‘The Odyssey’ Shows Us Just How Big, Bold, and Grown-Up Movies Can Be. Scream for More.
Coincidentally, ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ is coming soon. Why does it look like a Super Bowl commercial for crypto?
Welcome back to Projections, the only newsletter that tells you what you most want is what you most can’t have and that the most you can’t have is what you already had and lost.
PROGRAMMING REMINDER: I’m opening up a subscriber-only chat on Friday, July 24, at 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET. Let’s talk Odyssey, fall festivals, physical media, and how to beat the crippling heat that drains the life from my body this time of year.
Today I’m exploring the eruptive wellspring of feeling I got watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and how ecstatic it made me for the short-term future of movie culture. Is this a sugar high or the real thing, baby?
There was a mischievous irony in the Avengers: Doomsday trailer being released the morning after The Odyssey triumphed to a $265 million opening weekend. The evidence of what large-scale movie storytelling can be vs. the reality of what it has been. By which I mean, practically made, technology-forward, format-minded spectacle positioned against digitally rendered, nostalgia-farming serialization. Call it a tale of two Cyclopses.
Despite my posture toward superhero storytelling over the past five years, I’m looking forward to seeing Avengers: Doomsday. I’ve still got an adolescent instinct to want to see what happens to the characters I cared about as a teenager—I worked in a comic book distribution center when I was 15, and largely had a good time with the MCU, particularly as a novel realization of youthful dreams from those days. Ah, those dreams. Now that the Knicks have won a title, Spider-Man has become the surest thing in movies, and Paul Thomas Anderson has won a bushel of Oscars, well, it’s time to put away childish things. Let’s be grown-ups. That’s what the movies have been telling us anyway. Nolan’s The Odyssey may be the most adult blockbuster ever made—sure, there are monsters and witches and epic battles. But his telling of Homer’s poem is a massive sociological recrimination against war, indecency, and the erosion of human connection. It’s a cri de coeur disguised as a swords-and-sandals epic in a time of relentless bickering, trolling, and war-mongering. It’s also a thematic and textual mirror match with his previous film, Oppenheimer.
