— Virgil, Aeneid

A radically modernized revision of a timeless tale — ideologically twisted and transformed — lurks inside Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It rushes out and assaults those who expected a faithful adaptation of a story that survived 2,700 years, mercilessly cutting down anyone who cherishes Homer’s epic poem. As exhilarating as it is, you’re left feeling that you’ve just witnessed an audacious act of artistic plunder.

Like the Trojans, those who walked out of the cinema with slumped shoulders and bemused expressions perhaps shouldn’t have been so surprised. In hindsight, the film’s marketing was filled with ominous portents, and its culturally ahistorical casting clearly foreshadowed the vision we were met with. As for myth and magic — the stuff that colors the original poem with ineffaceable wonder and creativity — Nolan showed his hand when he openly discussed the need to crack the “approach to mythological elements in a sort of real-world way.”1

Those who thought Nolan’s The Odyssey would be authentically grounded in the Late Bronze Age of Homer’s poem were fools.

Still, Nolan earned the benefit of the doubt even amid all these ill winds and storm clouds. After all, this is a filmmaker known for his tactile realism and habit of recruiting experts to ground even his most fantastical films in the “real-world way” of the worlds they depict. Most famously, he worked with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to keep the science in Interstellar (2014) and speculative mechanics in Tenet (2020) believable, historian Joshua Levine to accurately reconstruct the evacuation in Dunkirk (2017), and physicist David Saltzberg to keep the nuclear science exact in Oppenheimer (2023).

That he chose not to consult a classicist, Homer scholar, Ancient Greek historian, or Bronze Age archaeologist for The Odyssey is perhaps the clearest sign that Nolan was not very interested in a faithful adaptation or recreation of 12th-century BC Greece. In fact, an expert has publicly flayed the film. Emily Wilson, whose translation has become the defining contemporary English version of The Odyssey — and one Nolan himself referenced — wrote a brutally honest review2 that reads like a 4,000-word Mortal Kombat fatality. It’s worth quoting the full paragraph that lit the internet on fire:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

All of this points to The Odyssey being Nolan’s most controversial film to date — one that launched a thousand questions. But more on those later.

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The final act of The Odyssey, when the weary hero returns to Ithaca and reclaims his household, finds Nolan operating at the peak of his signature powers for propulsive storytelling. The mixing and editing of image, sound and dialogue are in glorious sync as the buildup to Odysseus’ final monologue gathers furious momentum. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, composer Ludwig Göransson and editor Jennifer Lame work in hydra-like harmony to conjure that special only-from-a-Nolan-movie feeling of exhilarating spectacle.

Within these sequences, Robert Pattinson outshines the film’s entire cast as the malevolent, cowardly suitor Antinous — the film’s primary villain — and makes an indelible contribution to the orchestral composition of the act. Most potently, tucked into this crescendo of events lies what is perhaps the emotional pinnacle of Nolan’s entire filmography to date. It’s the briefest of moments: Odysseus’ old hunting dog, Argos, becomes the first to recognize his master and manages one final, weak wag of his tail. It’s a moment the movie has been building toward since the beginning of the movie, through effective flashbacks of Argos the puppy and Argos the loyal hunting companion, and it lands like a heavyweight blow to the gut as Nolan’s finest act of fealty to Homer.

The film has a few other splendid moments, particularly Odysseus’ and his crew’s encounter with the sorceress-goddess Circe, played by an unnervingly menacing Samantha Morton, who devours every second of her short screen time with the appetite of a starved veteran. When Circe welcomes the men into her house, there is a near-imperceptible shift in time and space as the atmosphere morphs from warm hospitality to grotesque horror through some remarkable sleight-of-hand editing and blocking. The movie shifts gears into a whole other genre for the next few minutes, and it’s gloriously messy, disturbing and unlike anything Nolan has ever directed. Morton, the linchpin of the entire sequence, shape-shifts from humble host to wicked witch in ways that put her in a league next to only Pattinson and far above the rest of the cast.

The director’s loyalty to celluloid is a very welcome part of his brand, and his name has almost become synonymous with IMAX. So, water is wet, the sky is blue, and the most recent Nolan film is technically spectacular. Filmed entirely with IMAX 65mm cameras, The Odyssey uses the scale, scope and intimacy of the frame in all their splendor to really make you feel the texture of the world on screen. You wince at the swords as if they’re about to land on your neck, smell the stink of the men suffocating inside the Trojan Horse, and taste the salt of the freezing ocean water as waves crash into Odysseus’ ship.

And yet, as a devout Nolanite for the last two decades — my own Ultimate Guide to Christopher Nolan’s Movies a testament to that devotion — it is not without considerable pain that I admit The Odyssey, as great a ride as it is on the surface and on a sensory level, did not leave me with the familiar buzz I get after total transportation. For the first time, in fact, it felt like the reactor core powering an explosive Christopher Nolan spectacle was fueled not by storytelling but by something else.

Distraction, distortion and dissonance ripple through the experience from beginning to end.

I. Distraction — Familiar Strangers

“Perhaps you've heard of Helen? Face that launched a thousand ships.”

[Shows her scarred face]

“Maybe now just five hundred.”

— Menelaus, The Odyssey (2026)

Christopher Nolan knew exactly what he was doing when he cast Lupita Nyong’o in the dual roles of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Elliot Page as Sinon, the Greek soldier dubbed “the bravest of them all”, rapper Travis Scott as a nameless bard in Ithaca who recites the opening lines of the film, and Himesh Patel as Odysseus’ second-in-command Eurylochus. By choosing to make a subversive meta point about the makeup of Western civilization today, he deliberately pulls the audience out of the story they are watching.3

Every time one of these actors appears on screen — regardless of their undeniable talent or commitment to their roles — one can’t help but feel distracted, thrown out of Homer’s world and into whatever liminal space lies between it and 21st-century expectations of representation that seem to interest Nolan more. It is distraction by design. Sinon doesn’t appear in Homer’s epic poem at all, yet by the end of Nolan’s adaptation he emerges as one of the film’s moral epicenters. Helen of Troy stands out not simply because she is a Greek character played by a Kenyan actress, but because Nolan draws even more attention to that visual dissonance by having Menelaus scar her face, effectively “uglifying” the most beautiful woman in Western literature. Her Helen is also remorseful and subdued, a choice that feels deliberately at odds with the mythic, arrogant, proudly defiant figure Homer gives us.

