, people’s conscience, their inner voice — that was the god speaking to them. We’re well beyond that. So to have a more reflective hero makes sense.

And his whole description of the siren song was just the most amazing thing, because I thought, how are you going to portray the song? Well, the best thing is you hide it. You don’t let the audience hear it, but you let him describe it in an amazing way that gives us so much insight into what he’s going through — that whole “do I want to go home, do I not want to go home, looking for the thing that’s lost, which is the thing I actually had.” All of that is Nolan’s stamp on this, to really make it that type of piece. As Tommy said, really that follow-up to Oppenheimer, on a hero and regret and tragedy: what have I unleashed upon the world by what I have done?

Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think the setup is actually very sweet and diabolical, the fact that we get him as the noble hunter. He doesn’t hunt without letting the prey know that he’s there, because that’s the only way that it’s fair. So he always plucks the bow. I really like the way he does that. And then when he is confronted with being a commander in a war that is based only on vengeance, retribution, rage, and ego, that conflict in him — hats off to Matt Damon. I think he plays that conflict really well on screen, in his face, in his body, in his relationship with Calypso.

Trying to figure out, to your question, Ocean, when does he want to go home? When does he just use the words “I want to go home” because I have a home, versus “I want to go home” because apparently I should want to go home, even though I’m terrified of myself and who I’ve become? And leading to the end of the movie — we don’t have to talk specifics yet — what have I become? I’ve become someone who can exert great wrath on others through extraordinary violence, and hopefully still be a guy that you can look at and say, he did the right thing, maybe. We see what happens in the story, but we never really get to see why, because I think Nolan rightly lets us interpret that. It ends up being a beautiful circle.

And I just want to note the bard. I have never considered this, but the role of the bard is essentially fake news, right? The bard’s just hearing rumors and singing it. The bard doesn’t know any of what’s going on. I love the way this is portrayed — we have this bard with the suitors doing his thing, while we’re seeing the story play out in a much richer tapestry elsewhere through flashback, through contemporary retelling. This idea of the bard singing that carnage into legend is the point. It’s the point of our relationship with news right now, and how broken it is. I kind of low-key love that Nolan included this angle.

Ocean Murff:
Well, yeah, but then that makes it where the rest of us are not as educated, because — what is it? He says the bard’s purpose, singing it, is the only way you can tell stories for people that can’t read.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Tommy Metz III:
Right, because the Bronze Age — potentially he broke the world by breaking Zeus’s law, and language disappears into the dark ages.

Pete Wright:
And all we have left is singing Facebook.

Tommy Metz III:
All we have are TikToks to remember what the world was like.

Pete Wright:
That’s right. Isn’t that what it’s going to be when we run across the beach and see the Statue of Liberty’s head in the sand? We’ll learn about it first on TikTok. You were doing great.

Okay, let’s talk about — this is the “Fake Things on Fake Things” segment. This is the Tommy Metz III Memorial Fake Things on Fake Things segment, because we’ve got some extraordinary composited sequences, visual effect sequences. First of all, how brilliant is it to turn the eyeball sideways, and then right side up?

Tommy Metz III:
That’s great. Just to make it alien enough, and to make it not goofy. That’s all it needed to make it not goofy.

Pete Wright:
It was incredible. So we have a real cave, we have real bees, we have a 60-foot Cyclops rig with full animatronics and puppetry, we’ve got 40 sheep, we’ve got Bill Irwin as the Cyclops, and it’s all thrown together on a backdrop of real places, real seas. I know there is digital wizardry in here, and I never once stopped to think how many computers they used. I was so invested in the look and feel of these sequences. Did anything jump out at you as overtly created?

Tommy Metz III:
No. For me, the one that could have felt the most artificial was when they scrape past the whirlpool and go through that little alley and all the tentacles start coming down. But it works perfectly, because he does the opposite of what Peter Jackson does, where Peter Jackson clears the frame so you can see everything and has an eagle fly around it. Here, it’s constantly bisected with mast or with water splashing. It’s really hard to get a good look at it, which makes it even scarier.

When you’re shooting tentacles in broad daylight and none of it’s real, that’s where things are going to fall apart. But he knows how to obscure it just enough with real things to make it feel like part of the real world, which is brilliant. It’s restraint. It’s like, I have the keys to the kingdom, but I’m only going to show you half of it. That’s what makes it work. It’s really well done.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah. For me — I definitely look out for fake things fighting fake things, because of Tommy. Honestly, we should have this be some Tommy rule; we have to come up with a name for it. In this movie, I really found that while you had fake things — the Cyclops, or the giants, or whatever that tentacle-octopus thing was, which was great how you didn’t know what it was — they’re always engaging with another character or a human being. So it’s a fake thing versus a real thing at all times.

You don’t have Cyclops fighting the giants, or a scene where everything is just CGI and none of it’s real. It is always real human characters interacting with this fantastic thing. Like with the giants — when they interacted with them, I found myself thinking, I don’t know, I think maybe there’s a way they could win. But they just ran, and then ran and died. But it’s still fake things with the practicality of the ships and the trope of how to kill them. So I thought the effects, partly because of that, felt very seamless. You’re grounded in the human characters in the scene, and they’re interacting with this fantastic thing or beast or person.

