Sir Christopher Nolan is many things. The Spielberg/Lucas/Cameron manqué of our time. A double Oscar-winner for Oppenheimer, a picture that is nowhere near his best work. The most acclaimed director of film bros, who somehow ignore his standing as a white, British privately educated filmmaker. But what nobody has ever seriously asked before is “Is Sir Christopher camp?”
I hesitate to say that. The (relatively) newly knighted director is as serious a figure as has ever been seen in the film industry. But after watching the new trailer for his magnum opus, The Odyssey, it is a question that I must ask. We have Good Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon, as Nolan’s conception of Odysseus. All good there; I myself would have cast Michael Fassbender, but hey ho. Damon rocks a beard of varying lengths and greyness, and wears an expression of becoming seriousness. At various points in the trailer, he makes it clear that he wants to go home. This is becoming a trait of Mr Damon. He has also made this clear in Saving Private Ryan, The Martian, Interstellar (another Nolan jaunt) and Elysium. Looked at dispassionately, Mr Damon is the actor who seems keenest to go anywhere, least of all Hollywood.
Well, he’s been lucky with The Odyssey. And the fact that he has slimmed down to near-skeletal proportions suggests that he has committed to the bit. As, indeed, has his co-star Robert Pattinson, playing the villainous suitor Antinous. I am a great admirer of Pattinson, who was the saving grace of Nolan’s solitary misfire Tenet, but I would suggest that no actor alive could deliver the line “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some snivelling bastard”.
Spiderman vs Batman (Pattinson vs Tom Holland): how could audiences possibly resist? But whatever happens, there is the suspicion that Sir Christopher has let loose after his earlier exercises in sturm und drang and offered audiences a film that they will want to see in some quantity. It’s budgeted at $250 million – some reports suggest that it ended up costing even more – which will make it by far the most expensive film of his career. Oppenheimer was a relatively cheap $100 million, and that featured the biggest bang of them all. Studio Universal no doubt hopes it is his biggest hit yet.
Nolan himself cut his usual calm and collected self on Colbert, praising his stars Holland and Anne Hathaway and talking of the timelessness of the story. In a sop to modern audiences, he said “Every comic book culture, whether you’re talking about Marvel or DC or all the rest, a lot of it comes directly from the Homeric epics… Homer, in a way, is the George Lucas of our time.” Modesty clearly forbade him from comparing Homer to another A-list filmmaker.
The director said in another interview that he was well aware of the sky-high expectations that people have. He said, with a becoming touch of modesty, that he “really tried to make the best film possible”, and that “anyone taking on The Odyssey is taking on the hopes and dreams of people for epic movies everywhere and that comes with a huge responsibility…[filmgoers] want to know that a filmmaker has gone to the mat with it.”
Judging by this trailer, which features the director’s own additions – most notably a forest-set battle where Odysseus and his men battle armor-wearing giants – this is going to be a picture in which literally everything is going to be on screen. Nolan’s own Spartacus or The Vikings, a big-budget, sword and sandals epic that will make audiences thrill to a bygone world all over again. As Russell Crowe declared in Gladiator, “Are you not entertained?” From this, we all will be.
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