I’ve been reading and listening to many reviews of the Nolan film The Odyssey. The spread of opinions is extremely wide – everything from a great masterpiece to a piece of horse manure, with plenty in-between. The film is doing well at the box office, probably because so much controversy has been generated and perhaps because people are hungry for films that tackle larger themes than the usual.

I probably will write more about the film in another post, although I don’t think I’ll be seeing it. Despite my curiosity about what it looks like on the large screen, the reason I don’t think I’ll go is that almost every single reviewer mentions something that’s a deal-breaker for me: painfully loud music above dialogue that’s hard to hear. I find such a combination awful, even though I’m interested in the large-screen spectacle of a classic story. I might not like it, but I’m intrigued enough to want to make up my own mind. But not at the cost of painful ears and losing at least half the dialogue.

This post is not about that movie, though. This is about a short video I encountered along the way. It’s AI-generated, and despite that I think it’s very fine. It tells the story of the Odyssey in about five minutes, using classic artwork as its basis. From the description at YouTube:

The whole epic in one breath: the apple, the wrath, the horse, the wandering, the homecoming, the film revealed at last as a Bosch triptych swinging shut on a world in a glass sphere.

Ten years of war and wandering, told in one breath. This is the whole Odyssey compressed into a single unbroken descent — the apple rolling down a god’s banquet table, a thousand ships dissolving into Claude Lorrain’s gold, Achilles playing one note while the war burns without him, and the Cyclops rising out of Goya’s black. From the sack of Troy to the bag of winds, from Circe’s melting sailors to the shades spiraling out of Hades, every trial arrives as a living painting, then gives way to the next.

Five images carry the current all the way through: the eye, the orb, the fire, the sea, the thread. Watch for where they return — the apple that becomes a star, the wound that becomes an empty beach. It ends where all of it has been pointing: a beggar at his own gate, an old dog’s last recognition, a bed rooted in a living olive tree, and a triptych swinging shut on a world held inside a glass sphere.

The longest voyage in literature. One take. No landfall until the final frame.

And here it is: