How "The Odyssey" Outsmarts Itself, with Wesley Morris

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. He's telling you in the opening minutes. His movie is not going to go. It's going to go. right after this. We should get a drink. It's time. It's time. It's time. We have props. You, you. I don't mean drinking in here, Pablo. Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In life. I don't know the difference between this and life anymore. This is where I live. I live in here. It's fair. By the way, I just want to say, the background makes me. It just makes me so happy. The visuals of the studio. I love that design. The design's glad to have you back. It just puts me in a great mood. I don't know if you have tested this out scientifically. We're doing it right now. Scientists behind the glass are watching Wesley Morris, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, smile. And I want to describe the visuals beyond what's behind me that the audio audience may not be totally caught up on. We have some helmets that I was told were more Bronze Age than they have turned out to be. People are getting a lot of. This movie's getting a lot of helmet blowback. We, like Christopher Nolan, are managing expectations for historical accuracy as we have some red. red boa feathers sticking out of the spirit Halloween helmets that are on the desk. I love these. I love these. I also want to clarify that I defer to you on spoiler policy. How do we handle this? I think you know your listeners better than I know your listeners. I tend to not. On the one hand, I love talking about the whole thing. Yeah. But I'm also sensitive, like, two weeks after a movie's been out to just be. You know, I just. I saw The Invite fairly recently. I mean, there's no spoilers there, really. But, like, just. I didn't know anything except who was in it and what the basic premise was. So, you know, I try to just avoid information about movies. I cover my eyes during trailers. So, the point being that we are mindful of the fact that there are some people out there who have not yet seen what is apparently the most popular movie in the world, according to the latest metrics? Yeah, yeah. It's the biggest movie. It's the biggest movie in the world right now. But I want to have a conversation that has value to people who have not seen it, who have already seen it, and, frankly, don't give a s***, maybe, about Christopher Nolan in general. But are going to see it or won't see it because they don't give a s*** about Christopher Nolan? People who, on principle, already hate this premise for an episode on this show, and people who may be so peer-pressured into giving in and finding out, because this is what's happening, Wesley, a true blockbuster has once again emerged, from the sea. From the sea. From the sea. And it's forcing people to figure out, am I going to find out what this is all about? I did something that I feel so privileged in getting to tell you about, which is, I got an invitation from a friend. This was last week. Hey, do you want to see The Odyssey? There's a screening in Lincoln Square, 70 millimeter. Oh, yeah, okay. This is probably where I wound up. So, I went to a fancy screening and saw it on the biggest possible and also preferred, size screen. The only true IMAX in New York City is what I got to see this on in row E. Okay. And I have been thinking about it ever since, which is why I texted you, Wesley Morris. And I was like, have you seen this yet? And so, where did you see it? I saw it at the same theater. Because, you know, there aren't very many places, depending on where you live on Earth. You know, this movie was shot entirely in IMAX. That's part of its claim to fame feels a little strong. It's lore. It's one of the selling points here is that you have to see it in IMAX. So, it was shot in IMAX, whole thing, unlike, you know, what you normally get, which is like a climactic scene in IMAX. And the rest goes back to its pitiful, regular movie aspect ratio. Right. In which, you know, in the old days, when I was a kid, because I'm older than you are, when I was a kid, there would be somebody in the theater. There wasn't a lot of aspect ratio switching. But when you'd get two movies, showing in the same theater, and the aspect ratios did differ, you'd have somebody whose job it was to adjust the edge curtains. Yes. They had to say, I'm sorry, we are a grower, not a shower. Right. We're going to cover up. Put a little fig leaf. But that no longer happens. And I think I would love to hear the exhibitors rationale for this, but they just probably assume that we are so used to letterboxing. Because also, when I was a kid, people were like, what are those black lines? I don't like it. I'm not getting the full picture. And it wasn't until Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel did a whole segment on their show about letterboxing. Oh, I didn't know this. And the glories of letterboxing that, you know, I don't know if it calmed people down, but I was like, I got a new high horse to be on. Hey, man. A wide-ass horse. Yes. That's widescreen, though. And