Despite the endless cacophony surrounding the cast in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, critics have overlooked the most important character in the film: the sea.
The IMAX technology allows Nolan and The Odyssey’s director of photography, Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, to offer viewers an immersive experience, and the ocean is central to this “cinematic” expansiveness, even if the story of the “hero” is a more personal, or intimate one.
“The story itself is always described as an epic story about a journey across wide seas and long distances,” says van Hoytema, in the film’s production notes. “But our focus was never on the scope, per se; the goal for us was to make an epic on a very intimate scale. It is a personal story about a man trying to get back to his wife and son, and willing to do whatever it takes to get there, set in an extremely dramatic, imminently cinematic backdrop.”
After the war,
when Odysseus finds himself “captive” with Calypso (Charlize Theron) on the stunning
island of Ogygia, viewers will wish they too could be enjoying the golden-hued
sands and crystal-clear waters – in contrast to the hero, who wishes only to go
home, back to Ithaca.
Meanwhile,
there is the quest of Odysseus’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland) who sets out to discover what has happened to his father, and here again, the sea
naturally plays a role – leading him to meet Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong'o),
who might have been given more screen time in this adaptation. We also see the goddess Athena (Zendaya) lending support to hero and son as they respectively attempt to brave the waves or surmount other challenges yet again.
The seas depicted in the film are not from just one region; Nolan used multiple
locations, filming in six countries: Greece, Italy, Iceland, Morocco, Scotland
and the United States. What could not be accomplished on location was shot
on newly constructed California soundstages, according to the director.
“These places would have
sounded fascinatingly exotic and strange. We wanted to capture that in the
film, so we didn’t limit ourselves to a very tight Mediterranean perspective of
where a historical Odysseus, had he existed, might actually have gone. We knew
our story started and ended in the Mediterranean, but to bring to life the
places in between we needed much different landscapes and environmental
conditions.”
The “finding”
of the Trojan Horse, for example, was shot in Morocco, on the beaches of
Essaouira, which also provided the setting for the boat launch of Odysseus’s voyage
back to his home island. In comparison, the island of Favignana near Sicily stood
in for Ithaca, home of Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), Telemachus,
and the “long-lost Odysseus”.
What sold Nolan
on the island, according to the production notes, “was a 15th century castle,
the Castello di Santa Caterina, atop Monte Santa Caterina, a rugged hill rising
1,030 feet above sea level, with a panoramic, 360-degree view of the
countryside and Mediterranean Sea”.
Views of the
sea were also important in the other locations, such as in Iceland – as far away
from the Mediterranean as one can cinematically get. The differences in these
settings, and their waterways, will likely leave viewers yearning to embark on
sea journeys.
According to
the film’s producers, Nolan’s “ambition was to capture the visceral experience
of what sea travel in the Bronze Age, in all its beauty, sweat and terror,
would have felt like to the men onboard. That meant finding ancient ships. And
shooting on the ocean.” (Those ships are another story for another time.)
So, forget the never-ending chatter about who should or shouldn’t be in Nolan’s movie, and go see The Odyssey for the sea.
Then, make a commitment to help protect the world's oceans. We hope Nolan and his cast and crew already have. - SWAN
(Photos: scenes from the film above and below, courtesy of Sony. The Odyssey is in cinemas from July 17.)
