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 Batman

For a character that has been booted and rebooted to the point where any sense of permanence or progression has been subordinated to an endlessly regurgitating state of origin, Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson's take on the caped crusader manages to eke out a place of its own in this ever-expanding pantheon by making him deliberately inexpert. This desire to play the masked vigilante as disconnected and insufferably weird is just enough to numb the nagging feeling that, perhaps, the Dark Knight might be better served by a period of hibernation. Although the overarching story is completely dissimilar, this The Batman is grounded in themes and ideas that didn't quite make it to the screen when Frank Miller and Darren Aronofsky were circling Warner Bros' prize property in the early 2000s - a Bruce Wayne estranged from the gaudier aspects of his wealth and a Batcave that, rather than occupy a cavernous space beneath a mansion, is actually a cordoned off stretch of abandoned subway. 

Like Miller and Aronofsky's recalibration, this Bruce Wayne isn't portrayed as worldly either. There's zero sense of the globetrotting pilgrimage that underpinned Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale's shinobi cinema take. Reeves' Batman has put down roots then rotted, a phantom committed to drifting along the streets that claimed his parents. Pattinson offers up gauntness, a malnourished cigarette stink that is reflected back to him by a Gotham filled with blaring video screens and neo-Grecian majesty; a city resplendent with ill-gotten gains and drowning in a constant downpour. Suited up, Pattinson's Batman isn't played as intimidating either. The street-level cops he interacts with are not awed by his supernatural presence, they treat him as a nuisance - an unwanted physical affectation that, for some reason, is allowed to pollute their evidence gathering procedures. 

Pattinson has a theatrical, carnival, quality to his looming. The horned cowl he wears more evocative of a Victorian depiction of The Devil than the usual animisitic totem. Batman as a dressed-up, Spring-Heeled Jack style, eccentric rather than the world-shaker who counts Superman amongst his friends. This Batman then has been plucked out of folklore and deposited into a particularly dour police procedural. This clash plays beautifully, at least at first, largely thanks to Pattinson's decision to not adapt in the slightest to the superhero production line. Rather than a gleaming Adonis, this masked vigilante is sinewy and violently unhinged; his venom maintained by poisonous-looking chemicals that can be injected into his body when he finds himself in dire need. Firmly located within sodden squalor, Reeves and Cinematographer Greig Fraser's film very obviously strives to evoke David Fincher and Darius Khondji's despondent work on Seven but the invocation frequently plumbs deeper influential depths. 

A constant technological prickle recalls the uneasy symbiosis of analogue and biomechanical machinery tidied into every frame by Ridley Scott and Jordan Cronenweth on Blade Runner. In the early goings, eyes gather and compute long strings of visual information, spitting out leads for this button-pushing meddler. It's a shame that the demands of Bruce Wayne's case have him leave this visually unusual feedback loop; damning his interactions to yawning exposition dumps and criminals casually surmising their murderous intents. Although the aesthetic is often sublime, the actual structural mechanics underlining this beauty frequently work directly against the spell. As well as an elasticated relationship to bodily harm that (bizarrely) aligns him with his Warner stablemate Daffy Duck, Pattinson's Batman isn't just dim, he's blank. An empty vessel just waiting to be filled up. 

Mouth-foaming data is batted aside, more than once, when Bruce Wayne finds his way to another, contradictory, perspective. There are sequences in the film where Batman dutifully trots from meeting to meeting, instantly rearranging his entire outlook based on nothing more than the last thing that was said to him. The character's strongest convictions are the revulsion he feels regarding firearms, an abstinence he lords over those who plainly weren't rich enough to keep a butler on staff to teach them the ins and outs of Spanish martial arts. In a film where, comfortably, hundreds of innocent civilians are swept away by polluted filth, why shouldn't Zoë Kravitz's Selina Kyle shoot a man involved in the brutal murder of her lover? Similarly, Batman's yelping admonishment of the supervillains he faces comes off as rote and sanctimonious when we've seen that the public-facing 'Bruce' persona is a barely maintained shadow. Scenes designed to draw clear lines under the idea that Batman and his foes are reflections of each other repeatedly fail to land because of the voyeuristic strangeness constantly being generated by Pattinson. If anything, the final Wayne's unholy quest to pummel turnstile hoppers makes considerably less sense than a violent uprising determined to rid a terminally compromised city of its parasitic ruling class.