Film Review - The Odyssey (15)

 Promise me you will come back.

The phrase 'go big or go home' seems to apply uniquely to Christopher Nolan. No one would have blamed him, following his awards and box-office juggernaut Oppenheimer, for scaling things down and returning to the more intimate thrillers of his early career like Memento and Insomnia. Instead, he opted to adapt one of the foundational stories of world literature, a tale as sweeping as any epic produced in the Golden Age of Hollywood and populated by gods and monsters besides. The word 'odyssey' has come to describe stories from Gulliver's Travels to The Lord of the Rings, even featuring in the subtitle of Kubrick's 2001 - originating, as it does, in this ancient and momentous quest narrative. And it's to this massive challenge that the British-American filmmaker has applied his energies.

The 'quest' in question, as you probably remember from your schooldays, is deceptively simple - that of Greek warrior Odysseus to find his way home to his island kingdom Ithaca following the Trojan War. But this proves - in Nolan's film as in Homer's millennia-old poem - as arduous and frustrating as the war itself, with similarly devastating loss of life. Matt Damon plays the complicated hero, wrangling one deadly setback after another on behalf of himself and his crew, while wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) who has yet to meet his father, wait and hope for his return. Their situation is complicated by a rabble of young and wealthy suitors, led by Robert Pattinson's sneering Antinous, who have descended on Odysseus' palace to compete for his wife and his wealth. From the film's beginning, the stakes for the estranged family are clear.

The Odyssey is a tale for which Nolan's formidable talent has been honed over twelve other features, to the point where it's equal to the venture's sheer scale. This is a vast movie, the first one shot exclusively - as has been widely noted - with IMAX cameras. The effect is one of complete immersion in each location, be it ocean, icy wasteland, or volcanic isle, as well as soul-searching close-ups of the kind that proved so affecting in Oppenheimer. Another IMAX virtue is how it showcases the project's detail in all its authenticity. The earthiness of each scene is striking, making ancient myth remarkably relatable. Even the most fantastical elements of sea monsters and sirens convince due to the director's much-praised embracing of practical effects. (Green screen is nowhere, CGI used only to enhance what was achieved in camera.) This is an epic you feel as much as hear and see.

As with his previous Oscar-winning adaptation, Nolan digs deep into the source text, finding a clear and compelling narrative thread. Odysseus's story is more than just a sequence of strung-together incidents. It's about one flawed individual's struggle with destiny, a fight that turns him increasingly at odds with his compatriots and more despairing of his life's meaning. It's about the cruelty of war, how the effects of conflict live in a soldier's bones long after the fighting has ended. And it's about family loyalty - the resistance under pressure to compromise those ties of love. The gods make occasional, subtle appearances, but this Odyssey is first and last a human tale. It's told in as non-linear a fashion as Homer's poem, so that the film's opening act may disorient some. Stick with it, though, and the narrative thrust rewards handsomely in a final stretch that ties the story and its themes together.

As for his team, Nolan draws on creatives he has assembled over multiple cinematic adventures to craft what might be his ultimate. Damon, ripped but ruined, anchors proceedings with a physical performance that's heroic in its own right. Other stand-outs are Hathaway, girding Penelope's patience with steely determination and simmering fury, and Pattinson, enjoyably slimy in his villain role. Nolan newcomer John Leguizamo adds emotional weight as Odysseus's loyal mentor Eumaeus, and as for Samantha Morton - her contribution to the film won't be forgotten by anyone who sees it. Ever. Meanwhile, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema complements the realism of the director's vision with his naturally lit and stark camerawork, while Ludwig Göransson scores the action sequences with strange, heart-pounding intensity. In short, no one here's on their B-game.

The movie has stoked online controversy (stemming exclusively from those who haven't seen it) regarding issues of historical accuracy, casting choices, anachronistic dialogue... The furore is so much hot air. In a project this ambitious, tackling such an ancient and morally complex source text, expect creative choices that raise eyebrows along with various technical nitpicks. Not everything is going to work for every viewer. It's literally astonishing, however, how much does. This doesn't purport to be the definitive adaptation of Homer's famous work, but it's a damn good one. And if you happen upon a more awe-inspiring feat of filmmaking this year, let me know. Because that I want to watch. 

Memorable Moment(s): (1) The logistics of delivering a Trojan horse. (2) Make sure your stew isn't spiked... (3) The most faithful friend of all. (This bit made me cry.)