Steve Sarmento:
He always found the right location or the right environment for everything. When it’s fighting the Laestrygonians, the giants in the big plate armor, the way the trees move around to imprison them — the camera’s moving, and I’m thinking, is he just using parallax to make it look like these trees up front are moving? There’s unnatural movement going on, but the camera’s also moving. There’s so much going on. He’s using the environment, or the trip to Hades on that black beach or wherever they are. It’s not, okay, big blue screen, put them on a set and create whatever you want. It’s, let’s find the most desolate place on earth and use that. And really bury the actors.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
Apparently really bury them. They had snorkels and a safety person with all of them. The practicality is thrilling.

Pete Wright:
But when you want to magnify it —

Steve Sarmento:
Especially when you’re going to magnify it, when you’re shooting on such a high-resolution film format, it’s going to catch every detail, to the point where I can tell that Charlize Theron has three ear piercings on her left earlobe, because the detail is so fine that you can’t tamper with things. So you’re going to do as much in-frame stuff as you can, and it all looked good. I couldn’t tell with the Cyclops — is that an animatronic arm? How are they compositing shots together? And I didn’t care, because I was never taken out of the moment. Everything felt true to the situation they were in.

Pete Wright:
It was really seamless. Hats off to DNEG doing the effects work, clearly in partnership with everything going on in camera. Let’s turn our attention to Telemachus and Penelope. This is where we’re in a space of no appreciable giant monsters or visual effects. This is the court of the suitors, Penelope and her weaving, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland just doing their thing, trying to get along with all these brutes in their throne room. They sort of ground the story in their reality. How badly did you want Robert Pattinson to just shut up and win already? Is anybody in the bag for the evildoer?

Steve Sarmento:
No, he was so horrible. He played the worst person so well. He was great. I loved all of those sequences. Tom Holland did a really nice, restrained job. Anne Hathaway is always amazing, and Robert Pattinson was perfect. When he’s just like, “the shields, get the shields, get the daggers,” I was like, oh, you’re the worst. But he was also believable. I liked his scene with Penelope a lot. You could see her maybe being like, all of these guys are a bunch of pigs — and we’ll talk about pigs later — but he’s the least piggish of them. So even though he’s the worst, I thought it was outstanding. He was very charming.

Pete Wright:
Very charming, and I think that’s the thing that struck me. There is actually a lot of the movie where I’m like, he really is the best of the lot, and maybe she should just give him a chance. But over the course of three hours, he gets so believably, progressively worse that you buy that he needs to be on his way by the end of the movie. You buy that he needs to be taken out, with an arrow in the neck.

Tommy Metz III:
I think putting the dog on the dung pile maybe pushed the needle a little bit.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, that was it.

Ocean Murff:
I think they needed that scene so that you would have him be universally hated. Up until that point, I think he’s fifty-fifty, depending on whether you like him or not. But once he puts the dog on the dung heap, you’re like, okay, now you can kill him. Outside of that, I think he’s fifty-fifty.

But in the grounded story — this is the thing I found interesting — why is Telemachus, throughout this entire movie, the worst fighter in the kingdom? We’re spending all this time with him learning how to fight, getting this training from Odysseus’s last loyal servant, Eumaeus. And then he’s apparently the worst fighter in the kingdom. Everybody can beat him up. So I’m trying to understand — part of the subplot is supposed to be the rise of Telemachus, right? He’s going to ascend and become the ruler of Ithaca. But he seems just as cowardly, in a sense, as Antinous, which was Robert Pattinson doing an amazing job. He’s ineffective. He does not elicit the loyalty. He’s not a leader, he’s not a good fighter. Basically, because these are your parents, you get this. But there’s nothing else about you that seems to merit it.

Pete Wright:
He’s a nepo baby.

Steve Sarmento:
Right, exactly. That’s the whole point. You’ve got Odysseus, a man from a different era. You’ve got these guys that are battle-weary, battle-hardened. And you’ve got these suitors that have just been sitting around for the past however many years, eating, getting fat off the food and drink, and have no skills, no ability to lead. Why Telemachus cannot step into that is the dynamic of the story. It puts Penelope in a really unique position of, I know what it takes to be a good leader, and nobody here qualifies for this. Not even my son can be the man that I need him to be.

That’s one of the great things Anne Hathaway brings to this performance — the complexity of the decisions she’s facing. The country is falling apart. The kingdom is falling apart without a king. We need a king. There’s nobody here to do this. Everybody’s looking to me. I have the power to do something about this, and I need my king back. To me, that dynamic is necessary to create that moment at the end when Odysseus does return, to show not only his son and the suitors what it takes, but also that it’s not something to look forward to, to take on that mantle of leadership, because it is a brutal position to hold.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. To both of your points, this idea that the suffering it takes to become the man that Odysseus is was not available for Telemachus. He was raised in a way that Odysseus was not. That means there is this sense that leadership skips a generation, maybe, or you have to go even further for the youth of royalty to make them hardened leaders. And is it even worth it to do that? This is the story of generational wealth that’s inherited by the youth. You’re just going to be king, but you’re never going to live up to your father’s shoes, because he had to become the leader he is because of some different, horrifying things in his upbringing. I like that.

Tommy Metz III:
Well, it’s a step. Also, though, he is in many ways the heart of the movie. What his strengths are is loyalty, being able to see through, not wanting a power grab or money just for power’s sake. He wants to try to save his father’s legacy. He wants to do right by his mother. There’s a lot of goodness in him.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, even when he approaches his mother and says, “Here’s a plan, you’re not going to love it,” it’s not because it came from a place of greed. He thought things through. He made a case.

Tommy Metz III:
When we talk about nepo babies, I don’t want to make it sound like he’s one of the cast of Succession. He has within him the possibility of being a great, fair, just leader.

