I went to see Nolan’s Odyssey, if only for the monsters. I have some thoughts about them while I’m still digesting the movie as a whole.
Mostly I just wanted to see Polyphemos, whom I adore, and I did not have to wait too long. I thought this Polyphemos was quite beautiful to be honest; or maybe I just think that actor Bill Irwin is adorable. He reminded me of that Augustinian notion that should monsters exist, surely they’d been created by God. I felt a great deal of empathy for this everyday shepherd cyclops who, with diligent protestant work ethic, takes good care of his animals and seems to genuinely love them (the sheep don’t mind that he’s a one-eyed giant, either). Polyphemos wakes up at the crack of dawn every day to let them out to graze, herding them back in at dusk to keep them safe, and (seemingly without ever eating them) makes quality feta from their milk (Odysseus can vouch for this).
But when other live food presents itself our big fella isn’t shy to partake, eating whatever comes to mouth like the enormous id that he represents, such as how tiny armored Greeks are to him nothing more than shellfish—just puts them in his mouth and spit out the helmet after chewing. This is shown in beautiful chiaroscuro with obvious reference to Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son, though considerably less gory.
All the while I was mindful of the fact that the Greek infestation in Polyphemos’s dwelling would take out his eye before long, and that scene was excellently done. When it happened I felt a great horror. The prolonged screams were terrible, and the cyclops squeeling and sobbing to his father after the fact made me feel even worse. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t feel wronged if, at bedtime, your leftover dish of shrimp conspired to blind you. You’d go crying to your parents too. Now imagine if the shrimp constantly refer to you as „it“. Now how do you feel?
While escaping Polyphemos’s cave Odysseus decides, cruelly, to take another pot-shot at his eye, resulting in even more havoc. His men are not happy with this and lambast him for having been unable to show the creature some pity. I felt the same way. This was gratuitous and quite frankly evil. Which sort of becomes the entire point of the movie: war makes monsters out of men.
On Polyphemos’s design for this movie, see this article in which my good colleague Debbie Felton offers her insights.
Other strange beings don’t get the same amount of screen time. The Laestrygones are all clad in armor for some unexplained reason and look stupid as a result. What could have been a wonderful scene just felt silly and uninspired.
Ostensibly on the same island according to the movie but not Homer lives Circe, played wonderfully by Samantha Morton (how she is safe from the NFL-looking Laestrygones is not revealed). The scene in which she laboriously turns the Greeks into pigs is a lovely bit of body horror, and the way in which she whispers softly to the pigs to „turn back to their disguises“ when she turns them back into humans is wonderful.
Sirens, Charybdis and Scylla are all treated in a matter of minutes, and while I do appreciate the restraint in showing too much of these beings (as revealing the monster usually only reveals how truly unscary it is—the prime exception being the Xenomorph and Tim Curry’s Pennywise), I felt the design of Scylla could have been better and more powerful.
Usually I hate seeing Iceland in movies as it breaks all suspension of disbelief for me (the worst offender: that god-awful movie Prometheus), but the Hades scene was pretty good and the use of the black beach Reynisfjara worked perfectly. My biggest gripe with the scene is that it seemed they sailed effortlessly into Hades and effortlessly back, as if it’s but a small thing to accomplish. They couldn’t find their way to Ithaca, which should not have been complicated as they already knew the way and the distance is short, yet they had no trouble finding the shores of the dead. Astounding.
All in all I feel some things could have been done with more respect for the diverse set of non-human characters in The Odyssey, instead of only focusing on how repulsed the humans are by them, but by and large I think monster lovers can feel reasonably happy about Nolan’s latest film. Polyphemos’s and Circe’s scenes are by far the most fleshed out, while the others serve only as minute distractions—and the audience couldn’t care less about how many nameless comrades of Odyesseus get skewered and devoured by them. There is a lack of sense to many of their scenes, especially that of the Laestrygones who seem faceless underneath their stupid helmets, that could have done with some bit of fleshing out. But at least we got a very beautiful and sympathetic Polyphemos, and that’s something.