The Odyssey

Writer-director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is, as expected from the creator of the temporal pincer movement, a non-linear telling of the ancient poem that is steeped in queasy memory and elided thought. As with the director's own Oppenheimer, this Odyssey hinges on an individual who seems, for all appearances, to be an emissary from a forthcoming, dreadful new era of human extermination. Where J. Robert dreamed of quivering, sub-atomic galaxies, the lost king Odysseus chats candidly with the cosmic entities that bridge the hemispheres of his brain. Their faces are anchored in his own failings, while the thoughts they prompt demand consideration of his unholy ingenuity. Both Oppenheimer and Odysseus' visions relate to the application of an original but fundamentally terrible new thought, ideas that have rolling consequences; waves that crash and echo far beyond the sand on which they were plotted. The equivalent here to Oppenheimer's fission-based nuclear weapon is The Trojan Horse itself, a deception that works so well because, we are told, it undermines the most basic tenants of human decency. 

The sacking of Troy then isn't organised as a great or ingenious victory; it's a crime that damns mankind. Somewhat of a piece with the director's breakthrough film Memento, in that the present for Matt Damon's mislaid monarch is a fog of unconscious, reflexive action (he scours a blasted beach for signs of his ship or crew) and winding conversations with a woman, Charlize Theron's bronzed Calypso, in which critical information is deliberately withheld, prolonging his agonies. While Tom Holland's Telemachus steps away from a household packed with seditious suitors to brave a trip to Sparta, in the hope of hearing word of his absent father (finding little to nothing), a stirred Odysseus answers his child's queries but only for our benefit. Odysseus giving detail to a horrifying voyage premised on a desire to physically split with the ungrateful allies who share their wrongdoing. By straying from the shipping lanes, Odysseus inadvertently abandons himself and his crew to the Gods and the elements they personify: Zeus in the ferocious thunderstorms above them, Poseidon in the churning waves beneath. 

The light of knowledge that prompted Odysseus to pack himself into a holy object - apparently a gift for petty Gods, intended to curry favour - is absent on this expedition. In this section mankind's brightest, most devious mind is confronted with how much he doesn't, cannot know. Nolan's film then taking the island-hopping form seen previously in Don Chaffey and Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, only absent the certainty or good-natured bonhomie that kept the Argonauts from Jason's throat. In Nolan's telling Odysseus meets the men he has failed, including Elliot Page's Sinon, and is then cursed to know, by figures who emerge from black sands, how events can play out. The decisions he will be pressed to make and how lives will be lost on each path. Forced to treaty with powerful supernatural forces - from Samantha Morton's Circe, a witch who can remake men in the slovenly image of beasts, or a massive, one-eyed man who is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son rendered in, as behind-the-scenes images would have us believe, Royal de Luxe-style puppetry - horror in Nolan's Odyssey is not just the unknown but the unknowable. All around them are thought and method that exceed the grasp of these pillaging sailors. 

Finally returned to Ithaca, Damon's king prospers again by deception, breaking another siege - this time of his own palace - by exploiting the social norms of the day. He enters his household as a beggar, a disguise that we are told is beloved of earthbound Olympians. Telemachus, desperate for any connection to a father who has been transformed into contemporary myth, repeatedly voices entreaty that acknowledges that the person he is speaking to has displayed some aspect, so beyond the norm, that it raises suspicion that they are Godly. Odysseus, again, uses this human reverence for something beyond themselves to his advantage. Anne Hathaway's Queen Penelope may weep at the straining sound of an unstrung bow; Odysseus tearing apart the challenge he has conquered only to clatter the jerry-rigged debris against the fleeing bodies of his enemies but the lasting impression of Nolan's film is its description of hubris. Damon's Odysseus as a man arrogant or foolhardy enough to consider himself in terms that are not instinctively beneath Greece's vengeful pantheon. Odysseus as an agnostic in the age of antiquity who, when judged against governing Gods who personify aspects of human life, makes a case for himself as a new deity of deceit. A line drawn from Prometheus, the fire-giver, and the failed sculptor Dolus to Odysseus. A figure so powerful he can even deceive himself. 

The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy hasn't been shy about kicking the shit out of its hero. Batman Begins tracked the inception of the bat-identity, from the crime alley mugging that made him an orphan through to an L-train showdown with the false father that shaped and tempered his vigilante impulse. The Dark Knight broke his spirit by killing his beloved, maiming his successor, and nuking his reputation. What anguish does this franchise closer heap on everybody's favourite fascist? It makes Christian Bale's billionaire detective older, lonely, and infirm. His brief stint punishing criminality has left a permanent mark. The Dark Knight Rises ratchets up this torture by giving Bruce Wayne an opposite; an opponent that is both his mental equal and physical superior. An anti-Batman.

Bane is the idea that Wayne rejected at his ninja graduation; the dedicated disciple who happily acts out the extinction ideals of Ra's al Ghul's multiracial mujahideen. Where Bale's Batman has placed his faith in technology, augmenting his broken body with electronic leg braces and metal rending slash hands, Tom Hardy's Bane has cultivated an armour of muscle and swagger. He operates in daylight, dressed in a shabby football manager's coat and surrounded by scurrying generics. Contrary to his comic book antecedent, this Bane does not mainline glowing super-steroids. His bio-mechanical mask does nothing other than add an electronic inflection to a voice that sounds like Sean Connery essaying a bare-knuckle boxer. As well as this impenetrable accent, Bane is a horrifying physical presence. He towers and growls, tugging at his own neckline. His are fingers restless, desperate to snatch at something then break it. 

Bane's interactions with other human beings are short, stunted exchanges that usually end with his hands darting to their throat. His power is absolute. Bane is a fully realised, focused individual - the perfect foil to a caped crusader who is desperate to be unnecessary. Unlike a Batman that prefers to whisper to his ruling class associates from shadows, Bane surrounds himself with derelicts and has them build the means to level Gotham. In this sense, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises is as much the Mutant Leader from Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Returns as he is Knightfall's muscular luchador. Like the former character, Bane is (eternal?) youth, ferocity and an equally pulverising rhetoric. Qualities that have all but deserted a Bruce Wayne numbed by eight years eating soup in an empty castle. Although equipped with a variety of new toys, Batman is quite incapable of standing toe to toe with Bane. When first they clash, Batman rains blow after blow down on his opposite, barely able to stagger him. 

The Dark Knight arrived somewhere abstract and lawless during a protective custody sequence in which Harvey Dent's SWAT van came across a burnt out fire truck whilst invisible electronic insects buzzed on the soundtrack. The Dark Knight Rises does something similar with a sustained close-up of Batman wincing as Bane relentlessly hammers down on his skull. Teeth clenched, praying for it all to stop, he looks like a child. Batman, shrunken and utterly beaten. It doesn't last. Bruce Wayne finds motivation down another well, and Bane's position as ultimate evil is retconned on the fly by an unsatisfying twist straight out of The World Is Not Enough. Bane and Batman's rematch is inconclusive too. Bane's momentary wobble after Batman starts focus striking his breathing equipment leads straight into a rage power-up that allows him to put dents in marble. Bane is too big for this film. Too capable, too dangerous. Its heroes cannot stop him, he must be circumvented at a conceptual level. Reduced to an idea, and subordinated by a deeper, more personal threat to Bruce Wayne's psyche, Bane becomes docile. A few moments later he's being dismissed, decisively, by Anne Hathaway's Catwoman. Bane isn't broken, or really even beaten. He simply leaves the frame, and the film, after he comes under artillery fire.