Ed's Verdict: 9.5/10. Nolan's done it again. His Odyssey calls to mind Lawrence of Arabia's immensity and the ingenuity of special effects legends from Ray Harryhausen to Rick Baker. It's also got thrilling action, a rich emotional core, and one very hungry cyclops. A 2026 biggest-screen must-see.

Film Review - Spider-Man: No Way Home (12A)

 You have a gift. You have power. And with great power...

I don't know where to begin. I don't know what to say, and what not. Either you've seen Spider-Man: No Way Home by now, in which case I can wreak no spoiler havoc, or you haven't, in which case you possibly don't care. But just maybe you've not yet made it due to family or work commitments and still want to experience the movie fresh. I'm going to assume that last scenario, also that you've not seen so much as a trailer for this Spidey outing. Because if you are such a person - someone who loves the whole Peter Parker teen-super mythology but who gets to watch this movie cold, then you're in for the treat of your Spider-loving life. 

The starting point of this film is the end to the previous one, and that much I'll assume you have seen. Peter's precious anonymity has been shattered by J. Jonah Jameson, played with muck-raking gusto by J. K. Simmons (reprising the role from Tobey Maguire's Spider-Era). Jameson is likewise promoting the lie that Parker/Spider-Man is responsible for recent villainous events internationally. With his cover blown, Peter finds his reputation and college chances ruined, along with those of girlfriend MJ and best friend Ned. It's more than a high-school lad can take, so this being the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he calls on Doctor Strange's mystical powers, to see if the world can forget that Spider-Man is really Peter Parker in spandex. But spells have messy consequences when cast in the presence of excitable teens, and the consequences here are remarkable - not least for long-term fans of the webslinger on page and screen.

2002 was my proper introduction to Spidey with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, this Maguire iteration of the character probably being the purest in terms of adherence to comic-book lore. The hard-on-the-heels reboots brought a skater-boy cool to the character, Andrew Garfield's likeable interpretation hampered by variable narrative choices, but still not without its entertainment value and dramatic punch. Finally the MCU and Tom Holland effectively made the character Spider-Boy, with less of the angst that plagued Peter in the other versions and greater emphasis on high-school dating and friendship. 2017's Homecoming and 2019's Far From Home majored on fun, including amusing support players and more jokes. (Thankfully the latter had a high hit-rate.) But No Way Home, the final part of director Jon Watts' Home trilogy, does something unprecedented, in terms of Spider-Man and of popcorn cinema. It begins with the jokey Holland style with which audiences have become familiar, and then it goes old-school, taking enormous storytelling risks. This might all have resulted in a disastrous mess, but instead it creates a magic that's little short of alchemical.

No Way Home begins with all the wit and charm of its MCU predecessors - but in focusing on the consequences of Peter's identity reveal, it highlights the burden of personal responsibility on a teenager that has always made Spider-Man uniquely compelling. And that's only the start of what turns out to be an emotionally turbulent and constantly surprising story. Holland is as welcome a presence as ever in the lead, being called on to find constantly greater range in the character and meeting the challenge every time. He and Zendaya become steadily more endearing as the Peter/MJ paring, with Jacob Batalon's Ned rounding out the trio of friends in a way that takes it from purely knockabout to something considerably more touching. 

With great support also from Marisa Tomei (the most impactful and - let's say it - hottest Aunt May ever), Jon Favreau ever loveable as Happy Hogan and Benedict Cumberbatch bringing the weight and humour of his ever-evolving Doc Strange, it's an engaging and pacy prologue, but that's all it is. For when the story's antagonists arrive, they do so from a place and in a form that will steal the breath of those few Spider-Fans who've bunkered up and avoided all publicity. And from there the surprises keep being sprung - not cheaply, but in ways that reforge expectations of what this kind of live-action film can achieve, while deconstructing the Spider mythology to build it into something more impressive than before. Never has the Parker/Spider-Man duality been explored with such invention and import.

