First saw this expecting a magic movie and walked out realising I’d been shown the trick and missed it anyway. Every rewatch is a different film. Once you know Borden’s secret, every scene where Sarah says “you don’t love me today” lands like a punch.

Nolan’s re-releasing it on 21 January 2027 with 70mm blow-ups from Wally Pfister’s original 35mm. I’m going.

Rewatchers: did Tesla’s machine feel like a cheat the first time? It did for me. Now I think it’s the whole point.

When the Odyssey trailers first dropped, the YouTube comments were full of people criticizing the costumes, questioning the casting, mocking the dialogue, and declaring the film a flop before it had even come out. Ever since the film came out, the reception tells a very different story. It has an 88 on Metacritic, IMDb is currently 8.4/10 from 528,000 user ratings. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 94% from 515 critic reviews and a 96% audience score. Obviously, those numbers don’t mean everyone loves the film, and there are legitimate criticisms to make, but it’s interesting how the pre-release discourse was dominated by people confidently predicting this film to be a failure. People seemed to be genuinely convinced that Nolan had lost his touch and that the movie was going to be embarrassing. What fascinates me is how the sheer volume and certainty of the backlash seem to have vanished from collective memory. There’s no comparable discussion about how wrong the predictions might have been, no real reflection on the premature judgments, just a complete shift to the next thing. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

Screenings of ‘The Odyssey’ on the big screen are becoming more and more scarce, as the film completed a 3-months generational run. While some re-releases are expected, I think it’s a good time to celebrate some of its achievements during its highly profitable run.

From @nolanismm on Instagram

This, combined with the 88 MC, 94%/96% RT, 8.4 IMDb and 4.3 LB, I think it’s safe to say we haven’t had a movie like this in quite a long time.

Spoilers for the film.

Hi everyone! I wrote a long essay on The Odyssey and would like to explain here how it relates to its subject. It was conceived as an analysis of the film and in the course of the work grew into a philosophical text around it, yet it still rests on Nolan’s decisions, above all those related to meaning. What captivated me was the point at which The Odyssey stops being a retelling of Homer and becomes auteur cinema. So I first look at how meaning is constructed in the film, and only then allow myself a freer interpretation that no longer claims to be indisputable. I also discuss the visual decisions, but I look first of all at what they mean and how work in a narrative construction.

The essay begins outside the film, with Nolan’s earlier work. Interstellar, I think, was already an odyssey, only a cosmic one. Cooper leaves home answering a call, disappears for an unthinkably long time, and, having returned to his now elderly daughter, soon flies off again, so his return does not close the ending. Nolan’s long-standing interest in time and space shows in Dunkirk as well, where he brings together a week on the mole, a day at sea, and an hour in the air. In The Odyssey both leitmotifs meet again. Space stretches between the hearths of people in the oikoumene, while time delays the meaning of an act. It all seems simple, and indeed both distances can be overcome by crossing the sea and waiting out the years until the dust of change settles. What, then, keeps the story from ending? The essay answers that what resists is a third dimension, the depth of what was done.

This answer grows out of the ways Nolan departs from Homer. There is no council of the Olympians in his film, the gods are kept almost entirely out of frame, and with them the very outlook on the world shifts, since the view from above that could take in the whole war disappears. Its place is inherited by the spectator, who sees more widely than any hero - but still looks with the eyes of a human being. In the film, it is the blind characters - for example, the swineherd Eumaeus and Tiresias - who preserve the memory, while the sighted Menelaus has his eyes clouded by the myth of his victory. Hardly any access to what happened remains, until the very finale no records or tablets are seen on screen, only song and spoken accounts. This is how antiquity arrives within the lifetime of the war’s eyewitnesses - the world has simply lost access to its past as it was.

However the film offers six views of it, from the nameless bard to the lying Antinous. Each interprets how the war ended and what it means, yet there is also a seventh, asymmetrical view, Helen’s, which calls the very origin into question. Among them is the main character, but even Odysseus is not allowed to tell his story himself. In Homer he recounts his wanderings to the Phaeacians at length, while in Nolan he has shut himself off from the past behind a veil, and it breaks through to him in short flashes, like a punishment. I would not call these wanderings a trauma, though, since the film offers no healing. From the forgetting with which Calypso heals him at the cost of silencing part of his person, Odysseus walks away. Later he admits that his thought, which brought victory, opened the way to crimes, and in the finale he chooses exile for himself.