we'll talk about some horses in a minute. Yes, but that is widescreen. IMAX or 70mm are your, like, primo movie-going options. And I. I saw it in IMAX, and I have to say, like, I was probably too close. I also left not sure that I needed to have the entire three-hour Odyssey experience in IMAX. It didn't alter. Why do I care? I just wonder what Nolan. I think the achievement of it is sort of what. Can I do this? And how can I do it with some of the best actors and movie stars we have? Because, you know, do you know about, like, the IMAX camera, the hassle of the IMAX camera? How enormous it is. Yes, A. But B, it's loud. So, like, it's not a great. It's not a great device for capturing dialogue. So a lot of IMAX sequences have to be looped in post, so to speak, because you're picking up a lot of noise from the camera itself. So the IMAX camera's so noisy that they built the giant blimp. So the blimp goes around the IMAX, and so the blimp is, like, that wide, with the camera sitting in the middle. So if I'm gonna put my face next to the camera to do my scene with Steve, it's gonna be way over here, which means your eyeline is gonna be like that, and you're not gonna be. I'm not gonna be seeing both of your eyes and seeing you. So the mirror system works like this. The camera's here. The big box is here. I'm here, and you're Anne Hathaway. I look into a mirror, which reflects into another mirror, and my full face is in a mirror right next to the camera lens where it needs to be for you, for us to have that intimate view of your face. Christopher Nolan, because, of course, it would be either him or James Cameron or Steven Spielberg, one of those three people would have figured out a way to shoot a movie entirely in IMAX and live-action movie in IMAX. Sorry, James Cameron. And also make sure that you can record your dialogue in situ. I mean, the question of, like, is the medium of IMAX at its highest point, 70 millimeter, is that part of the message here? I want that to sort of also run through what we're describing as, by the way, people are struggling to find the preferred way to watch this because there just aren't that many 70 millimeter IMAX theaters at all. I mean, there are 41 in the world, 25 in the U.S., one in New York, as I said. Wait, we have 25 of the 41? Yeah. Wow. Holy shit. Nine in Canada, three in the U.K., three across Europe, scattered somewhere, one in all of Australia, You found out. I mean, this is eight of them in California, incidentally. Yeah, that's fair. That is fair. Which feels fair. And so what we're really doing is we're talking about, like, okay, it's a true blockbuster. Yes. And the scale of all of this for you as my friend who I think of when I want to determine, like, what is a person with taste's view of something that is meant to be so broadly consumed but also critically acclaimed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For you, is the scale of this interesting? Oh, yeah, for sure. I think that any time you get a director, even one that I'm not crazy about the way I'm not crazy about Christopher Nolan, who is taking the time and care to build a world that he thinks is so, for his purposes, visionary, that, you know, he's got to try to reinvent an old format to express it and realize it. I'm already curious about what is going on here. But having sat through it, through this particular use of an innovation, of a piece of, you know, of technology that has been made to evolve in this part of the 21st century, I don't, I just want to say to the people who can't get to one of the 41 IMAXs. The true 70 millimeter ones, yes. You are fine watching it wherever, wherever you go, get your movies just have it be someplace you trust because you know even i've heard nightmare experiences just from people watching it at theaters where i know i don't want to watch the odyssey i will not name names here today because i still depend on some of these theaters but i don't i'm not going let's let's generally describe what a terrible place to watch the odyssey might be because some of the great places i've seen movies and this is i think key to this whole thing is you really should see this in a theater oh for sure we agree on this sure definitely see it in a theater for all kinds of reasons well i just think of like one of the reasons why i want to talk about this on the show is because i had while watching this at that 70 millimeter imax one of my favorite movie going experiences and so what else is on that list i want to pick your brain about that because for me sure i mean i watched uh my brain immediately goes to watching you uh django unchained in downtown brooklyn oh s-h-i-t okay i see where you're and i'm like something was so essential about watching this with others in this setting man do you have a favorite movie going experience where you're like if i could recreate what it felt like to be in this room watching this how old were you when you saw django it was when it came out so 2012 yeah so that was 14 years ago that was 26 okay i think that if you were alive while tarantino was alive and making movies it's going