Pete Wright:
That’s all I want to echo — that he has the potential to be that, but not the opportunity to learn it the way his father did.

Tommy Metz III:
Sure. But maybe that’s good. His father learned it and broke the world. He says, “I broke the world,” and then enough time will go by and everyone will forget our mistakes. That’s how this goes. And remember, he’s also not allowed to fight. He’s not allowed to fight and take on the suitors. They want him to fight, because he’s younger, weaker, not as battle-hardened, and then they can either strike him or he’ll be put into exile. The idea of being put into exile in this time, because we didn’t have GPS, was a death sentence. Being exiled from your place, going into the unknown, is like, okay, you’re done.

Steve Sarmento:
Well, it comes back to that whole Zeus’s law, of you treat the visitor, the guest, with hospitality. So he’s still beholden to that. That’s the law that ultimately Odysseus breaks. But that’s the law of the land. That’s what keeps us functioning as a society. “I should just kick these guys out,” but then that’s a violation there’s no coming back from. So he’s the example of, this is the complexity of holding fast to this. And Odysseus is an example of, well, if you dare to break it, this is the chaos that can spew out from that.

Pete Wright:
But if you’re there for three years, are you still a visitor? If you’re never — that’s kind of the point. They’re never actually really welcomed in.

Steve Sarmento:
Right.

Pete Wright:
They’re a visitor until they’re welcomed in. They just sort of start squatting there.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah. I guess I view Telemachus as a kid from Succession, because I think his reign would last maybe a day, and then he’ll get taken over and killed. Even in his plan that he thought through, Penelope lets him know, look, even if I marry someone, what do you think happens next? You’re dead, and then we’re going to live on this other thing. Your plan has an immediate hole in it right off.

And then, this Zeus’s law thing — here’s my thought. They are in charge of the castle. When Odysseus was there, he also was in charge of the castle. This law existed, and everybody didn’t just come and squat, right? Because the castle is always going to be better than where everybody else was living. So if there was some way to get other people out, there must have been some way to do that without being exiled. If you’re not going to be tough and battle-hardened, at least be smart. And he wasn’t even smart enough to figure out how to get these people out of your house. Because there has to be a way, otherwise people would all just move to the best house.

Pete Wright:
But I think the way the story is architected, they’re only there because they’re waiting for Penelope to choose her next hand. That’s the difference. When Odysseus was there, they weren’t waiting on Penelope to choose anything. They couldn’t go into the house because there was nothing to wait for. There is a cultural process for choosing, from the suitors, the next hand of the queen, and I think that’s what’s missing.

I like it, because it’s a party where they all bring their own food, right? They say they’re going to bring us all pigs and gifts and stuff to eat. So they kind of take care of themselves. They just do it in her banquet hall.

When you look at the women of the movie — we have Penelope and Calypso and Circe, and Lupita Nyong’o’s dual role as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. I think Penelope is a really interesting one, and obviously Anne Hathaway is fantastic. I’d love to walk through the other women of the movie and look at how Nolan has updated them, because — and, Steve, I’ll lean on you a little bit — my memory of Calypso and Circe and the sirens and Helen was that they weren’t as rich. These roles were meant for good, strong actresses to play in a way that I don’t think an originalist adaptation would have done.

Steve Sarmento:
No. Everything with Circe and Samantha Morton — the story is they go, they eat, she turns them into pigs, she’s a witch. But how Nolan took that — it was the most horrifying, gruesome moment. And then even the commentary, when she’s turning them back, basically saying, okay, put your disguise back on, go back to your disguise. It’s not just the kids’ story of, don’t go into somebody’s house and act like a pig or you’ll be turned into one. It’s no, that’s who these guys are. That just was an amazing way to recontextualize that scene for a contemporary audience, to give us something horrifying and to speak to the inner nature of people, versus just the kid story of, oh, there are magic people that can turn you into animals. That was a true standout for me, one of the sequences in the film.

Tommy Metz III:
And, if I remember from the text, this Calypso is much richer. She’s like, I helped you when you needed help, and now it’s time to slowly bring you back. I don’t remember that from the text. Calypso just wants him to stay there. Other gods have to intervene and be like, look, lady, enough with the lotus flower, he’s got to get going. Here she becomes like a therapist, in a way, which makes that fascinating, because it’s him arguing with himself, and she lets him do that. She sedates him and then slowly brings him back to remember. That made it a much richer character. That was really cool.

Ocean Murff:
Okay, so I guess I should talk about Helen. When it comes to the Helen thing, I thought it was interesting in two ways. One, I’ll admit part of my first ignorance — I was like, oh, Menelaus got her back, didn’t know that. And then when she goes back, in the little scene about “I’m so sorry for everything I did” — okay, whatever.

But when it comes to Helen, there was the scene of Helen, and to a lesser degree the same actress with the twin sister. I thought it was well done, it was interesting. It was a little bit of a revelation to me that she was Black. Making Helen Black does change a lot, because especially in that time period, Greeks would have been either closer to olive-skinned or lighter. And their vision of beauty was pale, because women were inside, men were outside. If you were outside all the time, you were poor. If you were beautiful and being captured, you were inside, so you’d be very pale.

So to have her be essentially an African woman, instead of someone from Greece — I understand the backlash of that. And it did take me back a second, because — first off, let me do the — she is beautiful, so I was like, yeah, that would work for me. I get it. I could destroy a city for you, that’s fine.

Tommy Metz III:
I got a thousand ships in my backyard. Let’s go.