If I were to quibble, it'd be to say that certain choices made in the story's early stages are more to facilitate the amazing plot twists that come later, rather than a natural extension of how you might expect certain characters to behave. Yes there's an element of contrivance, but what it leads to is so thrilling and so punch-the-air joyful that it's okay in this case to let such conveniences lie. Look, I'm not going to claim straight out that No Way Home is the best film in the wider Sony-related franchise (though it certainly stakes a claim). What I will say is that it takes Spidey enthusiasts to places they probably never dreamed they'd go, and puts a big goofy, teary grin on their faces once they get there. If you've paid any attention to the big screen adventures of Spider-Man over the past two decades, you might end up wearing a similar grin yourself.

Gut Reaction: Spellbound by a sense this was more than just Spider-business as usual. Then grinning a lot and tearing up for reasons of both sadness and joy. 

Memorable Moment: I can't say much, just that it was one of the most audacious reveals I've ever experienced in a cinema.

Ed's Verdict: 9/10. Hugely satisfying block-buster entertainment - less from its scale and effects (both stunning), more from big emotions, rooted in a plot that embraces its ambition with a bear-hug and doesn't let go. This everyday neighbourhood hero has never blown so many minds.

Film Review - The Current War (12A)

My boys and I caught in a jar what before now has only flashed across the night sky.

The Current War tells of the 19th Century battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse for supremacy in America's burgeoning electrical industry. The story has such epic scope and deals with cultural upheaval so vast that it's surprising no one has attempted to put it on screen before. But sadly while director Alfonsa Gomez-Rejon's effort gives off sparks of the situation's innate drama, it never shines with the kind of illumination promised by that core idea.

Michael Shannon plays Westinghouse, the entrepreneur who having devoted himself to gas distribution becomes fascinated by Edison's harnassing of electricity as a power source. Edison's refusal to meet with him and talk shop leads to a steadily intensifying competition between the two men, Westinghouse combating his rival's direct current system with the creation of alternative current lighting (it's AC versus DC, folks). Into the mix steps Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), the young immigrant scientist whose genius has the capability to give either man the edge. As America lights up state by state and the use of this new electical magic takes some ironically dark turns, the two men resort to dubious means in order to corner the rapidly expanding market.  

It's a wonder of its own that a film with so many bright individual aspects doesn't work as a whole. From its outset there are moments of cinematographic beauty that take you by surprise, of which the haunting gaslight of a passing train and Edison standing amid a forest of lightbulbs are but two. The dialogue has wit and insight, not least when the two vying entrepreneurs finally meet and acknowledge their shared fascination with the force of nature they're both trying to channel. Then there's Chan-wook Park's vital, pulsing score, one that would set your heart racing, were the drama really lighting up.

On top of that is the cast-to-die-for. Cumberbatch brings all his Doctor Strange drivenness and enigma, but with greater humanity. Shannon, so grimly magnetic in Nocturnal Animals and just plain grim in The Shape of Water, finds the warmth underlying Westinghouse's obsession, helped by the ever-radient Katherine Waterson (Fantastic Beasts) as his wife. As for Hoult, check out his performances in The Favourite and Tolkien to witness range and depth and then see how much he does with limited screen-time as the awkwardly brilliant Tesla. Plus it's got another bouyant likeable performance from Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland, as Edison's PA Samuel Insull. It takes a lot to screw up with that lot on board.

And yet screw up the film does, by failing to engage it audience, even if there's a clutch of moments where it threatens to do so. There are, I think, two reasons for this. First up is the screenplay - a frustratingly choppy affair that zips through history like current down a power-line, never pausing long enough to let us connect with the characters or grasp the mighty import of all they're trying to achieve. At under two hours this feels like a mini-series' worth of story crammed into a format that leaves you floundering to keep up. That problem is compounded by Gomez-Rejon's direction, possibly a hang-over from the work he's put into successive seasons of American Horror Story. What works in a stylised genre TV-show is a irritation here. Every shot is fisheye-lensed, Dutch-tilting or overhead swirl - artsy showing off that's impressive in itself, but ultimately distracting from a story that's travelling at breakneck pace already. It made me a bit nauseous at points, and even more detached from the story unfolding on-screen.

 

For a reviewer the mark of a good film is how fully you forget you're there to review it. The Current War had so many great ingrediants, starting with an epoch-changing subject and fascinating historical characters - men fired up with grand ideas, who helped to forge the modern world - that I should have been enthralled. The fact that I spent much of the running-time pinning down why I wasn't enjoying it more, suggests how far it felt flat. For all its thematic energy and star-power, this film never shocked me into awe and wonder like it should have done. The voltage was certainly high... but I'm afraid my interest blew a fuse.

