The following article contains major spoilers odyssey.
In classic Christopher Nolan fashion, odyssey It revolves around a horrific event that is repeatedly glimpsed in hazy flashbacks, but never fully revealed until the climax: the barbarian invasion of Troy, re-imagined as a brutal massacre that haunts Odysseus (Matt Damon), the chief architect of the slaughter – the man behind the Trojan Horse. (So he spends most of the movie wandering around like an emo kid, with no bangs.) As the doors finally come in, and hordes of bloodthirsty swordsmen flood the streets like a murderous plague, they’re led by a man clad from head to toe in jet-black armor, who appears to be a demon sent from Hades itself: Agamemnon (Benny Safi).
It’s a bit like that scene when Darth Vader arrives evil one. is like agamemnon odysseyThe final boss of, his very presence is indicating one thing: Oh, you are everything Mess. He overpowers those around him, almost on the scale of the armored giants who destroyed Odysseus’s men earlier in the film; The implication is that he is equally a nuclear-grade threat. It is a monster, or a Bronze Age machine, whose only motivation is to destroy, plunder, terrorize the world. And there’s one important detail that serves it as more than just a killer set of armor: you never see his face.
In Nolan’s explanation, odyssey It’s basically a movie about the trauma of war, and Odysseus, you know, feels extremely bad about his role in the destruction of an entire civilization. (Many people online have compared how oppenheimerNolan’s last film is about a similarly depressed man haunted by his own invention: the atomic bomb. The film is filled with expressions of his grief. For one example, we are led to believe that the goddess Athena (Zendaya) visits him frequently, but in the Troy sequence it is revealed that the woman he sees in those scenes was one of the many civilians his men killed, and decapitated before his eyes. She is not a beautiful figure of myth, but rather a hallucinatory trauma response, the result of her struggle to reconcile her morality with the fact that her actions led to the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people. (The world’s smallest violin is ready.)
In this view, Agamemnon is another symbol. In Odysseus’s mind, he represents the terror of war itself; Its relentless passion, its relentless desire for blood. Then again, it makes sense that Odysseus would remember him as so cartoonish, terrifyingly evil, stripping him of everything that, really, made him a man. Seeing his face will remind us and Odysseus of his humanity. (On a more basic level, it triples his aura, making him appear undeniably more badass.) This is probably why we only get a glimpse of Safdie’s face in one scene. Midway through the film, Odysseus’ son Telemachus (Tom Holland) is told the story of the death of Agamemnon, who was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra (Lupia Nyong’o) upon returning from war to avenge their daughter’s sacrifice. Odysseus might have thought of him as an armor-clad nightmare. But in the memories of others, he was just a naked man murdered in a bath.
This article originally appeared In British GQ.