Ocean Murff:
Exactly. I was like, I could destroy a city for you. And I get that part. There’s the overarching literary impact of the holistic thing, like she’s so beautiful that all of this stuff happened. But there’s also the other part where, okay, well, if I tilt my head slightly, I can make this work, because really we’re only talking about the taste of two dudes, right? Maybe Menelaus and Paris like darker women. It wasn’t like everybody wanted her, but in the mythos she’s so beautiful that they don’t stone her. So maybe it is that. But making her what would not have been considered a stereotypical beauty, even in Greece at that time, is the thing where I could see how people could have had issues or problems with it, or been weird.

I honestly, looking at the whole thing, think the whole movie would work better if Zendaya and Lupita had switched roles, because Zendaya’s look makes more sense. For her to look like Zendaya would have made more sense. That’s what she would have been closer to.

Pete Wright:
I wonder if that’s true, because I think when you look at the casting of Lupita Nyong’o, who is, objectively among the women in this movie, the most exotic thing on screen —

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Wright:
She looks the most different than any of the other characters on screen. I actually think her casting is wonderful specifically in that regard, because she doesn’t look like anything else that they have seen. This is, oh my god, she’s from a place that’s very far away, we don’t even know how to get there, we would have to go through giant squids and whirlpools of death to find out where she came from. So we’re going to protect her, and she’s going to be the thing that launches a thousand ships, because she is so different. To me, that worked really well.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, I get that. But I’m not — I don’t think of the thirteenth century BC as a place that embraces diversity. So there’s a piece of it where, don’t get me wrong, I’m on board with everything you’re saying, and I think having her in it was a great choice and I loved it. But at the same time, I understand how this is such a departure from what you would think of, especially in that role, which you think of as the stereotypical beauty that would do all of this. To have such a departure from it — I get that. Helen’s primary attribute is just how she looks, right? It’s not like she does or says anything dramatic or profound. So to have it be such a departure from what you would think of as a stereotypical beauty of the time — you could have put Lupita Nyong’o in any of the other female roles and it would have worked fine. You could have switched her and Charlize Theron. That might have worked too. Because Charlize Theron looks more like what you would expect the person cast as Helen of Troy to look like.

I guess I’m trying to make sure I’m communicating effectively, and peddling both sides of the fence. I liked it. I thought it was kind of cool that it was done that way. But I understand why that would be jarring or off-putting for some people, because it’s such a departure from what you would expect that character to be.

Pete Wright:
Well, and isn’t that a Nolan-esque thumbprint, in terms of his efforts to modernize the story? In the original story there was no indication that she was any other race than Greek, Spartan, whatever. She was a princess of the people who just happened to be super beautiful, and then eloped and started a war. I actually think this choice modernizes the story in a really interesting way. So I totally see your point, and I also see your point that Lupita Nyong’o could have played an incredibly effective Calypso.

Okay, so on the other side of it we have Clytemnestra. We don’t get a lot of Clytemnestra.

Ocean Murff:
No. She just kills Agamemnon and then moves on. Because Agamemnon killed her baby, which I was like — justified.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Ocean Murff:
So, okay.

Pete Wright:
The best Clytemnestra is in montage. That’s what we’re saying.

Steve Sarmento:
Well, I think that works so well because of what we do see of Agamemnon. We don’t see his face, ever. We just see little bits of it through the mask, and a lot of just black, dark, ominous presence. So it feels completely justified, of like, dude, you are the source of so much pain for so many people. You had this coming to you.

Ocean Murff:
But he is so cool.

Pete Wright:
He’s got that dope helmet.

Ocean Murff:
The armor was cool, the way he walked was cool, his massive presence over everyone. He’s not only the king of kings by title, but by the sheer size and dominance of him. And then the aura he was forming when they opened the gates of Troy — the other scene, he’s just standing there, he doesn’t even say anything.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Ocean Murff:
He didn’t even have to say “attack” or anything. He’s just standing there like, take a look at me. And then they go and kill Troy. Like all of his —

Tommy Metz III:
“All right, fellas, let’s go.” That would have been — no.

Ocean Murff:
Right. But he didn’t have to say a word. He was just standing there, and they knew, hang on a second, the king needs a moment. All right, now. That was such a cool character, the way they built them all around.

Pete Wright:
So Agamemnon is played by Benny Safdie.

Ocean Murff:
[inaudible]

Pete Wright:
What — is that weird stunt casting?

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, really?

Steve Sarmento:
I don’t know, because I kept wondering, when we get to him back home and all of that, we’re continuously shooting around his face. We don’t see his face. I thought that was an interesting choice. And then I was like, okay, I wonder who that is. And then it’s Safdie. I was like, okay, it doesn’t really matter, because if we’d seen his face, I don’t know that that would have changed anything for me. But not showing the face did just contribute to the aura and mystery of Agamemnon being this larger-than-life person. But then, why Benny Safdie? It could have been anybody, really. They just had a shorthand or something.

Tommy Metz III:
I had no idea that it was him. That does seem like a funny choice. But he did it great. His physicality was perfect.

Pete Wright:
Super physical. The other one that stands out to me that I want to make sure we have a specific shout-out to is one of the underappreciated, wonderful British character actors that we first discovered in Yesterday, the Beatles movie where the Beatles disappeared and Himesh Patel got to sing all the Beatles music. That guy is fantastic, and it was a huge surprise to see him in such a significant role as Eurylochus in this movie. I adore Himesh Patel. I relish whenever he shows up. He’s great.

