With cinemas capable of projecting it in anything like its optimal presentation selling out weeks in advance (even for middle-of-the-night screenings), The Odyssey has certainly got audiences excited about going to the big screen again. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem was generally savaged before anyone saw it because of some of the casting decisions but has been granted a much more positive reception now people have seen it (I am somewhat old-fashioned in thinking it’s probably best to wait to see a film before deciding whether it’s any good or not).
With his collaboration with Hans Zimmer now a thing of the past, Nolan has turned once again to Ludwig Göransson for the score. Again before anybody heard any of it, there was a bit of a furore as some remarks from the director and composer were taken out of context about why the score wouldn’t be an old-fashioned orchestral work in the romantic classical tradition. I mean – if anyone seriously expected a Ludwig Göransson score for a Christopher Nolan movie to be an old-fashioned orchestral work in the romantic classical tradition then I would suggest said person has not heard much music by Ludwig Göransson nor seen many films by Christopher Nolan.
Instead the score is a somewhat quirky blend of ancient and modern – instruments of Greek antiquity recreated, then paired with electronics and even a rap song. Believe me – this was not a quest for authenticity. It is also a very insular score – this isn’t a great surprise either – the music in several Nolan films seems to be essentially a musical commentary on inner turmoil, whether the Batman films or (in a very different way) Interstellar or more recently Oppenheimer. (Maybe Dunkirk too – I could never quite work out what that score was trying to do.)
Interestingly, a couple of years ago when another movie based on the same story was released (The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes) its composer Rachel Portman took what is conceptually a very similar approach – her entire score is based on Odysseus’s inner turmoil. She (needless to say) took an orchestral approach to solve that challenge and I found it to be a fascinating piece of work.
By contrast, Göransson’s music – as heard on the excruciatingly long album, at any rate – is quite a slog to get through. The opening “Zeus’s Law” features some spoken dramatic lines, presented in a theatrical staccato style. I don’t know who remembers John Williams’s Olympic piece “Call of the Champions” in which a choir shouts Latin expressions symbolising bravery and heroism – this is a bit like that, only a lot shitter.
The gong-like sounds which run through the score offer a kind of spiritual feel which I like – to my ears they more bring to mind Tibet than ancient Greece but they are amongst the period-authentic instruments the composer has employed – and they offer a sense of calm contemplation which is one of the score’s dominant features. It is made up largely of long, drawn-out pieces which move at a glacial pace and the subtlest of tonal shifts can be so subliminal that they only become apparent with repeated listens.
We’re not far off half an hour in when the first real drama occurs – some dramatic pounding drums in the early parts of “Let’s Go Home” offer a tantalising glimpse at what Zimmer may have come up with were he still working with Nolan, though its subsequent descent into bland electronic anonymity more serves as a potent reminder that he isn’t. It’s an even longer wait for one of the score’s small number of melodic themes to really reveal itself – the soulful vocals of “Menelaus, Husband of Helen” are very attractive and the track is certainly a highlight. Only ten minutes pass between that and an even more expressive treatment of the theme which builds from a bed of gloom in “Laestrygonians” but they seem like the longest ten minutes of your life.
Perhaps the most controversial piece is “Hades” (voiced by James Woods), where we are presented with some 8-bit synth effects that sound for all the world like someone’s playing the old Asteroids arcade game while you’re trying to listen to The Odyssey. It’s jarring by design.
My favourite part of the score is one where Göransson sets something up and then pays it off later on. In “Sirens” he deconstructs and then reconstructs his main theme for various winds and it turns out to be particularly attractive; then later in by far the score’s best track, “Odysseus” he picks that idea up and runs even further with it, with driving percussion and various voices added to the mix. It’s cleverly done and perhaps the only truly memorable thing about the whole endeavour, the one time when the epithet “epic” might come into play.
I don’t have any problem with the score’s approach, really – the old “Miklós Rózsa travelled the world for 18 months to conduct painstaking research before writing a score that sounds like all his others” joke works because there’s an element of truth to it – and in the sense that Christopher Nolan got exactly the score he wanted, by definition I suppose it is a success.
Ludwig Göransson clearly has something about him but perhaps there’s a degree of the emperor’s new clothes hanging on the execution of the idea (which is certainly a decent enough concept for a score). At two hours long the album really does drag on but that’s part of the point (the arduous mental journey being as hard to navigate as the literal one); there aren’t really more than a few minutes of it I would ever particularly want to hear again. It will be showered with awards, of that there can be little doubt, but film music can do a lot more than this, really. It’s just so basic, despite its length so ephemeral.
Nolan limits the canvas on which his composers can paint to such a degree – Hans Zimmer managed to thrive on a couple of his films in those conditions but even he struggled to find the room to have much to say on some others – and for whatever qualities Göransson has, I’m not sure he’s anywhere near to Zimmer’s league when it comes to his instincts for what could not just serve a film and its director’s wishes but actually elevate it. (Zimmer has on occasion taken big swings and missed – not for Nolan’s films, I hasten to add – and I’d rather that than just play it safe.) I’m afraid the whole thing is too limited in its ambition and as a result, really pretty boring.
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