There are even stranger dislocations than that. A particularly surreal scene features Eurylochus confronting a villager whose language he doesn’t understand. A translator explains the villager’s words to him, only for Patel’s Eurylochus to respond in frustration that the man should not fear them because they, too, are Greeks. The language the villager was speaking all along? Greek.

The scene, like Helen’s scar, Sinon’s exaltation and the choice to open the movie with a rapper from Texas, is symptomatic of the film’s larger problem of distraction. Rather than being fully transported into the “real-world way” of the story on screen, the audience is repeatedly made aware of the real world off screen by the modern machinations of Nolan’s adaptation. It’s like watching a theater play with the curtains pulled back to expose the backstage, all the ropes, levers and pulleys laid bare. The spell of storytelling is repeatedly broken. We’re not watching Homer’s world; we’re watching Nolan watching Homer’s world.

The other cast members also play their parts in distracting the audience, but not for the same reasons. The film is littered with megastars playing dress-up. The likes of John Leguizamo (as the blind and loyal old man Eumaeus) and Mia Goth (Penelope’s not-so-loyal maiden Melantho) do the best they can with the meager material they’re given, but the marquee A-listers carrying the greatest responsibility for the story ultimately fail to convince because they do not disappear into their roles.

Matt Damon has made a wonderful career out of playing outsiders, tricksters and fast-talking high-IQ manipulators (The Informant!, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Rounders, etc.). Nolan’s script would’ve served him better by tapping into those aspects of Homer’s Odysseus more, because that’s when Damon shines and is most entertaining to watch. Instead, for most of the movie, the audience is asked to buy him as a returning warrior-king, leader of men, and great military commander. Damon simply doesn’t have the charisma and aura to pull that off. He is far more convincing in the final act, when he’s disguised as a beggar and glimpses of Jason Bourne appear, than he ever is as Odysseus leading his men or as Calypso’s traumatized prisoner.

The other big stars — Theron, Holland, Zendaya (who plays the goddess Athena with her signature scowl that becomes a distraction of its own) and Jon Bernthal (as Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus) — can’t shake their stardom. Ironically enough, a few weeks after the The Odyssey’s release, Holland, Zendaya and Bernthal appeared much more at home when they reprised their Marvel roles in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Oppenheimer worked brilliantly in part because Cillian Murphy had never carried a movie of that size as the lead. John David Washington was a casting masterstroke as the Protagonist in Tenet because of his relative anonymity. For Dunkirk, Nolan deliberately chose Fionn Whitehead as the central British private Tommy “so that the audience could feel the reality of the situation without any movie star distractions.”4 Other than Morton, Pattinson and a small handful of other familiar faces in minor roles, the rest of the cast is a parade of movie-star distractions.

Anne Hathaway walks away as the one who commits most fully, though she should have been reined in on more than one occasion and reminded that she’s not on stage but in front of a camera — an IMAX one at that. Worse than that, though, is how her Penelope is reduced to little more than a grieving woman yearning for her husband’s return. This strips one of the poem’s strongest female characters of much of her intelligence, agency and cunning.

That speaks to a larger issue, one that lies beneath the distractions of casting and performances: a screenplay that wants to have Homer’s cake and eat it too, even as the head baker is busy baking an entirely different one.

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II. Distortion — Ancient Modernity

"Ten years on this fucking beach. Let's go home!"

— Odysseus, The Odyssey (2026)

Much of the discomfort and unease that permeates The Odyssey can be traced to its screenplay — adapted by Nolan himself. This turns out to be more curse than gift, not only because screenwriting is Nolan’s Achilles heel but because, in his dogged pursuit to satisfy modern audience sensibilities, his script dies from a thousand modern cuts. Whether it’s Telemachus referring to his father as “Dad”, Odysseus dropping F-bombs on the beach, or that horribly on-the-nose line that has now become a meme — “our age of Bronze is collapsing” — the dialogue too often feels written for the audience to hear rather than the characters to speak. The jarring thing is that these anachronistic lines are part of the same script that contains moments of startling Homeric lyricism, like Odysseus’ poetic description of the Sirens’ song or the very formal conversation he has with Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) in the underworld.

At times, the film isn’t sure whether it wants to be a modernized adaptation or a faithful recreation. Baz Luhrmann’s Rome + Juliet (1996) works because it’s very clearly set in a modern world even though the characters all speak Shakespearean English. The Odyssey is the inverse of that: a modern voice transplanted into Homer’s world of giants, monsters and gods. Except it’s not always a modern voice, and the relationship between gods and men is reduced to little more than a psychological device. Athena brings none of the power or commanding presence she has in the poem; the goddess of strategic warfare and wisdom is diminished to a figment of Odysseus’ traumatized imagination, the personification of his coping mechanism. Yet another strike against Nolan’s ability to write interesting women.

The moral heart of Nolan’s reinterpretation, however, is in the right place. Songs of heroic fame and glory passed down through generations should serve as cautionary tales about men losing their moral compass and the civilizational collapse that inevitably follows. To serve this idea to modern palates, Nolan simplifies the complex Ancient Greek code of hospitality known as xenia — presented as Zeus’ Law in the movie — into the Golden Rule of treating others the way you wish to be treated.

Military commanders like Odysseus are revered as heroes when in reality, Nolan suggests, they were more likely broken men, hollowed out by the trauma of war, eaten away from within by guilt and regret. All of this is revealed quite matter-of-factly through Odysseus’ final monologue, that admittedly contains some of the best lines in the film.