Odysseus keeps even the sign of home on his person. In Homer the marriage bed is made from a living olive tree and ties the home to its place, whereas in Nolan this sign fits into a fibula on his cloak. Instead of Homer’s golden dog it bears an image of Athena, who later pursues the hero almost like a hunting dog, and so the line of the hunt runs through the fibula. Once, the young Odysseus demanded that no one attack by stealth, but the horse crossed out that rule, and toward the end the hero himself says that at Troy, battle became a hunt. Behind all this stands the image, which lasts by spending the present, or, as the essay puts it, “the feast eats through the house, triumph through lives, the song’s refrain through the meaning of victory.” The human being cannot measure up to his own image - the hero of victory returns to his home having taken the name of Sinon, whom he left to die by the horse, thereby repeating the ruse that let the Greeks into Troy.

Perhaps a thread runs through all of Nolan’s films, and the essay calls it the production of the past. An account of what happened gives it a form and a meaning on which the future then stands. In Dunkirk, a newspaper with Churchill’s speech turns the retreat into a myth while the soldiers are still riding home on the train. In The Dark Knight, Gotham’s future rests on the image of a hero that Harvey Dent did not measure up to, and Batman pays for it with his own image, taking Dent’s crimes upon himself. These examples are not in the essay, I added them to expand the observation. In The Odyssey, though, the thread seems to me to grow into an epic that arises from the fall of the sublime.

I’m curious whether you see this thread in his films. Which of The Odyssey’s decisions strike you as the most authorial?

The full essay, if you’d like to read it: https://medium.com/rock-nheavy/the-duration-of-ruins-e3ea8a70602c

Take the final game of the 1985 World Chess Championship between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, and tell it alongside Napoleon’s Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

The circumstances are surprisingly similar.

Karpov had been world champion for 10 years. Going into the final game, he needed a win to keep his title. Kasparov, just 22 years old, only needed a draw.

At Waterloo, Napoleon was making one final attempt to defeat Wellington and save his empire.

Nolan could tell these stories simultaneously, cutting between the chessboard and the battlefield.

Karpov begins an aggressive attack against Kasparov’s king. Cut to Napoleon sending his forces against Wellington’s defensive lines.

Kasparov absorbs the pressure and begins looking for opportunities to counterattack. Wellington holds his position as the Prussians begin arriving on Napoleon’s flank.

As the game progresses, Karpov commits more and more to his attack, leaving weaknesses that Kasparov can exploit. Meanwhile, Napoleon is running out of options and commits his Imperial Guard in one final attempt to break Wellington’s army.

Kasparov launches his decisive counterattack. Wellington’s forces repel the Imperial Guard, and Napoleon’s army begins to break.

There you have it, would you watch?

Full Bracket in Comments

It's obviously not the same instrument but it sounds very similar.

It appears around the minute 1:40.

Does it sound similar to you as well?

Alright, let's actually be rational and constructive about Nolan and his work for once.

Lately, I've actually been enjoying Denis Villeneuve's work more, but whenever I rewatch one of Nolan's movies, I just keep thinking that it's an absolute masterpiece. Even his "worst" movie is still better than most of Hollywood's output.

Of course I'm a fan of Nolan and I often defend his movies and style, but that doesn't mean I can't see when he has some flaws. I believe there are plenty of reasonable people here who feel the same way. After all, as movie lovers, or even critics, we should be at least somewhat unbiased. Not that we're always like that, but you get what I mean.

I personally have several of his movies among my favorite movies of all time. I often can't decide which one is the best, and the competition for that spot usually comes down to The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Inception and Interstellar. I probably lean towards The Prestige the most, simply because of how brilliantly constructed that movie is. But I guess it also depends on my mood.

Of course, the mood and atmosphere of his movies is pretty much always the same, and it's true that sometimes you'd like to see a change. And as we've seen with The Odyssey (phenomenal movie btw), he approaches pretty much any genre in his own way.

He's also not that great at action scenes, we all know that, nothing new here. People sometimes criticize his screenwriting and dialogue as well. That's actually something that never really bothered me personally, and I've never seen it as some major problem. And yeah, underdeveloped female characters, we know that one too.

