Justin Chang
speaker
1,638 appearances
51 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard yesterday
Justin Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 28 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.
Appearances
But Odysseus is in fact still alive on a distant island.
His memory has been bewitched by the nymph Calypso.
That's Charlize Theron.
And the story of his long, long journey tumbles out in a cascade of flashbacks.
The jumbled timeline suits Nolan's love of non-linear plotting.
Still, I had a lot of questions going in.
How would a filmmaker known for his narrative surprises tackle one of the best-known stories in all literature –
And how would a director of heady, high-tech action movies adapt to Homer's ancient world of gods and monsters?
The gods themselves are largely absent, with the exception of Athena, who pops up every so often in the form of Zendaya to counsel Odysseus.
Nolan is a downbeat realist by nature, which gives the Odyssey a fascinating tension.
It's a fantasy made by a skeptic at heart.
The supernatural elements have been tamped down.
When the island-dwelling sorceress Circe briefly transforms Odysseus' men into pigs, the magic has a low-key, almost tactile realism, aided in no small part by Samantha Morton's chillingly intense performance as Circe.
And when the men outwit a giant cyclops in his lair, Nolan pairs away almost all the dialogue.
Gone are Odysseus' showboating speeches, and goes full-bore monster movie in a way he never really has before.
Visually, Nolan is clearly pushing himself.
The film was shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras, and the images of Odysseus' ships at sea are stunningly majestic.
There's a ferocious intimacy to the action scenes, some of which play out in near-total darkness, illuminated only by flickering firelight and set to Ludwig Gorenson's pulse-pounding score.
Nolan brilliantly recreates the famous Trojan horse deception, masterminded by Odysseus himself, in two gripping set pieces, culminating in the total destruction of Troy.
As he recalls these shattering events, Odysseus is flooded with regret, which Damon fully conveys in a terse, plain-spoken performance that ranks among his finest work.
Showing 581–600 of 1,638 · page 30 of 82
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