The message is clear, it sticks the landing, and it resonates on a profound level today. We are currently living through times when foolish, power-hungry leaders wage wars without any thought for the moral cost, while the international laws and institutions meant to hold Western civilization together are broken, dismantled or ignored. In that sense, Nolan’s The Odyssey is very topical.

The trouble is that this somber, serious, reflective tone becomes the film’s overarching preoccupation. Nolan zeroes in on the darkest, most melancholic thread running through Homer's epic and weaves an entire tapestry out of it, discarding the multitude of beautiful and complex threads that have made the original so wondrous. In doing so, he compresses The Odyssey into a single emotional register, flattening one of the richest works of Western literature into a meditation on trauma and guilt.

The distortion is especially pronounced when you compare the vitality of the original Odyssey, which bursts with life, color, humor, cosmic chaos, and messy humanity, to Nolan’s sterile treatment. His stated “approach to mythological elements in a sort of real-world way” is a prime example. Odysseus’ episodes with the Cyclops, the Sirens and the six-headed sea monster Scylla are all rendered with the same rushed, colorless brushstroke, as though the script is simply going through the motions.

The Cyclops becomes a sad, unintelligible giant; the Sirens occupy the screen for barely half a minute, with Odysseus’ reasons for binding himself to the mast drowned out by impatient editing; and Scylla is reduced to a faceless CGI rock monster on loan from the set of a bad Flintstones adaptation. The vivid imagination that breathed life into these mythical creatures in the original poem is smothered on screen in a “real-world way” that says nothing good about our real-world ways.

Taken individually, these distortions might amount to little more than the compulsory compromises of adaptation. Taken together, they create something harder to reconcile: the jarring effect of trying to fit a modern square peg into an ancient round hole. There’s a persistent dissonance between the world Nolan recreates and the worldview he places inside it.

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III. Dissonance — Catastrophic Success

“We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars; now, we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

— Cooper, Interstellar (2014)

The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s first adaptation of a major literary classic, and one can’t help but walk away from it hoping it’s his last. Distraction — by way of star-filled and subversive (mis-)casting — and distortion — born from the collision between the world Nolan is writing and the world he’s adapting — work in tandem to suck the wondrous spirit out of the original poem. And once you drain The Odyssey of its wonder, you’re left with a felt absence that hollows out the experience from the inside. No matter how magnificent and rich it appears on the surface, a lingering dissonance drums beneath.

In my Ultimate Guide, I write:

Christopher Nolan is special because he’s the guy who built the strongest bridge between thought-provoking cinema and box-office entertainment.

The “box-office entertainment” end of the bridge has only been strengthened by The Odyssey. At the time of writing, the movie has grossed just over a gargantuan $1.6 billion worldwide, becoming Nolan’s highest-grossing film, the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, and one of the 20 highest-grossing films of all time. Only The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) can compete once you adjust for average movie-ticket prices.

Fans of Nolan’s The Odyssey point to its commercial success as vindication, conveniently forgetting an axiom as old as the blockbuster itself: ticket sales are proof of appeal, not artistic merit. In this case, the appeal isn’t just the biggest director in the world returning after the Academy Award and box-office triumph of Oppenheimer with an even more star-studded cast; it’s the biggest director in the world adapting one of the oldest, most beloved and influential works of literature ever written. Nolan brought people to Homer, but Homer also brought people to Nolan.

Since we’re not dealing with original ideas, historical events or real-life biographies, the film’s artistry has to be weighed on the scales of adaptation. For anyone who has never read or heard of The Odyssey before watching Nolan’s film (Lupita Nyong’o, take a bow),5 ignorance truly is bliss. But for people who love and admire Homer’s original epic poem, Nolan’s adaptation takes on the dimensions of an artistic catastrophe. It’s eerily appropriate that The Odyssey is Nolan’s thirteenth film; like any true-to-form unlucky number thirteen, it disrupts the flow of one of contemporary cinema's most remarkable filmographies. And even though The Odyssey thematically follows the end-of-world fixation so central to its two predecessors, it feels like an abrupt left turn from the path Tenet and Oppenheimer had naturally laid out. It’s an outlier defined by cinematic dissonance, ringing out from an entire parade of paradoxes.

The film is commercially successful yet artistically vapid; an R-rated spectacle that sanitizes its source material of all the sexual coercion, dismemberment, cannibalism, mutilation, mass slaughter and executions6; a mythological epic that distrusts its own mythology; an ancient world populated by conspicuously modern minds; a three-hour epic that somehow feels rushed; a story about one of literature’s great tricksters, starring an actor who excels at playing them, with hardly any trickery on display; a film overflowing with grandiosity yet starved of the original poem’s wonder; a faithful reinterpretation that is, in too many essential ways, a profoundly unfaithful adaptation.

Perhaps the biggest paradox of all is that Nolan, by his own admission, felt liberated after the success of Oppenheimer and finally had the opportunity to tackle The Odyssey in the way he always wanted to.7 But instead of subverting narrative mechanisms by toying with time and space inside the world of the story — something he has done so wonderfully in his very best movies — he directs his subversive instincts outside it. He flips one of the foundational texts of the Western literary canon like a pancake: writes self-aware dialogue, diminishes the role of the gods, psychologizes its mythology, modernizes its morality, and bends its characters toward contemporary sensibilities.

Given the freedom to reinvent The Odyssey, Nolan instead chooses to reinvent Homer, writing and directing an adaptation in spite of him rather than in his spirit.

IV. Coda — A Thousand Questions

“Art is born of constraint, thrives on struggle, and dies in freedom.”

— André Gide, “The Evolution of the Theater” (1904)

In a February 2024 interview8, after the success of Oppenheimer, the subject of art and money came up. The interviewer referenced the André Gide line directly, asking Nolan whether he had ever struggled to reconcile himself with an excess of freedom as his budgets grew and the scale of his films expanded. Nolan dismissed the premise, and the first part of his answer is worth quoting in full:

Oh, no. The wonderful thing about large-scale filmmaking, in my experience, is it’s exactly the same as a tiny-scale independent movie; you never have enough time, you never have enough money for whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s the nature of budgeting: you chase your own tail, so if they give you more money, you try and do more. Everything Emma and I have ever done, our philosophy’s always been to take the money and put it on the screen. So, we don’t waste money pampering movie stars, or whatever.

