WEEKLY WRAP: Does 'The Odyssey' deliver?

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This is a CBC Podcast. Hello to all of you. Hello. How's it going, everybody?

Guys, get in the boat. We've got a lot of stuff to do. We've got a real big journey to go on. Okay, so I saw the movie last night.

I just wanted to be real transparent here. It is difficult to convey in words, you know, just how epic of a scale this movie is. But we will let the trailer do some of that work. You gods don't speak in ways we understand.

Who doesn't understand pain? Of blood. The gods told you. Then I defy the gods.

I just love Zendaya in that role, by the way, just going like, you guys don't understand all the messages we've been sending you, which is just like the thing that she keeps doing over and over again in the movie. The Odyssey was written by Homer nearly 3,000 years ago. I'm here to tell you it will be difficult for me to spoil a story that is that old.

That's just not a thing that we can do. However, what I'm going to try to do is try to summarize the story in like less than 30 seconds just so we're all kind of quickly caught up and everybody listening is like, okay, I have some footing here. And so the Odyssey is the story of Odysseus. He's the king of Ithaca.

He's been away. He's been away for some time because he's been fighting in the Trojan Wars. And then the Trojan Wars are over. Thank God.

Thanks to Odysseus for actually, you know, helping manage and these wars. However, he's got to get back. He's got to get back to Ithaca because his wife has been without him for some time, his wife Penelope. And she's trying to fend off all these suitors who are like, we think your husband's dead.

He's been away for quite some time. Meanwhile, his son Telemachus is like, you know what? I got to go. I think my dad's alive.

I got to go figure out exactly the thing that has happened to him. That is roughly the story of the Odyssey because a few things happened to Odysseus on the way that delay him, shall we say. And the last thing I'll say is that like anytime you see a narrative of a homecoming, a hero who leaves home, even though they don't really want to leave home and they get into some trials and tribulations and they come back. We're all doing iterations of the Odyssey.

We've been doing that for some time. Moana is the Odyssey, but also in Hawaii. You know what I mean? So anyway.

I'm with bound. Finding Nemo. It's all the Odyssey. I think we have all the most important ones.

Moana. That's it. That's exactly right. So all this to say, there are a lot of expectations because this is a foundational text of Western canon, Rad.

You are an OG fan of The Odyssey. You literally named your daughter Penelope. Tell me about the expectations you had for this movie. Did it measure up to you?

You know, funny thing is I didn't have the highest expectations for this movie. Let me qualify that. I mean, of course, in my household, we were very excited for this movie because of the Penelope factor. Yes, we did literally name her after this book that I fell in love with or specifically this character who I fell in love with when I read the picture book version of the Odyssey in the eighth grade.

I was like, I named my daughter Penelope and that happened. So we were very excited because Anne Hathaway, who we love in our house, is playing Penelope. That was it. But in terms of the movie, like, look, I wasn't as excited because I'm not the biggest Christopher Nolan fan, right?

You know, like he's not a PTA in my mind, right? Paul Thomas Anderson for those who don't exist in the film world all the time. But yes. Yeah.

And on top of that, like, you know, Nolan adapting The Odyssey, I'm like, get a load of this guy. He's going to adapt. Like, you know, there's a hubris in that. There's a hubris in that.

I mean, you know how long The Odyssey is? Like, you know, that a lot of this movie is Penelope knitting. Like, you know, like it's like it's not exactly like a like a story that that is easily, you know, contained within a three hour movie without that that kind of wear. And, you know, watching the movie, it's certainly you do feel that journey.

You do feel the wear and tear, especially in the first two hours and the redundancy of like kind of like, you know, the Odysseus that is a man going from one obstacle to another in a way that's still beautiful to look at in a way that still has this cumulative emotional force that then builds up to this final act where then that's when it really blew me away. So when you finally get to the end of this movie, it really did actually surpass any expectations that I had. And I felt like, hey, I want to steal a pun from one of the headlines. Christopher Nolan hit a homer.

Boo! Okay, I'll tell you this. That's all the time I have. I don't think I exhaled in the last 45 minutes.

That's how in it I was in this movie. But we'll get to that in a moment. I think there was a moment for me, David, where I was sitting down in the theater and going, oh, I didn't realize that Christopher Nolan has just been making The Odyssey for the last 15 years or so.

And then you get to him actually making The Odyssey. People are like, oh, he did it in Interstellar. And he did it a little bit in Interception. And he did it, you know, like he's kind of kept on returning to this before literally making The Odyssey.

I know you had some doubts walking into the theater, David. Tell me about whether your doubts were erased. Yeah, I mean, not to echo to exactly what Rad was saying, but I came into it with somewhat similar reservations.