The Odyssey Nolan

Once again, I'm back on my bullshit ehehe :D

You already know I loved the movie the first time I saw it, and  I was toying with the idea of sharing my thoughts about Nolan and what I call his war trilogy. 

I'm not an expert on Nolanology. Still, after watching most of his work and listening to plenty of his interviews, I can safely say that I know his affinity for the following themes: the love for his wife (he absolutely loves his wife, more than anything else in the universe, and ALL of his movies reflect on that)  he is terrified of losing her (and subjects his male main characters to either the death of said wife, or the threat of the loss of her); his fascination with Time and the necessity to make non-linear movies, his love for cinema, his relationship with his work (past, present and future) and the need to conceptualize "characters" in the movie so the audience could see them more like concepts rather than characters. 

You can absolutely see these themes play out in The Odyssey (just like you could see them play out in Oppenheimer), but this is not what I am going to talk about here. 

While watching The Odyssey, it dawned on me that it was connected to both Oppenheimer and Dunkirk. All 3 are talking about War but through different lenses. 

Dunkirk throws you in the heat of the battlefield, at a time when the nations at war saw the others as enemies and nothing more. The movie doesn't sugarcoat the tragedy that it is: the loss of humanity, the absurdity of it all, the need for survival, and the way humans would do the worst to one another to survive. The movie doesn't glamourize war. It's ugly, it's dirty, it forces you to strip your humanity down to the raw desire for survival. It forces the audience to see beyond the passionate speeches and political tactics... it is humans killing humans. It is a void that swallows everything that makes us human. It is a horror that should not be happening. 

Then came Oppenheimer, and along with the movie, you are thrown out of the battlefield into places where you make decisions and contribute to them. The horror of the movie and the destruction that the atomic bomb brought down on Japan is not truly shown, but suggested. Oppenheimer might not have detonated that bomb himself, but as soon as he created it, it was used with extreme prejudice by the military high ranks. These deaths and those who will follow from the use and development of more powerful bombs (whether nuclear or thermonuclear)  and weapons of mass destruction all rest heavily on the hands of a man who wanted to help and ended up signing the worst Faustian contract one could think of. Ultimately, you start to understand that you only need one idea, one awful idea, to strip humanity of people and to bring about the apocalypse on Earth. 

And now you have the Odyssey, which expands on that idea of responsibility, of one man's idea being responsible for yet another apocalypse. This time it is a myth, a legend, a way for Nolan to enshrine in a movie the idea that the first man who decided to strip the others of their humanity has opened Pandora's Box. Mankind is condemned to repeat the same mistake Odysseus did by denying others their humanity, tricking them into thinking they were treated as equals only to destroy them.  Odysseus is Oppenheimer because he's the engineer of the fall of Troy, but he is also a veteran of the war, one of the soldiers who came back alive to the UK at the end of Dunkirk. A broken man who suffers from War-related PTSD. A man who knows that he can no longer remain among the ashes of Civilization he helped destroy and who goes in exil. This type of man cannot remain among us. Our society can't remain as is: belligerent, dehumanizing, without empathy for people who ultimately are our kin. 

He's extensively taken a very humanist stance over his interviews and denounced the rise of violence, bigotry, and dehumanizing discourse in the UK (and the rest of the world). So it is not too far-fetched, I think, to consider that the man who wovens in his art- the immense love he has for mankind, the fears that cling to his bones, his hopes and dreams and deepest desires; to want the world to be a better place and to ensure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. 

I'm doing my English teacher again XD I know Nolan isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I had this in my head for many days lol 

Have a lovely day, darlings :)