to be a tarantino movie is my guess because even if you didn't like django and i know a lot of people in my life who did not like django sure they remember the experience of watching it with other people and part of the thrill of the movie i can't speak for the people who hate it because i don't hate it but the i hate django movie in my life is green book and i will tell you i watched green book in a packed theater three times because for a variety of reasons we don't need to get into sure i've seen it i saw it in the theater three times and every time i saw it with an audience that just loved it and that was thrilling to me i loved watching it with people who love that terrible movie tarantino for me is the person who gives you that because you're high you're in suspense and i mean like the movie is making you high you're on a high there's suspense there's comedy there's uncertainty and there's also the permission that you're seeking from others maybe to enjoy the part that you're not sure if you should be enjoying well maybe yes but you're definitely all in whatever this is physically together and the great thing about tarantino is you're mostly on the same page in a lot of cases so i would say the answer to your question is pulp fiction because i think you never forget your first i mean i'd seen reservoir dogs in the movie theater but but pulp fiction was the one where i was like i gotta go see the reservoir dogs guys new movie and it was that and like the first that first sequence where you know amanda plumber and tim roth jump up on the counter and you know hand over all your mother mother everybody be cool this is a robbery any of you f***ing pricks move and i'll execute every mother f***er and they free he freezes the frame on them yes and her line still amanda plumber's line is still going but she is frozen and you're in that surf guitar starts so that is a level of i just gotta chill oh no it's formal invention yeah that tarantino was doing as well as like this comedic but energy and energy this is to be very clear this is not that no but i want to point out that like and maybe this is a mini spoiler but i want to point out that like and maybe this is a mini spoiler but i don't think it is the first words that you see on screen are a disclosure the text on screen says a time of apparent magic and now you're into christopher nolan's version of greek mythology you're not in greece greece you're remembering stuff vaguely from school like okay i kind of know what happens with the cyclops i remember the sheep stuff i remember some parts about penelope you know who's played by anne hathaway his wife who's left behind on you know his f***ing land ithaca his castle ithaca his kingdom his little kingdom um this is how articulate i am about uh what i learned throughout high school but the point being that once you've gotten the terms and conditions about what might happen apparent magic yeah suspension of your disbelief is to come pablo we are so past suspension of disbelief i mean every once in a while i wind up in a reddit thread you wind up in a reddit thread for like a movie the comment sections on just like as a person who works for the new york times you sometimes get a person who just just can't can't just like doesn't have the physical strength to like just like can't put the disbelief on the hook like can't put it in the overhead bin hey can you help me i my my disbelief is too i packed too much no can you help me the disbelief can you pick it up for me they have the extender seat belt on it and it's taken up the most space to the inconvenience of all around you should have checked it i don't even know how you got it on the plane this is my emotional support disbelief i'm not checking this i am legally obligated to complain i needed to hold it the whole flight yeah no that hell how much did you know going in about what you could possibly experience i thought so little about this going in to the point where i was like okay i didn't even really register it and i was like okay i'm going to register that the whole 70 millimeter thing was this big a deal i knew generally frankly about the discourse on my twitter feed okay about how mad people were about casting oh lord i didn't even want to indulge that but go on but it's just the odyssey is woke i'm sorry mfs this is also a movie with giant cyclopses i did not read it before i saw this movie but i've read it a couple of times and i'm not going to read it again i'm not going to read it again and um you know this is like he can do whatever he wants with this everybody here on delta airlines needs to know that helen of troy needs to be white lupita nyango cannot play her not only can academy award winner and truly one of earth's most stunning births of all time by any golden symmetry mathematical are we even just not even the science the science like science supports this yes even a eugenicist would be like damn i can't do nothing about her i i see you guys got a point i love knowing what upsets us about adaptation and the idea that you know i mean why is burnthal here you want to complain about a jew