So, any other — this is a murderers’ row cast. Nolan got anybody he wanted, pretty much. Anybody else you want to shout out? We actually haven’t talked enough about Matt Damon. Samantha Morton, Bill Irwin as Polyphemus, Elliot Page in a small but central role, Jon Bernthal obviously is Menelaus, John Leguizamo as the elderly, blind swineherd Eumaeus, and Mia Goth and Logan Marshall-Green. Who else do you want to shout out specific praise for? Oh, Travis Scott.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, the bard.

Pete Wright:
As the bard.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, that was great. I liked that form of storytelling from the bard. You kind of mentioned the actors that I would have mentioned. I liked how they wrote the Menelaus scenes. I liked how they wrote what Menelaus was, so that, as opposed to being just some vengeful or raging or crazy person that’s jealous about his wife being stolen, that character is written with more depth. And the way it was done — as far as little acting things I liked — they were pheasant hunting. Nowadays you’d do that with clay pigeons, and basically they’re just a couple of guys shooting pheasants with a bow and arrow, talking about matters of state and history, and Telemachus really fleshing out and learning about his father.

That scene, and then even his interaction with Helen, I thought was something you could — there are so many ways that could have gone very wrong, not only in how it was written, but the way you would act that and present it to make it a believable thing of, yeah, we had this thing, we did this brutal stuff, we moved on. He’s kind of more well-adjusted about the war than most everybody else. I found that dichotomy interesting, where to him it was just, yeah, we had to do this thing, it was rough, it was horrible, we came back, we did it, we’re good, and now let’s hunt some pheasants. So I just liked the way that was done. And I see so many ways that would be done poorly.

Pete Wright:
Can we transition to the score?

Steve Sarmento:
Oh my gosh, yes.

Pete Wright:
What is happening with the score? It’s amazing.

Tommy Metz III:
I saw this in RPX, which is Regal Premium Experience. It’s not a full IMAX screen, but it is much bigger, and they’ve really poured a lot into the sound. There’s speakers all over the place, and they have what the slang calls “butt kickers,” where your seat is connected to bass. So anytime there’s any low notes or thunder or bass, your seat rumbles.

Steve Sarmento:
Which means I spent two hours and forty-five minutes going like this, because that score is relentless.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
It is relentless and so intense, and I never got numb to it. It would build, and then it would find a way to build still, and then build again. He did that Nolan thing where he’ll take something from the real world of the story and put it in the score. For this, it was the clanging — the alarm they were sending from Troy. That’s the clang, clang, clang you’re hearing while my seat’s going all over the place. It could have been so deafeningly dumb and numb after a while, and instead it never stopped building. It was incredible. I thought it was breathtaking.

And I preferred this sound mix to a lot of his other sound mixes. There wasn’t an important conversation that happens on a catamaran. This Christopher Nolan doesn’t hate dialogue as much as some other Christopher Nolan movies do.

Pete Wright:
You might think he’s actually kind of proud of it. I could hear everything in a way that felt, oh, he likes his words here.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
He apparently banned an orchestra for this movie, which was a deeply clean break from Tenet and Oppenheimer. Ludwig Göransson reconstructed a whole bunch of Bronze Age instruments, the aulos and the lyre, and he’s got thirty-five bronze gongs. He recorded himself, as you say, hitting scrap metal and air conditioner units. And we’ve got James Blake on chant vocals, with Travis Scott as the bard. The chant vocals are haunting. Listen to the “Troy” track on the soundtrack and you’ll get a feel of that. But use the best sound system you’ve got, because it is incredibly layered and textured. Really incredible work.

I think that goes to a lot of what people are talking about with the movie — that so many people who are in and around this movie are doing the work of their careers in it. Tom Holland, Matt Damon, Christopher Nolan, Ludwig Göransson, Hoyte van Hoytema. This thing was one hundred percent IMAX, 70-millimeter. They built the new camera with IMAX, the IMAX Keighley, which is the first LCD telemetry on a large-format film camera. It’s also in a giant 400-pound vault to silence it on set, so they could actually capture the dialogue sequences too. It’s the first anamorphic IMAX ever. There are a lot of first-evers on this, including — and I can’t quite understand this, because I haven’t seen it in a behind-the-scenes — a mirror periscope, so that Damon and Hathaway could have eye contact around the giant camera, because it was so close to them that they couldn’t actually see each other. Does that make sense?

Tommy Metz III:
It’s like a new version of the Interrotron, Errol Morris’s device. It’s a way of making it as intimate as it can be for the people talking, even though there’s no intimacy there. They can’t see each other at all.

Pete Wright:
None.

Steve Sarmento:
Right, because if Anne Hathaway’s supposed to be engaged with Matt Damon, so Matt Damon’s going to look at Anne Hathaway, but because of the blimp, as they call it, around the IMAX camera, she is so far off to the side that if he’s making eye contact with her, the camera’s getting him in profile, practically. So it was that idea where he could be engaged with the camera and with whoever he has the scene with. The mirror construct allows them to do that. Because in the photos I’ve seen, the IMAX cameras are big, and then they encase it in this huge thing that is ginormous. It looks like the old Technicolor rigs from the fifties where they were shooting three colors of film stock at the same time. It’s ridiculous. You should check out — there’s footage out there of them hauling this thing around set. It’s insane. And then to go to the top of a mountain with all this stuff, every grip must have been like, this is my last day.

Pete Wright:
I just remember the footage from Dunkirk, seeing Hoyte van Hoytema carrying the IMAX camera on his shoulders in the water, in the ocean. I figure if there’s one guy who could carry that whole thing on this movie, it’s got to be him. The guy’s a madman.

It is, right now, the biggest Matt Damon opening ever. It’s the largest R-rated debut in Universal history.

Tommy Metz III:
Really?

Pete Wright:
It’s currently tracking at 120 million domestic, 257 million worldwide opening. This is Nolan’s biggest global opening ever, currently tracking to top Oppenheimer.

Tommy Metz III:
Wow.

Pete Wright:
And yet it feels a little slow. I wonder what you guys think about this. So much of the press has been “see this on the biggest thing you can.” But there aren’t that many of the biggest things you can see, like the IMAX 70-millimeter pristine thing. It’s not everywhere. I wonder how many people tried to buy tickets for opening weekend in the biggest theater they have and couldn’t, so they just pushed it out. I wonder if that’s going to be a drag on opening weekend, even, and we’ll see this thing have longer legs over the course of the month.

Steve Sarmento:
I got so lucky. Opening weekend tickets went on sale last July. July 2025, tickets went on sale for the IMAX, and I missed the announcement by a day or two. And then the evening shows, like two on Friday, were sold out. And I was like, okay, last July.

Pete Wright:
A year ago.

Steve Sarmento:
A year ago. This is the first time they’ve gone that far in advance. Early June, I just went and checked to see if there was anything on Friday, and at the 11:30 show there was one seat that opened up near the back of the theater. I’m like, mine. And I’m looking, and in that IMAX theater it’s sold out, sold out, sold out, or just the front two rows. When I got to the theater about fifteen, twenty minutes before showtime, I walk into the lobby and it’s wall-to-wall people lined up for popcorn. It was like all the Nolan bros just showed up.

I have a friend that’s a huge Homer fan, and he’s like, oh, I should go see it. I’m like, well, you’re probably going to have to get tickets for mid-August, maybe, if they’re available, because in that format people are just buying every single seat they can. And I’m hoping it’s continuing in the other large theater experiences, because what I saw, this thing should be — I’m surprised the numbers aren’t bigger, because what I’m seeing is people treating this as a must-see experience, at least here in Phoenix at that theater.

Pete Wright:
Reportedly, the production plus prints and advertising, the break-even is around 625 million dollars. This movie has to do that to break even. It’s off to a hell of a start this weekend, but that’s just a big number.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah. Thinking of that made me question, or think about, a thing. I had a point that I thought was semi-profound, but now I think it may be wrong, or maybe I have an argument with it. Is Christopher Nolan specifically, and then maybe James Cameron, the only directors who could get a studio to green-light something like this, where you have a 250-million-dollar movie that is not about a superhero —

Tommy Metz III:
That isn’t IP.

Pete Wright:
That isn’t IP.

Ocean Murff:
Well — that is about a superhero, right? And then I stopped and thought about it, and I was like, well, is Odysseus a superhero?

Pete Wright:
Well, he will be now. He’ll be all over the lunchbox set.

Ocean Murff:
Maybe. There are several reasons for the shifting of how movies are made and what movies are, but there’s a place for this. There used to be — back in the olden days it was only a hundred million — but the hundred-million, hundred-fifty-million, or 250-million-dollar movie that wasn’t IP, that was, hey, we’re just going to take a swing at this thing. A lot of times, of course, it’s the track record of the directors that’s able to get that green-lit. Are we at a point now where Christopher Nolan and James Cameron are the last two directors who could get something like this made?

Tommy Metz III:
It’s getting that way, because everything’s broken.

Pete Wright:
Yes, everything’s broken. There was a wonderful interview with Christopher Nolan and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and Nolan actually said, you know, this was not a foregone conclusion. I’ve wanted to make this for a very long time, and it was hard work — nobody was easily convinced that this was going to be a worthy story. So I don’t even know if Nolan is a guy who feels confident that anything he wants to throw at a screen he’ll get made.

Steve Sarmento:
No. He said that was because of Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer basically allowed him to do this. If Oppenheimer had not been what it was — if it had been a typical Nolan film that did pretty well — I don’t think we would have had this film. But because Oppenheimer became that film that summer, he had to take his shot with this one. This was the one time he was going to get a chance, which is a shame.

Pete Wright:
Huge shame.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
He did say the Trojan Horse sequence — he was originally on board for working on Troy, and he had conceived of this Trojan Horse sequence back then. It’s been in his head since Troy, and now he finally got a chance to make it.

Ocean Murff:
I don’t know that it would have worked in Troy.

Pete Wright:
I know. It was reconceived for sure.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah. To have it be a horse in — I don’t know the name of that position — but with their hooves up, versus just the regular four feet, so that would make it easier to move around. What it took for all the hundreds of Trojans to move that horse — the scene was great. It was an imagination of that Trojan Horse scene that I’d never thought of, getting it that way.

Pete Wright:
There is a horse, a wild bronco, a blue bronco with red eyes, that sits out in front of the Denver International Airport. It is a haunting and horrifying thing, and I’m never going to drive past it again without imagining how many people are dead inside of it.

Steve Sarmento:
You just have to get out and stab it. Stab it a couple times. But what if someone in there wipes the blood off when the blade comes back?

Pete Wright:
Right, you don’t know. Believe me, I imagine a lot of locals have wanted to, if not already tried to, stab that horrifying thing.

