Composers from Purcell to Birtwistle have created passionate dramas inspired by ancient Greek stories – and none of them require you to sit through three hours of solemn spectacle without an interval
For me, the most astonishing thing about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is its barnstorming popularity. I found this cinematic epic for the ages visually bloodless, expressively monotonous and very, very long. Mind you, it is good to know that Nolan thinks that war is, on balance, you know, once you really think about it, probably a bad idea.
The music, too, was disappointing. If I were Nolan, I’d have asked Mica Levi to score The Odyssey. Ludwig Göransson could have surely done more to make a soundworld of genuine strangeness, but all he could manage is a falling tritone and then a descending fifth on the two reeds and pipes of a recreated aulos, which he uses as a melancholy leitmotif in all-too-conventional Hollywood fashion. (The aulos is beautifully played by Callum Armstrong on the soundtrack, at least.) The best sounds in the film come in the scene with Samantha Morton’s Circe, in which the crew’s gluttony is horrorshow ASMR: surround-sound mastication that threatens to devour the audience.