being in this thing like what are we doing a new york a new york accent a big old like pseudo pacino like jew ah come on what are we doing right john leguizamo john leguizamo is literally marlon brando as like a blind greek man he's great though he is great he's really good can i can i i feel like we have a choice right now as people talking about this doing our own uh adaptation like hurting a cat no but it's but it's like should we say whether you liked it or not i i think it's fine i didn't love it i think the the christopher nolan movie going experience i used to call him a fraud right i used to say i love this you think you think you're deep inadvertently invited the guy who called the pulitzer prize winner excuse me who called christopher nolan a fraud i've totally overlooked this part of your oeuvre but please i did not mean to interrupt i i i just never believed him as in terms of the themes and sometimes when you get an idea the ideas i just because they're not successfully or or fulfillingly at least for me explored enough and you know a smart person can you do the work of connecting something like what is happening in his version of the odyssey to other depictions of war and war as we've experienced it you know in the last three thousand years and i'm not saying that those things are not there these ideas some of them are very quite obvious i've only seen it once but i i think that you know my problems with christopher nolan are very present in this movie i mean like my actual makes him frustrating as a filmmaker who makes movies about people. But they're not about people, right? They're about an idea. But they're never really about an idea. They're about a theme. We reach concept. We reach themes. But we don't ever really get psychologies, sexualities. You know, because there's a version of The Odyssey that is just, you know, we are watching Penelope really make some choices. We're watching Odysseus make some choices. I mean, I'm sorry, Circe, Calypso. Yeah. I don't know what we're, we're not going to take any, we're really not going to take any sex risks here. I was going to say. At all, Mr. Nolan. I have a feeling that Wesley is going to point out how little f***ing there was in this adaptation of The Odyssey. I guess my reputation precedes me. But I should say, so again, Matt Damon as Odysseus, when he shows up on these movies. Magical Islands, and he encounters these women who in lore, and this is not even wish casting, it's literally what f***ing Homer wrote. Yeah, well, I mean. I mean, it's, allegedly quote unquote yeah collectively through the concept the theme of homer put down through an oral tradition that carries through 2026 um odysseus is supposed to have sex with all these people very graphically and in this case we're fairly neutered actually yeah i mean the day took the bob barker approach make sure you have your pet spayed and neutered we'll see you tomorrow um i you know but that didn't bother me too much because i understand the world that i'm going into i definitely enjoy the experience of watching it i think that there are a lot of there are a lot of wonderful moments in this film i was impressed that for a movie where and this is true in nolan because i watched one two three four i watched four nolans in the like before i watched four nolans in the like before before and after i watched the odyssey for the first time it is not the journey that appeals to him although he has been making the odyssey the entire time christopher nolan every movie is about a man trying to get somewhere back to himself who's alienated back to earth his family and is grappling with what he has done yes and i guess something that i'd never considered until this movie was just how much his characters speak expositionally it works in this movie this is the first time it it's made sense right because it's actually part of the premise yes exactly spoken oral tradition but i also think that one of the draws for him is how like what are some ways in which i can tell this story i can use a device that i love using i don't even know that he knows he's using it but like let's have odysseus talk to calypso about things that happened that transpired before he arrived on her island yes um and then we're going to see it and then we're going to see it i don't know it's just it's such a it's such a great use of what to me is a tick in a filmmaker's i love that i love that you're pointing this out um i should say that i am not here to convince you to love this film as much as i loved it oh please speak but i adore christopher nolan for the very reason that you have identified as his tick which is not the exposition but i think of him as an architect as an engineer a thousand percent and so the the reliance on device yes is to me like it's always a question of how is he gonna end this thing and how is he gonna make it so that that ending catches you by surprise and makes you feel something and makes you think that was clever and admittedly those are all pretty inhuman standards of success yes yes but they are feats of engineering to me and i love how