Knee-jerk review: "The Odyssey"

1. Now this is what we call a movie.  Wow.  Big, sweeping, expensive-looking visuals.  A cast fully stocked with A-list talent having a great time chewing the scenery.  Complex, thoughtful (and Important!) themes.
2. Writer-director Christopher Nolan will not hold the audience's hand.  He's telling his story and you have to do what you can to keep up.  We missed probably 20% of the dialogue, but got the gist.
3. And good luck keeping the Greek character names straight.  Afterward, to discuss the movie with the family we all had to just rely on the actors' real names.
4. The shipwreck scene was pretty intense.
5. Jon Bernthal is intense and scary as always.
6. Nothing like a good sniveling, cowardly villain to root against.
7. So we drove 30 minutes farther than we usually go for movies just to see this in IMAX.  It was a big, tall screen.  Crisp, yes.  Great sound.  But we didn't notice a magnitude order of better quality... not in today's world of perfect digital projection.  (Remember back in the day when theaters projected actual film so you'd have scratches or blurry focus?)  Ms. Fry disagreed, however, and found the experience better than usual.  We'd be curious to see it in 70mm IMAX. 
8. But this was an older AMC theater in a mall.  Gross on many levels.  Trash cans overflowing, soda machines out.  We apparently have been very spoiled by our local Cinemark theater with plush reclining chairs with wide aisles and leg room.
9. Never heard of Zeus's Law.  Is that really a thing?
10. Multiple sequences of sailors running like hell to their boats to escape mythical monsters. 
11. To write this post, we skimmed the Wikipedia plot summary.  Holy cow is this movie complicated and confusing.  Then again, the non-linear structure works wonders peeling all of these layers back in just the right order.
12. This is the first time we really thought about the unpleasant logistics of quietly hiding inside a giant wooden horse for many many hours.
13. Twenty years is a long time for us.  Imagine that much time passing for folks back when life expectancies were much much shorter.
14. The melodramatic ending, what with all the bloody revenge and silly disguises and reuniting lovers, is very Shakespearean.  And also very satisfying.  Guess Homer and Shakespeare knew what they're doing.
15. Tom Holland gives good sad weepy eyes.
16. We heard of the Sirens and the Cyclops, of course.  But we definitely didn't see it coming when Circe showed up. 
17. Biggest lesson: don't eat lotus flowers offered by Charlize Theron.
18. Christopher Nolan is a skilled, accomplished artist.  No question he is a master filmmaker.  But he leaves us a little cold.  It's often a lot of sizzle and little heart.  We still love Batman Begins, Memento, and The Prestige best.  Interstellar is a close fourth, but it's too long.  A lot of his movies feel too long.  This is especially true of the loud, forever endings of The Dark Knight and Inception.
19. We should all take a minute and think about this movie's incredible success.  A three-hour, R-rated movie about an ancient Greek poem.  This is not a teen-centric popcorn comic book movie.  This is serious cinema and the masses are totally eating it up.  The folks in our AMC theater represented a remarkable cross-section of moviegoers of all ages and backgrounds.  Yes, word of mouth is keeping the momentum going - good movies do that - but a lot of this is driven by Christopher Nolan's name on the poster.  Spielberg and Lucas could do that at one time, but not lately.

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