The irony practically unspools itself. Nolan had $250 million worth of freedom to finally direct The Odyssey his way, and the end result is a “less is more” approach populated by quite a few pampered movie stars. It would seem that adapting The Odyssey on his own terms meant, above all, having enough money to film the entire thing with IMAX cameras. Was Nolan’s idea of tackling this epic story on his own terms ultimately just about expanding the scope of its production, not the scope of the story itself? With so many possibilities, avenues and themes of the poem left unexplored in the film, the answer is disappointingly clear.

I wouldn’t go quite as far as Gide and pronounce the artistry of Nolan’s cinema dead, but The Odyssey has certainly given it a good thrashing. Maybe, after repeat viewings of the film and readings of the poem, something deeper and more profound about Nolan’s revisionist approach will crystallize — something beyond the sheer spectacle of it, something that resembles the cerebral work of the man behind Tenet, Interstellar and Inception. Alas, after letting it brew in my mind for two months, the stripped-down, postmodern, self-aware version of The Odyssey still feels too reductive.

That’s not to say it hasn’t sparked a healthy amount of discourse. One fascinating lens through which to view the film emerges in one of the best interviews Nolan has done on the press tour.9 The conversation begins with the topic of civilizational perspective — Homer wrote The Odyssey some 400 years after the events it depicts; Nolan adapts it 3,000 years later — and to the stark difference between the tone of the poem (celebratory) and the film (funereal). Nolan admits this gap fascinates him and more or less says he adapted Homer with modern audience expectations front of mind.

Both Homer and Nolan inherited Odysseus from another era and remade him in the image of their own. In that sense, Nolan is something of a modern-day rhapsode, continuing an ancient tradition of reshaping a story that was sung by generations of different voices before taking the written form in which we know it today. But where that tradition expanded The Odyssey, Nolan’s modern improvisation contracts it. Homer modernized through accumulation; Nolan modernizes through reduction.

What also becomes evident from Nolan’s answers in this interview is that he appears less interested in adapting The Odyssey as it is written than in adapting what The Odyssey has come to represent. He moves through the major landmarks of Homer’s narrative, but the real lead feels less like Odysseus than The Odyssey itself, cast in the role of foundational text of Western literature and survivor of three millennia, perpetually questioning its own place within the Western canon and what that inheritance means today. It’s as if The Odyssey itself has broken the fourth wall to address us while all the other characters continue playing their parts, oblivious to what is happening around them.

It is the cultural object, not Homer’s story, that Nolan sets about reinterpreting — diversifying the ethnicity of the characters, psychologizing its mythology, modernizing its morality and filtering its ancient worldview through our own cultural sensibilities. This mechanism is evident. “To be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism,” Nolan explains in the same interview. “People have this idea that because I can understand why the story affects me the way it is therefore it didn’t work. That’s not how storytelling works.”

But what happens when the mechanism becomes so laborious and self-evident that it fails to affect us? Nolan is right that seeing why a story affects us needn’t stop it from working, but surely that depends on the story retaining its power to transport us in spite of the visible mechanism. The world on screen has to remain compelling enough for us to surrender to the illusion, be transported, and stop caring that we see the pulleys, levers and ropes behind it. But how can we surrender when the world on screen is not a portal into a mythical Bronze Age but a mirror, continually reflecting our own world’s sensibilities back at us? Rather than let us get lost in the fiction and contemplate its meanings afterwards, we are expected to surrender and contemplate simultaneously.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” ring Shakespeare’s eternal words. “The stage’s all the world, and all the players are merely men and women,” Nolan appears to reply.

My attempt at examining the imbalance, uncertainty and clashing impulses inherent in Nolan’s reimagining of The Odyssey launches a thousand questions. Is Nolan implying that, because Western civilization is teetering toward collapse, we don’t deserve the effervescence and grandiosity of Homer’s verse in the form of a faithful, Lord of the Rings-style, three-part, twelve-hour cinematic adaptation? Is he treating The Odyssey as a cultural artifact rather than an epic poem because the distance between our world and Homer’s has become too great, or because he thinks Homer no longer speaks to our world as directly as he once did? Why does he believe modern audiences need to have mythology rationalized in order to connect with a story from an ancient time? How far can an adaptation fundamentally alter the chemistry of its source before it ceases to feel like an adaptation and becomes a reinvention?

Does Nolan actually enjoy The Odyssey?

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In the tempestuous sea of contradiction, ambivalence and underwhelming undercurrents that shape my feelings about this film, I cling to whatever life rafts I can find to save the Nolan fan in me from drowning. For all my struggles with his narrative choices, the final act of the film and the Circe sequence are, as spectacles of image and sound, magnificent. I will try to watch the film one more time in cinemas for those moments alone.

The film is also indisputably an extraordinary commercial success. In the month and a half or so I spent writing this essay, the film jumped from #19 to #14 on the all-time worldwide box-office list. And it’s not done yet. Anything that gets people back into cinemas to experience the magic of movies deserves its flowers — even a film that sucks much of the magic out of the material it adapts.

The greatest gift of all, however, is also its most wonderful paradox: what it may have done for Homer. Thanks in no small part to Christopher Nolan’s own mythic status as a filmmaker, The Odyssey reignited interest in the poem: book sales skyrocketed10, and despite the adaptation’s many flaws and subversive choices, the film will undoubtedly become a gateway through which multitudes discover the beauty and wonder of the original.