consistently he tries and succeeds to make his ending leave the sound in your head where you're like you got me again well say more about that because i mean you know for me i find his endings i kind of roll my eyes a little bit because you know we spent all this time here and really this is just about a this is about a guy who misses his daddy and feels it's always about daddy is such an issue for him right like inception really just annoyed me because we find out that the whole point of this thing was this old this old money bags yeah um but i you know because also we know we know where you got this sir it's you didn't you could you could not have it be a sled but so exactly so the whole the whole rose budding of of the payoff um this is the inception that we're talking about or at least i'm talking about yeah yeah but it's but it's also but it happens it recurs it's how do you how do you catch people at the end in a way that makes you think i should have seen it it was there the whole time and now it's clicking you like that so i am i mean i don't know but but as as somebody who appreciates story i'm always i fetishize endings often as i have learned over the years at the expense of character development at the expense of the the humanity of even the characters who are really you know uh wheel spinning to get us to that last reveal and so for this i should say that like we all know how the odyssey generally ends that's great of you to think that proceed he gets he gets back oh oh that's what you mean sure yeah he's back home i'm sorry i thought you meant the but but the film yeah the film like of course the the theme of it the the big takeaway which is funny to say out loud because it is now that i see through your lens not the most original insight is that people who kill other people should probably feel guilty about it uh-huh yeah but when you enter the world of apparent magic and you go through and you watch him and he gets us the audience broadly speaking the royal we i like where you're going to root for odysseus only to realize far too late that wait a minute he's he's war criming yeah we're the bad guys i mean for me i would have liked more of that because it's too subtle in the movie one of the ingenious things about the casting is that it's too subtle in the movie is that this very astute observation that you have perceived in this in nolan's text is completely overridden by ingenious casting he gets away with a lot of these choices because it's such shrewd casting like you'll forgive this movie a lot because we've been with matt damon for like 30 years matt damon's the oldest person in this movie by the way crazy crazy and he means something to us and what he does not mean if this was michael douglas playing playing odysseus we'd have a different story running in jamie fox i think the theme though that that nolan is getting at is is in communication with the ants and the theme is you know that meme this is this is this is a terrible way to to make a point that i hope has some level of insight but you know that meme from euphoria where they're watching the play and the thing and it's like wait a minute this f***ing play is about us yeah that's what i felt watching this where it was like surprise uh the reason that we can't have nice things anymore as a civilization is because the thing we valorized the trojan war the trojan horse was both genius and also the breaking of what has been framed in this film as zeus's law but is fundamentally the christian principle of do unto others do unto others right unto others jesus was a beggar right that whole notion and in our celebration of that we have caused the downfall of our own civilization and infected everyone who perpetrated the those war crimes with fundamentally a ptsd which would have been more apparent from the start if the setting was not a time of apparent magic but vietnam oh man i just wish the movie had more thoroughly excavated and explored that i'm gonna see it again and i think you know i think my second viewing is probably going to focus a lot more on what some of these actors are doing lupita nyong'o is playing helena troy and clython mestra and her twin sister i don't i don't i don't but not really i mean nolan is clearly making some choices here with these texts you know importing this woman from from the iliad yeah and then giving her a twin that's really just her very complicated sister um there are choices being made here i wish one of the choices was like give lupita 15 minutes just 15 literally a second line i should point out that one of the funny things about people being like helen of troy can't be black is that like and this is a through line in all of these sort of like allegedly woke casting choices lupita nyong'o is essentially a possession she's an object in this film there is no interiority yes she is effectively a captured creature that serves this larger masculine plot line yes yeah it's not a plot line it's not a plot line it's not a plot line so the idea of like you cast a black woman to do that i'm like there's a world in which the opposite argument is being made of like how dare you cast lupita nyong'o to play this role pablo i give that argument 15 more minutes until the gates go up and by the way i mean parallel parallel argument right elliott page trans actor plays uh sinan who is in the film the paragonist of the weak soldier i have no problem with the way people are used in this film oh yeah i'm just pointing out that there's another way to argue the opposite. Right, right, right. But I'm ready for the trans community comments about, I just want to hear the conversation about Sinan because I think this character is really interesting and, you know, he dies, he's the first death. Yes. Right? And I'm like, oh my, I don't get to see Elliot Page do much of anything. So this is the question I have for you. For you, the consistent lack of character development. Yes. Which, admittedly, now that you put it like this, I had underweighted in my viewing and I am struggling to spin in a positive direction. Well, I wonder what I'm going to enjoy about it the second time I watch it is really my question. But you sort of see in bursts these characters come to life and in the case of Sinan, it's in literal the afterlife in which they finally get to be interesting, really, or vocalize their own interiority but that's a deal breaker for you. Character development as a feature of cinema. This is a great question. No, because I also believe that there is a way to be the kind of artist that you like Christopher Nolan for being, right? I love your and appreciate and understand your love of him as an engineer and architect. And that was a memento that radicalized me to him and I was just like, oh. I mean, and that is a movie where you come to understand, hey, the movies do not have to go from point A to point B to every other chronological spot on the spectrum. You can skip letters. He's telling you in the opening minutes, his movie is not going to go, it's going to go, and people are going to be like, oh. But he's also not going to go, not James Cameron, who can also be like, okay, here's what I'm about to do. You're about to spend three hours with, I'm going to tell you in the first 10 minutes, I am sinking this boat. I'm going to show you how I'm going to sink the boat. Here's the boat. Here is actually the boat. And just zoop. Here's how the Titanic sank. And then two and a half hours pass and you're like, oh my God, this boat is going to, he's going to do it. He's not quite to me, the magician, that James Cameron is in terms of making you forget that something wild is about to happen or you're seeing something you've never seen before, in part because the people are just pieces on a board to him. This is, I think, the fairest criticism of Christopher Nolan is that the main character in a Christopher Nolan film is Christopher Nolan. Sure. Yeah. Like marveling at like, even the whole notion of this is an experience that, that you must appreciate in the way that I am basically incentivizing you, forcing you even to consume is about the auteur. Yeah. And even that is enough for me. You know, even that is enough for me. I think that like one of the virtues of this movie really is the thing that's a, that's a vice as far as, or like a weakness for me in the other movies, which is all the, all the expository talking to me here is about the power of the story itself. There's real belief in the power of these assorted people telling each other stories of how what happened happened. Right. Right. The myth within the myth, the myth making within the myth making is a huge part of the Odyssey as a Homeric text and as a Nolanistic text. Yes. Yes. And it, that part works for me here. I like the Dark Knight. The Dark Knight really works for me. I think parts of the, the, what's the third Batman movie of his? The Dark Knight Rises. Dark Knight Rises. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I loved all the Catwoman stuff in that. Whatever Anne Hathaway is doing in that movie. Superhero fan of Catwoman. Bane is, Bane is also, the use of Bane is simultaneously ridiculous. And like it's, it's, that is a scary character. Like it gets me viscerally what Nolan and Tom already come up with for Bane in that movie. But Dunkirk was the movie where I was like, okay, this guy is a classicist. He really has only ever wanted to be making old Hollywood genre movies, right? And I just feel like this is the truest depiction of his soul, which is I've got a bunch of toys that make a kind of historical sense and I can just play with them. Not quite ad nauseum because I'm dealing with a real historical event here. I can play by history's rules and use my own personal style. So that movie, maybe it worked for you, maybe it didn't. I don't know. I enjoyed Dunkirk. I loved that his signature formal ideas with respect to time and space are operating full steam ahead in Dunkirk. I love that. I love the way that he takes that mode of expression and applies it to the Odyssey, where for more than two hours, you've got one, two, three, four, maybe four different moments in time operating, you know, he's juggling these four time zones. And you're involved