Just watched Nolan's Odyssey. What an experience. No one loves themes in films as much as Nolan--he's just a very literary type of fella. I could've been watching a Terrance Malick film, at least from the limited amount of his films I've seen. Multicultural characters were a novel approach to not make it a story about one specific culture, but more about human internal struggles, human decisions, and moral consequences rather than about external forces. The sounds are pretty amazing. While I still consider Memento as his best film (bc of how novel it is), I could consider this possibly his second best. The three hours passed by pretty quickly.
My deeper analyses below...
Spoilers ahead.
One could argue Christopher Nolan is not particularly the strongest storyteller, or at least that's not his specialty--he isn't always linear. He is interested in theme more than characterization. His films are not Spielberg films where emotions drive the story. His characters are archetypes and often are representations of ideas. Because he cares more about theme, his films often feel like an essay. Bong Joon Ho films also come to mind, although he plays with theme using irony and parallels.
"Kpop Demon Hunters" was also big on theme (both literally and figuratively). It was basically an essay on how shame works, what types of shame there are, and how healing can happen through community while playing catchy kpop. To note, Maggie Kang, the director, mentioned she is a fan of Bong Joon Ho.
In this story, there are two sides to Odysseus--the heroic side that the outsiders see (and what Homer's story was about and what Odysseus' son hears) and his own internal struggles and guilt after the war. Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy dabbled on this dichotomy as well where the Batman persona worked like a symbol of "justice" or a "hero myth" for Gotham to have hope while the Bruce Wayne character goes through his own trauma. I imagine a policeman in uniform (or a knight) similarly had this effect in the past (in times when people mostly had a positive view of them).
Nolan making the characters "less Greek" and more multicultural pretty much says that the film is about people in general and how people react and sometimes badly (but inderstandably) to all kinds of things under duress and not because they are particularly "Greek." It feels similarly to a morality tale.
It is very interesting how Christopher Nolan has made the presence of Greek gods and goddesses as a way to talk about the characters' moral struggles. The whole film, arguably, is about Odysseus dealing with his PTSD as he returns from war. He sees monsters and fantastic things in his journey, but they might as well have been a manifestation of him dealing with his trauma. If he had slept through the whole journey, these creatures would've been something he would see in a dream. Given that he was the only survivor of the journey, no one is left to corroborate on whether what he encountered was even real. If you have seen the film, there's a nod to this idea during Odysseus' interaction with Athena. The film "The Life of Pi" similarly played with this idea of the unreliable narrator and possible hallucinations one may or may not go through because of trauma or just being alone for so long. (To note, the book version of "Life of Pi" did not lean so heavily on the illusory aspect of Pi's journey as opposed to the idea of the "what if" and positive effect of story--whether that is necessarily good is also up for debate).
Similar to "Inception", there's that element of (for those who dig into it) ambiguity, which allows conversation. I suppose, just to simplify, the movie is about war and the aftermath--how it destroys both the conquered and the conqueror. Essentially, Oddyseus could be seen as another form of Oppenheimer (from Nolan's other film) who is struggling with what he has "accomplished."
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