Perhaps we would still do well to beware of great filmmakers bearing gifts. Perhaps our imperfect world deserves an imperfect adaptation of a poem that may itself be too exuberant for our dreary times. And if the reactor core powering this Christopher Nolan spectacle was not, as I argued at the beginning, storytelling itself, perhaps I finally understand what it was: one filmmaker’s idea of what The Odyssey needs to represent for a modern audience in 2026. Fixating on that, rather than the true spirit of the poem, hollowed out the experience for those already familiar with the source material, but it may yet send others searching for the missing depth inside.

If Nolan’s Odyssey never quite finds its way home to Homer, perhaps its greatest achievement will be leading countless members of its audience there.

Flash forward to the mid 2020s, and Paul Thomas Anderson is rightly regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers alive. His latest film, One Battle After Another, is officially out in theatres and finds him, for the first time in his career, at the age of 55, at his most explicitly political. The periods covered in the film are left purposefully ambiguous, but it doesn’t take a PhD in Film Studies to connect the dots to America today. How much of the film is a creative protest to Trump 2.0 and the current crackdown on immigration that is sweeping the nation2, and how much of it is just PTA cracking his storytelling knuckles? Does Anderson have his own Dora Maar, a muse that inspired him to loosely adapt Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland into his own epic action-thriller centered around a chaotic group of anti-fascist activists? As the questions swirl, one thing is clear. One Battle After Another is a visceral piece of political art that makes a statement with the same blunt force trauma that I imagine Guernica carried when it was first unveiled, all those decades ago.

Anderson is even more direct in his approach that Picasso was - something which took me by surprise when I first saw the film, five days ago. Eschewing the delicacy of a paintbrush, Anderson opts to paint his strokes with a crowbar. It was hard for me to recognize the director who successfully balanced his themes and characters on a wire stretched across the full spectrum of the human condition in Magnolia (1999), or the sophisticated master of period filmmaking who peels the onion of romance down to its dark and beautiful center in Phantom Thread (2017). Even closest cousins Inherent Vice (2014) and Licorice Pizza (2021) feel like distant relatives despite similar uninhibited styles, because they’re wrapped in an elliptical allure that feels missing from the abrasive and abrupt One Battle After Another.

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For his canvas, PTA chose a relic from the past - VistaVision. Similar to Picasso, who dug up archaic modes to paint Guernica as a monochromatic mural featuring mythical creatures, Anderson resurrects a dead format to create something purposefully anachronistic that demands our attention. “It’s so old, it’s new” as Marlene Dietrich says in Touch of Evil (1958). The fact that only four movie theatres in the whole world can actually project the film as it is intended to be seen makes it all the more precious and coveted. But marketing gimmicks are for mere mortals; PTA’s purpose with VistaVision is to use its expressive format as a way to accentuate his barstrokes.

The 1:50:1 aspect ratio makes the film feel condensed and compact, the symmetry of so many centered compositions is all the more prevalent in a square, driving the story perpetually forward as it steamrolls ahead. The deep colors, and that grainy, tactile texture our digital world hasn’t found a way to replicate just yet, adds to the feeling that we stumbled on a recently-unearthed 60s classic. I feel super lucky to be living close to London, one of three cities that can screen the film in its intended format. Needless to say, it looks and sounds in-fucking-credible in VistaVision. When I watched the film a second time, projected on standard widescreen digital, the difference was palpable.

The film is a bombastic, breathless escapade - unapologetically Guernica-esque in the starkly black-and-white way it carves the lines between the good guys and the bad guys with that crowbar. I can’t think of another film that pits Chaotic Good against Lawful Evil with such sharp contrast. We know exactly who we need to root for, there is no in-between, there is no gray, and there is no sliver of daylight between the creator and his left-wing activist creations, battling on screen.

While Guernica delivers its political message as buntly as One Battle After Another does, the painting is conceptually complex and symbolically ambiguous in ways that the film is not. That’s how it felt five days ago, at least. I’ve become too accustomed to the layered depths of PTA’s previous masterpieces, the intellectual mind-fucks and oblique cerebral experiences. With films like There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) - cathedrals of cinema that resonate with profound meaning and eternal grandeur - Anderson set his own bar pretty damn high. And my tastes in film have been heliotropically-inclined towards auteurist, intellectually probing cinema, like a flower is to the sun, since a young age.

No wonder, then, that Anderson’s strikingly conventional approach in One Battle After Another stumped me at first. Critics like to use the word “accessible” just so they can avoid the dirtier synonym. For this is doubtlessly Paul Thomas Anderson at his most crowd-pleasingly…*gulp*…mainstream.

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When I saw the film for a second time, just yesterday, with the weight of expectation lifted, I realized something. The blunt force trauma Anderson’s assertive brushstrokes delivered in VistaVision made me dizzy to PTA’s signatures underneath the politics of the film. From Jonny Greenwood’s monumental, reverberant score (you only need to hear and feel it once to know it’s his best yet) to Sean Penn’s otherworldly performance as the grotesque Col. Steven Lockjaw - an instantly iconic villain destined for a spot in cinema’s all-time Rogue’s Gallery - everything feels designed to be imposing.

This includes the film’s breakneck pace, which hurtles forward with the kinetic energy of an escaped lunatic, frothing at the mouth in his straight jacket as he flees his asylum wardens. Editor Andy Jurgensen picks up right where he left off with the exhilarating ending of Licorice Pizza and let’s it rip. Cinema’s magical ability to freeze time is strong in this one; 2 hours and 40 minutes have never felt more like 1 hour.

Critics have showered the film in a hyper-rapturous orgasm of praise from the moment it had its World Premiere in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. “Greatest of the year!” “Decade!” “Century!” “All Time!” “Masterpiece!!” “Beyond a masterpiece!” And there’s no doubt I fell victim to expectation. Unable to escape the online euphoria, I allowed myself to wonder… could it be? Now that the aftershocks have settled, and I enjoyed it for what it was rather than what I wanted or expected it to be a second time around, I can confidently say that it’s not, but that’s not to say that there isn’t more than meets the eye.