in all of them. I love that. I love the engineering and problem solving and puzzle making aspect of him. It does cost you something as a moviegoer. It really depends case by case whether it was enough for me to have enjoyed it when I don't get what I, some other things, I want because the priorities here are really involving the puzzle. You know, again, I am the sort of person who, until quite recently, had seen everything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Okay. And then. Until quite recently. That's a whole other conversation. I think it was like the, it was the whole multiverse saga where I was like, there are no stakes. Nothing matters. There are no stakes. Nothing matters. There are no stakes. And that was familiar to me from comic book fandom, where it's like, you've run out of ways to create stakes because. I like this. You've broken all of the, again, our disbelief and the suspension they're in, we have, we have, we have maxed out. Like, we can't, I can't believe that this matters to anyone anymore. And that was my superhero cinematic universe experience. Okay. And so this, part of it was like, how is Christopher Nolan going to bring to life the Cyclops? How is he going to bring to life all of these, all of these apparent magical creatures and villains and horror, figures from horror, it turns out, as he approached Cersei's island. And how you do that, I was like, I want to know how Christopher Nolan tackles these. And I found it all quite satisfying. The sound design, the whole, like, close encounters-ness of the Cyclops. Yeah. The alien noise. It's like, drilling into you. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I love that. I mean, there's some real great choices here. I love when the priorities of the Homeric text, the Nolan text, and the Matt Damon text completely align. There are a couple just real, there's a great moment, you know, during the sirens call when they're on the ship. I love this scene. And this is just every Matt, like a really great Matt Damon movie-going experience. It involves something that I describe as classic Damon. And here, it's when he, when all the men have sort of put wax in their ears to avoid the sirens call so they don't crash the ship or, you know, all die because they've gone to try to jump in the ocean to have sex with these ladies. Damon's like, I want to be the one who survives their call. By the way, when I watched that sequence, I was like, you're a movie critic who's writing down, like, lines that, like, you're gonna put into, into, into, into the paper record. Yeah, I'm just gonna. What I was doing was being like, oh, this Asian guy that people are mad at. He's the first to go! He's red-shirted! I am him for Halloween. I'm gonna wear this helmet. I'm gonna be the Asian guy everyone's mad at for being Greek who takes the wax out of his ears and runs towards the ocean. He's like, I'm getting in. I am f***ing these white women. And that's, if that's how this ends, I'm cool. It's funny because we know that guy. What's that? That's an actor we know. Yes, Will Yun Lee. Ah! Yeah, I mean. Pardon me, Will, for being, uh, your, your, your Halloween costume. Sorry to see him go because, not that this movie needs all the beauty he can get, but, like, you're just sorry to see a hot person leave the movie. A hot multiracial, a rainbow coalition of Greeks. I think one of the reasons that this is gonna be such a big hit is that people like me are gonna go back to it and be like, okay, change my mind. Change my mind. Expand my mind. What did I miss? You know, did I miss, did I miss something? The thing about Nolan is, I don't know. really ever think i missed anything the question is did i understand what i saw the first time well i think that's a fascinating way to judge a movie like is it the job of the auteur to communicate oh no no i don't know well again to communicate with with with the audience such that they get what you're going oh sure uh does the puzzle need to be solved by the audience member in order for it to have worked. I actually, a practice that I've gotten now as I watch these movies and I'm like, Wesley, write the plot down. Like just write, like write in your notebook what the plot of, like if you were reviewing this, how would you describe the plot of this thing? And that's one question. But then the other question is like, what does the plot mean, say, or speak to or allude to? Sometimes it is the filmmaker's fault for being unclear. And then sometimes, you know, you know, the way I know with a movie like Oppenheimer, like where do I begin to dislike it? And that's a movie that is such a, for me, confused coalition of theme, idea, and vision, right? Because when you're doing a movie, a movie biography, how do we get these visions? If we're talking about, you know, Robert Oppenheimer, how do we get his vision to correspond to Nolan's vision? I don't think you can do Oppenheimer with the text, A Time of Apparent Magic. I don't think you have the same license for a nonfiction adaptation. But that is the problem with Oppenheimer, right? And I didn't, frankly, I didn't