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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 28 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Nolan treats the sacking of Troy as an epical tragedy, comparable to the dawn of atomic warfare in Oppenheimer, an event that forever changed how humans and nations dealt with each other.
In a way, Nolan has been telling versions of Homer's epic for decades.
His films are about men trying to find their way home, even when home, and the world around them, has become almost unrecognizable.
The Odyssey is thrilling but uneven, though it moves pretty swiftly for being so overstuffed.
There are striking performances from Lupita Nyong'o as a fiercely defiant Helen of Troy, Himesh Patel as Odysseus' second-in-command, and a very moving John Leguizamo as an Ithacan swineherd who longs for Odysseus' return.
Throughout the film, you can almost feel Nolan thinking his way through the material –
figuring out which parts of the text to leave alone and which parts to cut or embellish.
Some sequences, like when Odysseus tussles with the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, feel a little perfunctory.
But then we'll get an inspired subplot featuring Elliot Page as a Greek soldier whose grim fate weighs heavily on Odysseus' conscience.
And you remember that Nolan, whose style has often been dismissed as coldly intellectual, is one of our most emotionally driven filmmakers.
There's no puzzle-like trickery to the final act of The Odyssey.
It plays out with a classical simplicity and directness.
and Damon, Hathaway, and Holland are entirely convincing as a broken family being pieced together at long last.
You realize why Nolan wanted to make this film, and why it feels like a prism through which his earlier films can be more deeply understood.
For him, no less than for Odysseus, The Odyssey feels like a homecoming.
Niles, a home?
He's still a young man.
Well, you certainly can't take care of him.
You're just getting your new life together.
Absolutely.
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