There is enough brilliance in the film that not an hour has passed since I walked out of the Odeon Leicester Square theatre, five days ago, that I haven’t thought about it. I love the uncompromising bravado of the score and the performances. I love that it subverts the typical role of the lead, played by the mighty Leonardo DiCaprio at his most hysterical and baffled, to the point of making him a supporting player in his own movie. A lost man with all heart and no plan. I love Teyana Taylor’s performance as Perfidia, such a commanding presence in the first act that it hovers throughout the rest of the film, like a ghost haunting everyone’s every move. The climactic car chase, on an unforgettable road paved with more suspense than asphalt, is one of PTA’s most exhilarating, hypnotic sequences of his career. Cinema is rarely this pure nowadays.

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What One Battle After Another lacks in intellectual heft, it makes up in undeniable entertainment value. Without a doubt the most hilarious and heart-racing of Anderson’s films. To quote Benicio Del Toro’s unforgettable, stoic Sensei Sergio, it’s heavy metal man. It’s also more emotional and poignant the second time around, Chase Infiniti’s performance as young Willa shines all the brighter. Beneath the surface, the film is about the bonds of parenting and especially the responsibilities of fatherhood - a signature PTA theme that trickles over from his greatest masterpieces - which transcends governments, revolutions and politics. Distilled down to its essence, it hits hard and deep. If there is a Dora Maar-type muse in PTA’s life that influenced him to make this movie, I strongly suspect it’s his own kids.

With Guernica, Pablo Picasso created his most public and accessible work at the age of 55. Off the beaten avant-garde path he’d been so well known and admired for, ending up somewhere more universal, with a highly charged political piece of art. With One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson created his most accessible work at the age of 55. Off the beaten auteurist path he’s been so well known and admired for, ending up somewhere more universal, with a highly charged political piece of art. Both men layer in a deeper message beneath the veneer of their respective creations; beneath Picasso’s Spanish Civil War and revulsion to bombing lies a deeper meditation on human suffering and myth of civilizational strength and order. Beneath the surface of Anderson’s portrait of a politically-charged and divided America lies a deeper allegory on parenting. Given that Picasso painted Guernica practically on the eve of World Word 2 as literal fascists ruled Europe, one can understand why his piece yearns for a world of order. On the other hand, Anderson’s One Battle After Another is made in a time when the word ‘fascist’ is thrown around too loosely, so he’s understandably more willing to embrace chaos over lawful order. As long as the heart is in the right place.

The parallels between these two artists and their two hybrid political artworks is uncanny, but time will tell how far it will truly hold. Will One Battle After Another end up being Anderson’s Guernica? The centerpiece of his oeuvre once all is said and done? It’s obviously way too early to tell, despite what some critics are saying. Given that Guernica was painted in the context of actual war and fascism, its cultural resonance as a profoundly moving anti-war symbol makes a lot of sense. It’s very sincere with its politics, because it had to be. I can’t see One Battle After Another reaching those lofty heights, given that the cultural context it was filmed in is largely defined by cynical rhetoric and not actual WW2-style totalitarian takeover. It’s much more satirical with its politics, because it can afford to be.

Paul Thomas Anderson is Picasso with a crowbar, disguising a love-letter to parenting and fatherhood in the form of a political thriller. The lack of a challenging narrative and the usual auteur-driven thematic depth we are accustomed to from him is definitely missing, but a second viewing of the film does beg the question: so, what? Does every piece of art have to be intellectually stimulating in order to resonate and reach great heights? Some stories don’t need to be told with a paintbrush. Sometimes, it’s best to just sit back, enjoy the ride, and embrace the chaos. And, if you have kids, be sure to give them a big hug next time you see them.

As a student of philosophy, particularly influenced by the works of Martin Heidegger, Malick’s cinema was always destined to be different.

The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other.1

These are films whose screenplays are more like rough sketches than blueprints; foundations built with matchsticks, not concrete. Actors are more like vessels than performers. Suspended on the starved opposite end of the chewed up scenery left by the Leonardo DiCaprio’s of world. Narratives are nebulous at best, and the conventional cogs that usually drive story - action, conflict, inciting incidents, build ups, climaxes - melt away like the clocks in a Salvador Dali painting.

What this all amounts to is that, for a lot of people, Malick’s movies are that most accursed, unforgivable thing that’s anathema to the 21st century movie watcher. They’re boring. Their plotless natures, coupled with a complete lack of obviousness and theatrical bravado, make them seem aimless, listless, perpetually tempting your attention span to break.

But for some other people…

Hearing the music

There’s a brilliant quote attributed to (but not actually confirmed to come from) Friedrich Nietzsche, and that Megan Fox has a tattoo of, which is quite fitting here.

Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

There are those cinephiles among us, who - for whatever, unanswerable reason - dance to the tune of Malick’s music. If you hear it, and you feel it, you know that it’s the kind that has transformed the way stories are told on screen. It’s a whole new language, unlike anything else you’ve ever seen or heard, and it has the power to open your mind’s eye to a whole new world of meaning.

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The heavy use of deeply-felt voice over, at times so internalised it comes out as a single whispered word. The never-still camera and its sense of freedom - turning away from our protagonist to focus on the way the sunlight is piercing through a leaf. The painterly cinematography and composition. All of these have become Malickian trademarks, along with his infamous post-production editing process that can last years, his never yelling “Cut!” on set so that the film just rolls on and the editors have millions of feet to sift through.

Viewed collectively, this entire process and end result, makes Malick perhaps the purest artist - in the philosophical sense of purity - in cinema.

It’s not a coincidence that those who work with him readily speak of his ‘genius’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘curiosity’ and sense of ‘wonder’. He is often likened to an orchestral composer or a painter, and in the editing room he refers to film footage like a flowing river.2 I am now convinced that, while all of his peers and colleagues direct, Terrence Malick simply films. And there is great beauty and truth to be discovered in a piece of art that is infused with that much freedom and devotion to its natural power.

