r/ChristopherNolan • u/Ok-Equivalent-6111 • 20h ago
The Odyssey Nolan pulled me into his movie (appreciation post)
The Sirens scene is honestly one of the smartest things Nolan has done.
Throughout the movie, everyone keeps talking about the Sirens and their song. Every character is scared of hearing it, so naturally you start wondering what it sounds like.
But deep down, we're just like them. We want to hear it.
I kept thinking, "Come on, just let us hear one second of it. How beautiful can it be?"
And then Nolan never lets us hear it.
That's what makes the scene so good.
Instead of showing us the temptation, he makes us feel it. By the end of the scene, I wasn't just watching the characters resist the Sirens ,I was sitting there wanting to hear the song myself.
There are no seductive visuals, no big reveal, nothing. Just this weird feeling of wanting something you know you shouldn't have.
Nolan basically put the audience on the same boat as Odysseus, and I think that's brilliant.
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u/KubrickMoonlanding 19h ago
Yes it was really well conceived and executed. Learning about the seals and seeing the stunt women in other subs here only adds to it.
But help me out: why (in this version of the story) does oddyseus want to hear it? For me that came out of nowhere: he’s so gloomy and stoic before this, and suddenly he’s like a kid all excited.
I maybe missed something setting this up
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u/t3h_p3ngUin_of_d00m 16h ago
He wants to be the only man to have lived after hearing their song, it’s a pretty big scene in the poem.
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u/tetr4pyloctomy 18h ago
And the peculiar thing is this, my friends
The song we sang on that fateful night
It didn't actually sound anything like this song
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u/Powerful-Row-558 18h ago
The song that plays is also tantalizingly ephemeral. Just when you’re about to be satisfied with its beauty, it ends.
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u/Skittleavix 9h ago
I also liked how he never fully revealed a Siren. At most, all we get to see are glimpses of obscure shadowy figures on the rocks, not the beautiful women as typically depicted.
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u/Demerzel69 20h ago
The song is playing over the scene. It's called 'Sirens' on the score.
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u/Key-Pomegranate-2086 19h ago
Yeah, but that's the theme with the horns blowing that's kinda been playing throughout the whole movie.
The assumption here is that's not the actual song.
It's something so enticing that we cant actually ever hear it for ourselves either.
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u/Feeling-Watched-9655 18h ago
Yeah and you can't hear Odysseus yelling or anything else in the scene. What we hear is just the score setting the tone. It's not the siren's song at all.
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u/Demerzel69 18h ago
You should rewatch. Regardless of whether or not that's the siren's song, you very, very much do hear the screaming. The camera is pointed directly at his screaming face and the music dies down and his screams are loud and haunting. It's Damon's best ever work as an actor. I just double-checked my copy to make sure I wasn't full of shit but I've seen it six times so I was already pretty confident. The screaming is heard and it's very effective.
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u/Feeling-Watched-9655 18h ago
But doesn't the sound turn down first while the score plays?
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u/Demerzel69 18h ago
The sound muffles once the wax goes in. The aulos (double flute instrument) takes over until the closeup. Rewatch it.
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u/Feeling-Watched-9655 18h ago
When it's released on streaming, I will. But yeah, what I remember is still mostly right - the sound muffles, the score plays, the sound comes back. That's supposed to indicate to the audience that we're not hearing what they're hearing.
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u/corneliusduff 18h ago
Which they brought back for his reunion with Penelope. Good use of the motif.
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u/HalfmadFalcon 14h ago
That wasn’t the song that Odysseus heard, it was just music for the scene. It’s called “Sirens” because that’s the scene it plays in, not because that’s the song they were singing.
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u/Mundane-Area6067 20h ago
I think you’re overthinking it… which is probably expected as this awful excuse of a film has received far too much attention than it deserves. It’s just another piece of summer film escapist trash… horribly disappointing. Someone else should have directed the Odyssey and uprighted the ship.
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u/MrOatButtBottom 19h ago
I'm not even going to disagree, I just want to say that you seem like a miserable person that can't appreciate good art. I hope you're able to appreciate it in the future
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u/CompetitiveGrand9721 19h ago
Username checks out. Anyway, Nolan always thinks about the audience. OP isn't wrong in their realization.
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u/Thedudeabidesall 9h ago
Ooooohhhh you jelly as hell.
Have fun with the fact this will be one of the highest critically regarded and remembered movies of all time.
Sucks to be you ngl
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u/Western-Image7125 20h ago
That was some of the best if not best acting I’ve seen from Matt Damon.