Welcome to the Second Thought newsletter, where I take another look at whatever’s bubbling up in the middle and the margins of the culture. This week I saw The Odyssey—or, since I got tickets late and had to sit in the front row, mere feet from the massive IMAX screen it was shown on: I saw the bottom left corner of The Odyssey, and if I really craned my neck, most of the middle of it. This was apparently one of the smaller huge screens in New York, at a width of around 60 feet, but I’m still vibrating from the endless drumming of the score. One of the trailers, for a horror film starring Jessica Chastain, made me feel like I was under live fire. If my great-grandparents had been seated in this theater and caught even one of the mellower moments of this movie—like when Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, cradles Matt Damon’s beaten-down Odysseus on her beach—I think that their hearts would have exploded.
But luckily for us all, the nearly three hours of sweeping shots of beaches and ocean, brutal battle scenes, and dazzling special effects that make up Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic poem are available to us for about 20 bucks. The cast is stacked—though some performances pop more than others, sorry Tom Holland—and it comes at a time where the themes, about the cost of war, the limits of hospitality, and institutional collapse, are apt as ever. Nolan is a virtuoso; at this point, if he directed oncoming traffic, it would make hundreds of millions of dollars.
So why is everyone so worked up?