The relationship between a moving image and sound is redefined in his films, and in the process, like a caterpillar transformed into a butterfly, liberated. Unaffected and unencumbered by star performances, Hollywoodised politics, clever plot twists, thrilling action that fades from memory just as quickly as it enters, and unrealistic dialogue from unrealistic characters who find themselves in unrealistic circumstances.

Terrence Malick distills the artform down to an elemental level, where film is at its most vulnerable, confounding, and beautiful. It contains multitudes, all within itself.

But is the work ever accessible in itself? For this to happen, it would be necessary to remove the work out of all relations to what is other than it itself, in order to let it rest upon itself alone for itself. But in this direction aims already the ownmost intention of the artist. The work is to be released by him into its pure standing-within-itself.3

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A moment from The New World

My personal journey of acquiring the taste for this one-of-a-kind filmmaker and hearing his music, started with The Thin Red Line (1998). I hope to one day write about what that movie means to me because not only do I consider it the greatest war film ever made, but one of the greatest films ever made, period.

To conclude my piece, however, I turn to a fleeting moment in The New World (2005) - another breathtaking masterpiece that in hindsight marks a clear fork in the road in the filmmaker’s evolution.

Released seven years after The Thin Red Line and six years before The Tree of Life (2011), The New World sees the ink of Malick’s signature setting in. Following a fixed story and narrative like his previous three films but beginning to experiment more with voice overs, camera work and stream-of-consciousness editing that would go on to define much of his films that followed thereafter, especially the so-called “Weightless Trilogy” - To The Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017).

In The New World, there is a moment that defines Malick’s modus operandi as well as any other from his filmography.

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During John Smith’s Presidency of Jamestown, after he had come back from his time with the Powhatans and Pocahontas, a daddy long legs spider crawls along a branch. The branch is gorgeously spotted and exotic, and the spider’s movement is smooth, balletic, indiscernible.

It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, quite literally – I don’t think it lasts for even one full second. It also appears completely out of the blue; a seemingly random shot that may as well have come out of some nature documentary and accidentally got cut-and-pasted into the film by some poor, sleep deprived editor.

Amidst the chaos unfolding in the story – John Smith (Colin Farrell) torn between his longing for Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher) and his duty as a leader (the perennial battle of heart vs. mind), while his men starve, desperately dig for gold, suffer from disease and generally lose whatever morsels of hope they’re still clinging onto by the minute. With the hope, go the minds – as the ever-searching camera finds Savage (John Savage), ranting fragments of nonsense that may or may not be alluding to the death of civilization.

The degradation of mankind unfolds thusly. Between the madman’s ravings and Smith’s heartsick introspection, we see the flash of a shot of our spider. Just being a spider. Plot-wise, it has no business being in the film. It doesn’t further the narrative by a single iota. What’s it doing there? What kind of strange, accidental, indiscernible, ambiguous, beautiful moment is this?

The super-close up shot of this spider doesn’t even linger as you’d conventionally expect a shot like that to. Gorgeous shots of nature and all of its critters and creatures tend to at least serve the purpose of providing a couple of beats of pause. To take a break, reflect, soak in the beautiful environment the characters of our story are in and – sure – be a bit of a navel-gazing exercise from the director. There’s none of that here. Amidst the external chaos of the Jamestown conditions and its residents, and the internal turmoil swirling within John Smith, a spider – for the briefest of moments – just is.

By the time the receptors in your brain even have time to light up with signals of recognition (“Oh, what? A spider? Crawling on- what is that a-”) it’s gone, never to be seen on screen again.

We are left to wonder, if we are even lucky enough to not have blinked and missed it.

These kinds of moments are woven into the experience of the film throughout. The spider is but one of many indiscernible, beautiful, natural, seemingly random, slightly puzzling, moments in The New World. Plants, trees, grass, birds, ripples in the river, loving eyes, cruel eyes, sad eyes, intense eyes, known gestures of kindness, unknown gestures of tradition and ritual, children, babies, the sky – life fragments of context disconnected from convention but very much in harmony with the whole unconventional experience that colors the entirety of Terrence Malick’s new world.

A distinct language all its own.

A music I’m grateful to be able to hear and dance to.

Quentin Tarantino turned 60 yesterday. Jesus, that makes me feel old. From the handful of directors that had a permanent impact on my movie-watching life, Tarantino is among the most important. I’ll never forget the day I saw Pulp Fiction (1994) for the first time.

It was 1996 or 1997 and I was way too young to be watching a film featuring heroin overdose, rape, blown-out brain bits and over 260 mentions of the word fuck. But watch it I did, and my impression of movies changed forever.

Before that day, I never understood their boundless power. I never knew stories could be told this way. I never knew movies could be this fucking cool. When the end credits of Pulp Fiction rolled, for the first time ever in my life, I rewound the VHS tape and immediately watched the whole thing again.

That was the day Quentin Tarantino became Maestro of Cool for me. The roots of my obsessive cinephilia dug in deeper and coiled themselves into an inextricable knot. For many, many years after that hallowed day, Pulp Fiction was my unblinking reply to the perennial “what’s your favorite movie?” question, and a massive black-and-white poster of Jules and Vincent pointing their guns went with me wherever I moved. Watching Reservoir Dogs (1992) a year later (in fitting, non-linear, Tarantino-esque style), and then Jackie Brown (1997), only furthered my allegiance to the Maestro.

What hooked me was his endlessly quotable dialogue that’s somehow hyper-realistic but also only possible in movies; his endlessly listenable soundtracks featuring the most obscure songs with the catchiest, most familiar sounds; and his larger-than-life characters that became icons before my very eyes thanks to the most seamless union of performance and screenplay I had ever seen.

Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winfield, Uma Thurman as Mrs. Mia Wallace, John Travolta as Vincent Vega, Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde, Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink, Pam Grier as Jackie Brown, Robert Forster as Max Cherry, Robert De Niro as Louis Gara. Those are some of the biggest MVPs, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that Tarantino’s collective cast from these three films feature the greatest acting ensemble of the 90s. And most definitely the coolest.     