Gut Reaction: Not boredom, it wasn't that. Just annoyance that something so potentially great didn't even achieve really good.

Memorable Moment: A very scary electrical invention.

Ed's Verdict: 6/10. Some impressive individual parts earn those points, but the sum of them doesn't add to anything more. The Current War is ambitious, but ultimately botched.

Film Review - Spider-Man: Far From Home (12A)

You are just a scared little kid in a sweatsuit.  

(This review includes spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.) 

A grand total of eight standalone Spider-Man films - that's including last year's animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - have swung across our cinema screens this still-young century. It's a testament to multiple individuals, starting with Spidey's creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, that the web-slinger remains as fresh and entertaining as in his movie debut seventeen years ago. We love this high-school superhero's teen exuberance, never more so than right here in Spider-Man: Far From Home.

The new movie begins with its youthful characters coming to terms with the world post-'blip', their word for the chaos perpetrated by arch-villain Thanos in Endgame. Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is still feeling the loss of his mentor Tony Stark, and so embraces a school trip to Europe, intent on leaving spider-suit and alter-ego behind, while romantically pursuing classmate MJ. But ex-boss of SHIELD Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson of course) is pursuing him, so that the teenager might help counter new global threats. And the most imminent of these is a bevy of dimension-hopping elemental entities, being taken on single-handedly by caped newcomer 'Mysterio' (an impressively suited-and-booted Jake Gyllenhall). Peter's vacation, to quote best friend Ned, has been 'hi-jacked', and he must decide whether or not to shoulder the full weight of the super-hero burden.

Like it's predecessor Spider-Man: Homecoming, Far From Home must strike a fine balance between integrating itself into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole and telling its own tale. On the one hand it helps to know what the 'blip' stuff is all about and why the protagonist is so down in the mouth over Tony Stark (Ironman's checkered legacy looms over the whole story). On the other, the film takes off as a fast-paced and frequently hilarious high-school comedy in its own right, enhanced this time around by vividly coloured European locations. It's got a revitalised and joyous comic-book feed in contrast to the sombre stylings of Endgame, never more so than when Peter is tangling with elemental adversaries alongside his new pal Mysterio. And that's only the movie's first half, before a series of rug-pulling plot developments steer it into darker territory that make unexpectedly heavy demands on our hero.

For all its teen-based jokery and romantic complications, Far From Home has surprising dramatic depth. Fans of the Sam Raimi films have seen Tobey Maguire's Spidey go through all this 'power/responsibility' angst already, but here it's in the context of the turbulent post-Thanos world and has a consequent sense of - well - consequence. It's a challenge to which Holland rises. He's better than ever as Peter, whether zipping around Venice and Prague in hero-mode, fumbling his efforts at romance or facing up to loss and self-doubt as circumstances turn critical. Spider-Man has never been more fully human than this.

There's sterling support too from all sides. Zendaya (The Greatest Showman) comes into her own as a self-protecting emo version of MJ, while the other 'teens' and their incompetent teachers dependably raise smiles throughout. (There's a particularly funny subplot involving Jacob Batalon's lovable Ned.) Meanwhile Ironman fans will love how the relationship between Peter and Stark employee Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is developed, supplying nicely judged moments of humour and sadness. And Jake brings the Gyllenhall magic like you'd expect, as the enigmatic and magnificently attired Mysterio.

Intricately constructed by the same directorial/writing team as Homecoming, Far From Home balances comic-book thrills and weightier moments with expertise, while switching up gears towards a suitably explosive conclusion. (If it does go a bit too CGI-mayhem at the end, the character drama sufficiently compensates.) Marvel fans have been expecting epic developments in this movie and they get them, though possibly not how they expected. Hang around for a end-credits double-whammy to knock your socks clean off. This movie isn't over till it's over, and Spidey's world - to say nothing of the MCU - might never be the same again.

Gut Reaction: Grins, laugh-out-louds, cheers and gasps - all that a Spider-Man movie should provide and lots of it. 

Memorable Moment: There were any number of those during the feature, but it has to be the first of the end-credits scenes. Cheer-inducing, then jaw-dropping. Nothing short of sensational.

Ed's Verdict: 8/10. A fun-packed ride for the casual viewer, with chewy delights for the dedicated MCU fan. In a perfect world all summer blockbusters would be this good.