But what I'm more interested in is your actual opinions. What do you genuinely dislike about him, or what do you love about his work? And how do you approach these things in a constructive way?

I've only mentioned a few examples here, and there are definitely more, but even so, he's a phenomenal director and one of the best of our time, constantly pushing the industry forward.

The hate he gets is sometimes almost astronomical, but I guess that's somewhat proportional to his success, so it's not that surprising. As they say, if nobody hates you, you're probably not that good, right?

So, let's hear your opinions.

I definitely recommend this book if you're a Tenet fan. It's very in-depth and the photos are amazing. I'm planning on getting James Mottram's book on The Odyssey too.

See The Odyssey on Blu-ray and Digital, November 17.

I find The Prestige to be an unusually intricate comment on the nature of finding the source of one’s personal identity and testing the validity of it. I wanted to see if others would share their thoughts on some of the questions that, in my view, the film proposes.

What constitutes an identity?

The most obvious test case to begin with is Robert Angier who, even before the fateful meeting with Tesla, occupied and shifted through several identities. He starts life as Lord Caldlow, the heir of a massive fortune of an old money family. Seeing himself as a performer, he creates the identity of Robert Angier so he doesn’t embarrass the family name. Finally he lands on the Great Danton to be his identity when on stage performing. The final shift is obvious, but couldn’t the transition to Robert Angier also be a performance of a kind, as an allowance to act more as he feels he truly is as opposed to an identity given to him by his life circumstances?

Moving further, Angier clones and teleports himself, killing a clone in the process each time. It must be asked: is Robert Angier alive at the end of the film for his final conversation? No matter what Angier is the original one post teleportation (whether it be the one who remains in the teleporter or the one who gets teleported), the original body ends up dead. If it’s not Robert Angier at the end of the film, then who exactly is it and why?

That’s the obvious case, but then we move on to Alfred Borden. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the twins as Albert (the gentler one who loved Sarah) and Freddie (the bolder one who loved Olivia). Together these two individuals comprise the identity of Borden. Is Alfred Borden real? Every single individual in The Prestige treats Borden as one real identity. Even though Alfred is at times inhabited by a different physical individual, people with intimate relationships with Alfred, like Sarah and Olivia, conceive as the individual they have that relationship with as one person, one identity.

Even the two individuals inhabiting the identity Alfred conceive of the identity as one united and coherent person. At one point Albert, as Alfred, tells Freddie, “she (Sarah) knows something’s not right. Tell her that I love her.” He’s asking the other twin to say something when he’s Alfred, but using the word “I” when referencing the identity Alfred even when he’s referencing a time when he personally won’t be embodying it. He does this throughout the film, like when Angier asks Borden what knot he tied the night Angier’s wife drowned. Borden says “I’ve been asking myself that, and I don’t know.” Albert is referencing literally asking another person, Freddie, but we (the audience) and Angier aren’t privy to this information yet. We picture one Borden as mulling over the question in his own mind, but that doesn’t seem all too much different from how Albert and Freddie conceive of the exact same situation. They separately write in one diary as one unified individual, confusing both Angier and the audience. They accept the consequences, however dire, of choices made by the other twin embodying the identity of Alfred Borden.

Is Alfred Borden, then, a real identity in the same sense that Robert Angier is a real identity? Is Alfred Borden alive by the end of the film for the same conversation referenced earlier? If Robert Angier is more real than Alfred Borden, in what sense is that true? Angier is a fake identity itself created for the purpose of not bringing embarrassment to the Caldlow family name, so how could it be more real than Alfred Borden, an identity created to make an amazing magic trick possible.

I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on the issue of identity presented in The Prestige!

The joke answer would be the Batman movies, if you see them as an MCU precursor

This hit me yesterday watching MI...

I think Nolan has always delivered great movies but for me Oppenheimer and The Odyssey are far above anything he's ever done and that most directors have ever done. I think his filmography in general will be looked will high regard, but those two(UNTIL NOW) will stand out. I also think Tenet will have a revision to it and people will se it as a great movie

I made a comment which I thought won't get any attention because you know everyone agrees, but damn , and minutes later while scrolling down I found this community, I'm glad.

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1x8g59j/comment/phchfs9/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I have seen it twice and I still couldn't understand the main point of the movie and it was giving me a head ache. I need some help from you to hopefully get the narrative

Check your emails … knew it was too good to be true.