Tommy Metz III:
I want to give a shout-out to the editing. It’s the same editor, I know, as at least Oppenheimer, and she has this incredible shorthand of visual language where you’re not watching people walk all the way across a room. You see someone start, and then they’re sort of in the middle, and then they’re at the end. They cut out all of the fat, but with a visual language that makes your head put it all together, so it feels seamless. There are literal jump cuts between Matt and Calypso in this, and it feels fine. It feels like this dreamy situation.

I can’t imagine how much footage is on the cutting room floor, but it feels seamless. It’s not shaky, it’s not overly frenetic. You don’t get the feeling that they’re cutting around something they didn’t get. They’re just taking out the fat. You don’t need to see someone open the door by showing the doorknob turn. Just get them in there. I thought the editing was flawless.

Pete Wright:
So much effortless audio leading, too, right? Sentences that are connected across jump cuts that make you think, this is okay, I’m totally in this conversation. I thought that worked really well. That’s a great point.

Every bit of promo that these guys are doing, they say this one bit of trivia — that they had to change IMAX reels every one hundred and eighty seconds. They get three minutes of dialogue, and then they have to change. Two million feet were shot for this movie, and they had to stop every three minutes. So they’re in the middle of those Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon real drama sequences, and when he yells cut, it’s everybody freeze, keep that energy while we change reels.

Steve Sarmento:
Oh my god.

Pete Wright:
Crazy.

Ocean Murff:
Why wouldn’t they just have multiple? I was curious about that. Why would they have multiple?

Pete Wright:
I think it’s just budget. These cameras — I think they’re the only ones that exist. You know, one camera.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah. Well, they also said this was the first time Nolan hasn’t destroyed one of the IMAX cameras during production, because they cost five hundred thousand dollars for one of those, and he said he got through this one without breaking any of the cameras.

Pete Wright:
And he came in under budget, nine days early. This is a 91-day shoot. Think about that.

Tommy Metz III:
I have a feeling his next movie is going to be shot exclusively on iPhone.

Pete Wright:
All right, now’s the time we rank at Letterboxd.com. That’s where you can find our HQ page. You can find the reviews of all the films we’ve talked about across The Next Reel family of film shows. As you know, it’s five stars and hearts if you really, really, really love it. Ocean, you first. What are you going to do?

Ocean Murff:
I think I’m going to end up going five stars and a heart. I don’t have any legitimate problem with the movie. All of my problems with it are just baked into the story, or characters I don’t like, or something like that, which is like, well, that’s how I should react. The fact that yes, you can give me a three-hour movie, and I did not get up to go to the restroom one time — I just said, I’m going to hang in here, I’m going to stay with it. And it was exactly — I could not say it anywhere near as good as Tommy did, how it was long but didn’t feel it. The acting was great, the story was great, the sound, the score, everything. There’s nothing about this movie that I can pick apart and say, oh, well, this part of it sucked but everything else was good. No. This is five stars and a heart for me.

Pete Wright:
Okay. All right, Tom. What are you going to do?

Tommy Metz III:
I also didn’t use the restroom, but my seat was vibrating so much, there’s a chance I did go to the restroom and didn’t know. There’s one thing that stuck out to me, and it’s so small and dumb that I almost don’t care, but I wish that Tom Holland would have just said “mother” and “father,” not “mom” and “dad.” That’s the only thing that tripped me up. I’m not saying recast to history. It just feels weird. “Mom” — there’s gods outside.

That being said, I thought this was an absolute masterwork. I think it’s extraordinary. It’s so exciting, and it really makes the filmmaking and the filmgoing experience so wonderful. I’m giving it five stars and a heart.

Pete Wright:
Wow, out of the gate. All right, Steve, what are you going to do? You can’t give it five stars, because you have your own rule.

Steve Sarmento:
Right. I do have my own rule. Social studies teachers across this country can’t wait for this thing to come out on DVD, so they can pop that in and have a whole week of just, hey kids, watch this, we’re going to talk about ancient Greece, here you go. It’s all good. No, I do have my own rule, so it’s going to be a 4.5, because it is an impeccable film. But I rarely give out five stars. It’s got to have some deep emotional something to it that usually doesn’t come out on the first viewing.

But I was really moved with Odysseus’s journey, his whole revelation. And we didn’t even get into this, about Athena being the goddess of wisdom and what that looks like for him, and that dual casting, and what that means — his realization, his coming to or accessing that wisdom and knowledge. There was a really powerful moment there that I’m looking forward to going on this journey again. Maybe venture out into theaters to see this one more time on a big screen of any size that I can find. But definitely four and a half stars and a big old heart.

Pete Wright:
So what I’m hearing is that there was no emotional pull for you that Odysseus destroyed the Bronze Age? You were just like, you broke civilization, meh?

Steve Sarmento:
It’s usually a personal thing that’ll push it up to five stars.

Pete Wright:
I’ve seen Steve throw a dog onto a dung heap. He’s a hard nut to crack.

I feel like — I went into this movie expecting not to have connected with the story, but to really connect with the filmmaking and the experience. That was certainly true, but even this conversation has amped my appreciation for the story writ large. I’ve got the audiobook downloaded on Libby. I’m going to go through the audiobook. We didn’t talk about the change of the ending from the book, which I think is an important change that Nolan gives us, that will change the way history remembers this story. Maybe that’s worth a conversation. But I’m still on board with the five-star-and-a-heart team.

That means it averages up to five stars and a heart, which also means we line up with Rotten Tomatoes. This is kind of a rare alignment where the critics and the audience agree. This is an A movie. Critics are at 98 percent, audiences at 96 percent. People dig this movie opening weekend. So, glad to be on board. Worth seeing, biggest screen you can get.