In the 2000s, my taste in movies evolved, acquiring a deeper, more serious disposition. Being cool was no longer enough, it wasn’t as important. While I got more and more interested in cinema as a philosophical avenue and psychological artform from elder masters (Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Kieslowski, Malick, etc.), Tarantino unleashed his inner movie geek to the fullest, unapologetically nerding out on pastiche martial arts (Kill Bill Vol. 1 in 2003 and Vol. 2 in 2004), exploitation (Death Proof in 2007), and WWII (Inglourious Basterds in 2009).

In some weird way, as I was pulled towards arthouse, and Tarantino embraced grindhouse, it felt like I was growing up and he was doing a Benjamin Button and becoming more of a kid. Coincidentally, in that same decade, Jackie Brown dethroned Pulp Fiction as my favorite Tarantino film, in what felt like a most natural selection.

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I still ranked him among my favorite directors, and of course every new Tarantino film was more than just a film, it was an unmissable cultural event. But as much as I loved the Kill Bill films, as much as I defended Death Proof to the critics around me, and no matter how entertained I was by Inglourious Basterds and QT’s latest discovery in Christoph Waltz, something was noticeably different.

I didn’t have the urge to rewind the tape.

Quentin was still the Maestro of Cool, undoubtedly, but my loyalties had clearly shifted.

The final line of Basterds hit me like a dump truck, when Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine kneels down to reflect on his latest handiwork and says straight to the camera that very cheeky, very meta, “this just might be my masterpiece” line. My gut told me what I just watched was most definitely not a Tarantino masterpiece. I knew it was one of the most entertaining films I’d see that year, it has scenes that need to be on a Tarantino career-highlight reel (the tavern!) and it’s got Hans Lands, one of Tarantino’s greatest creations, but deep in my bones I knew that Basterds didn’t hold a candle to his three 90s masterpieces or even Kill Bill.

My disenchantment with Tarantino continued and hit rock bottom by the mid 2010s, even though I rate Django Unchained (2012) quite highly. As his second “history revenge” film to come out after Basterds, Django’s more compelling and focused story - with a side of deliciously evil Leonardo DiCaprio - is pound-for-pound better. But it’s the movie that came after that truly shook my belief in QT.

The Hateful Eight (2015) featured a reunion of some of Tarantino’s greatest actors – Jackson, Roth, Madsen etc. – and the Daisy Domergue character (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) reminded me of what a brilliant example of genuine feminism Tarantino is, with his natural knack for writing some of the most memorable and engrossing female characters in the history of mainstream cinema.

This was a purer Western than Django, shot in eye-watering 70mm, with original Morricone music, and focused on a cast of deplorables stuck in a house armed with Quentin Tarantino dialogue. It’s every fan’s wet dream. And yet, somehow – I’m still not sure how this is even possible – I think it’s Tarantino’s worst film.

I will most definitely be watching it again to make sure I haven’t completely lost the plot, but The Hateful Eight was the first time I felt physical struggle instead of total (or near-total) immersion while watching a Tarantino film.

My confidence that I was still watching a movie by the Maestro of Cool was shaken to the core.

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In 2017, at this lowest of ebbs in my relationship with Tarantino’s movies, his 9^th film was announced. It was to be a love letter to Hollywood, with the trifecta of superstars in Pitt, DiCaprio, and Margot Robbie. I began to anticipate the film with the fervor of a rabid dog, but I felt something I never felt before. I was skeptical. I was worried about whether I would like a new Tarantino film. It would be a compliment to Basterds and Django as his third “revenge history” film, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence since Basterds was the origin of the first big crack.

So, when Once Upon a Time in Hollywood premiered in 2019, I walking into the cinema fearing the worst.

About three hours later I walked out feeling recharged. My gut was telling me that I just saw one of Quentin Tarantino’s greatest films. Everything I love about his style of cinema – the dialogue, the characters, the way his actors perform, the music, the story construction, the magic of cool – got resuscitated by some inexplicable defibrillator, held by Pitt and DiCaprio who deliver career-best work.

Extra add-ons come in the form of perfectly constructed set pieces that transport you back to 1960s Los Angeles and an undercurrent of extra love poured into the world of the film, propelled by the fact that it’s a personal ode to a time in Hollywood that was foundational for Tarantino as a person and as a filmmaker.

When I walked out of the cinema, the first thought that came to my mind was: I want to see that again. For the first time, in a long, long time, I wanted to rewind the tape. A big love that was ignited over 20 years ago, and laid dormant for a patch in the middle, suddenly came rushing back like blood to the head.

The Maestro was back.

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Now, we’re well into the 2020s and Tarantino has stuck to the promise he made decades ago. He will be directing only one more movie before retiring from feature filmmaking, and his 10th film - simply titled The Movie Critic - has been announced as a possible critique of modern Hollywood, loosely based on Tarantino’s (and everyone else’s, really) favorite film critic, Pauline Kael.

Hollywood would’ve been a good swan song for Tarantino, but this upcoming one sounds like it could be even more apt. Although my taste in movies shifted away from Tarantino's directorial style in the 2000s, today I admire him under a whole new light.

The movie landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade, becoming more and more tied to political and gender identity concerns. Too many filmmakers are more concerned with avoiding offense than creating authentic art, and too many critics are quick to praise mediocrity if it ticks a lot of diversity boxes.

It’s not a landscape for someone like Quentin Tarantino, a man with an inflated ego who might have indulged from time to time, but someone who always stayed true to himself and his vision, and who to this day gives a grand total of zero fucks if someone takes offense to his ways.

It feels bittersweet to anticipate Tarantino’s next film. On the one hand, I’m not skeptical anymore because Once Upon a Time in Hollywood made me realise that the Maestro never even left. On the other, I’ll be anticipating a new Tarantino film for the very last time.

Happy Birthday, Quentin Tarantino. Thank you for everything.

I will forever be in your debt.