I just had a brainstorm. I think we should do a post-credit scene of this podcast, because there’s something else we need to talk about. I forgot to talk about it, so we’re going to do it right after the credits roll. Don’t stand up and throw your trash away and go to the bathroom after the music. There might be more, but it’ll be a surprise.

Anyway, thank you all so much for downloading and listening to this show. We appreciate your time and your attention. If this conversation sent you down a rabbit hole, or reminded you of other films circling the same ideas, we do a lot of that work across The Next Reel family of film shows, where we dig into films and filmmakers that built the language this movie is speaking. You can find everything we do as part of The Next Reel family at thenextreel.com. And if this is your first time here because of this movie, stick around. We only do this once a month, and we’re picky on purpose. Next month, Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Meeting adjourned.

Steve Sarmento:
It is.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding. Here’s my post-credit sequence. I can’t believe we didn’t talk more about this. I think it’s important that we note that the gods that are mythical to us in 2026 are mythical to Odysseus in the Bronze Age. Is that an interesting thing to you guys? The fact that we got Athena as a vision — that was his personal relationship with a god. She does not exist. In the original telling of this story, at the end, Zeus and Athena, personified, walk into the banquet hall and wipe everybody’s memories and go about their business, because they’re real, tangible things. And Nolan has ripped that away in this telling. The gods do not exist beyond a personal relationship with them. I found that interesting. Did it strike any of you that way?

Tommy Metz III:
I think it’s a little ambiguous. Because there’s so much time spent saying, treat someone nicely because they might be a god in disguise, Zeus’s law. I think it’s a little ambiguous whether that was Athena. When you see that Zendaya is beheaded in the castle, there’s a chance he just took that as personal trauma and is talking to her in his head, or that she really was a god. This film isn’t godless, because there’s no other gods in the movie.

Pete Wright:
I did not take it that way.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s a possibility.

Pete Wright:
I didn’t take it that way. I thought it was —

Tommy Metz III:
I don’t either, but I like that it’s ambiguous.

Pete Wright:
We’re in violent agreement. Okay.

Ocean Murff:
Oh, no, I thought there were the gods. Because he goes and talks to dead people, right? He talks to all these dead soldiers, they run from him, the prophet that comes out of Hades.

Tommy Metz III:
But those are gods.

Ocean Murff:
Oh, yes. So Hades is a god and a place.

Tommy Metz III:
They’re still supernatural. The Cyclops isn’t a god, but the Cyclops talks to Poseidon. That’s why they think that he’s the brother of —

Ocean Murff:
Right. So they removed the — okay.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, that’s the difference.

Ocean Murff:
I think, because Troy is my benchmark for making these types of movies with no supernatural elements, this felt more supernatural to me. But you’re right, there were not any gods.

Tommy Metz III:
Because Calypso isn’t a god, she’s like a nymph or something, right?

Pete Wright:
She’s just another species.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
This movie is very species-forward. The sirens are like sirens-slash-manatees. I thought that was a really interesting thing. Because my experience with stories of this age is like Clash of the Titans, where they’re literal gods sitting around a table discussing the fates of man. I thought using the gods as a vehicle for Odysseus to rebuild his relationship of self — to understand his own guilt and process his life’s experiences — was really touching, in a way I did not expect in this movie. I like the way you say this movie is not godless. Maybe it’s god-adjacent, but it’s not godful.

Tommy Metz III:
Right. It is for the characters. The characters believe in them, and that’s enough.

Pete Wright:
That’s enough.

Ocean Murff:
The characters believe in them, and they see fantastic things. I think it is akin to a relationship that people would have with God now, where — unless you, at least as far as I know, no one’s saying, okay, I now see a physical God — but there are people that believe in him, and some people don’t. I think this was allowing for a diversity of belief. They even intimate that when they kill Sinon, right? They say, oh, well, they believe in the same gods we believe in. They assumed that they would believe in different gods.

Pete Wright:
That’s a good point. The movie is far from atheistic. The movie has a rich tapestry of belief, but it is as inconsistently consistent as modern tapestries of belief. I thought that was really special. Way to go, Nolan.

Tommy Metz III:
And then — we did touch on it — but the, if you want to call it a twist, it’s not really a twist like an M. Night Shyamalan twist, but he always has a big turn that happens at the very end. The idea of Penelope saying, “We are the people from the sea,” was devastating. And they give you so many clues. You kind of already knew it, but you weren’t putting it in that language, and then the entire movie just clicks into place. We’re the monsters at the end of the book, it turns out, as we go through burning villages because they won’t help us, and we’re worried about people from the sea. No, you idiot — or the Greeks, as we burn down your village and go back into the sea. It’s all right there. But it doesn’t click until he gives that speech without looking at Penelope.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. And we should say — the end of the — so, Steve, check me. What is the end of the original poem? He does the same thing, right? He has the conversation in Hades, I guess. Is it in Hades where he’s told, you’re going to have to go to the West, at the end of your story, you have to go pay homage to the dead? And then at the end —

Steve Sarmento:
It’s been so long, I don’t recall the end of the poem.

Pete Wright:
Okay. Well, my understanding is at the end he gets home, and he stays home.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Right? And here he gets home, and then gets back on a boat and goes to the West. That is low-key the kind of ending I think I needed from the story. He gets to do it with his wife, his son becomes the king, and that is the weirdest, darkest, happy ending that I think we could have expected. It feels very Nolan, and it was worth it for me.

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, absolutely.

Pete Wright:
End post-credit sequence.