love Oppenheimer. Well, there is apparent magic. But there also- It's just a moral atrocity. And by the way, that is also in this. The magic being the moral atrocity. And part of what, you know, what you're describing, and you mentioned Reddit before, it brings it all together for me. Because what Christopher Nolan does is make movies that compel you to not only show up in the IMAX theater that he has prescribed for you- Yes, you want to run- He sends you to Reddit. Run, tell him. Run, tell him. He sends you to message board threads that are pointing out all the things you missed because everyone- Everyone. Everyone becomes Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. Do you like that experience? I have come to appreciate that I am one of these people that will go, and I don't do this literally for escape rooms, but I feel like I am a puzzle solver when I'm watching Christopher Nolan. And that has been what stuck with me. Did I appreciate what the puzzle was? Did I catch all of the things, the breadcrumbs he dropped? And also, I think this is the thing that I was feeling towards the end when I'm watching Will Hunting, grappled with post-traumatic stress disorder, was this sort of reveal of the intelligence that has historically been ascribed to Odysseus as being this clever trickster. His intelligence in the climax of this film is revealed to be not the strategic deviousness of like, ooh, the guy who came up with the Trojan horse because that part is actually kind of like underplayed. Yes. You're not really getting- You're not really getting like the blackboard in which he's writing all the plans out. There's a whole other book for y'all out there that'll explain how the Trojan horse- That's right. How he comes up with that plot. That's not in this. But what is, is the reveal, so to speak, that Odysseus' real intelligence was all along the self-awareness he had along the way. Yeah. And it was guilt. It was this relatably Catholic guilt around, oh, no, I can't. I am f***ed up by how I've treated others. And that self-awareness ends up being the thing of like, oh man, that's what, he was ahead of us on that. The audience, for me, he was ahead of me on that. Nolan. Nolan was. And I was like, oh yeah, I should have seen that earlier. So here's the question at the end, Wesley. Okay. All right. As we try to, as the foremost movie critic- I like guilt though. I'm going to sit with guilt. Who has called previously Christopher Nolan, my favorite director, I think, quote unquote, a fraud. But I don't feel that way anymore. Well, that's the question. Is, did this film do anything? If we're going to consider him the main character of this film, what does this do for your estimation of his work? I love that this movie is what it, what it, what its popularity. And, you know, I knew we've known, because we now live in an age where there's one or two movies a year that we are told as moviegoers are going to be the movies that conquer the box office. That save movies. Right, right, right. I mean, in this, in Christopher Nolan's case, it's a Christopher Nolan movie, like, shocker. But I. I kind of love, as a person who loves storytelling, Nolan has never, he might be a virgin, right? He might only see the world according to whether or not it can be diagrammed. He might not really even have left the house to buy a coffee on his own in 20 years. But he can make a movie that is operating according to a very complicated formal design that someone will give him 200, or, you know, some company will give him a quarter of a billion dollars to make. And we, the first weekend it comes out, will erase the $250 million debt that this, or gamble that this studio has taken, on this man. And, you know, plus additional marketing costs, which I'm sure this movie will make up next weekend. I love that he has taken this old-ass, ancient-ass, classics-oriented-ass, you know, great text. And he has got us all on his timelines. He has got us all understanding his visual language. I think that people like you, the Nolan fans, are also conversant in a particular kind of cinema that is, it makes me so happy that it exists. I don't need to like this man's movies. I don't need for him to be my favorite filmmaker to appreciate the importance of what it means to get us feeling like we are watching something that really is formally complicated. I just wish there were more, going on in the complication, than what is actually happening. But sometimes, I'm here for the math. I'm here for the math. Oh, no! The most devastating dismount from Wesley Morris. I mean, I'm here for the math is the least romantic, least, ugh. But where's the romance here? I mean, what I'm hearing you say at the end here, if I may allude to the way we started in Christopher Nolan fashion, Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. When you were talking about that scene in Pulp Fiction, you know, someone's pointing a gun at you and saying, if you f***ing pricks move, I'm going to execute every last one of you. And you're like, if I'm going to have to sit here, at least, why don't you have a little more sex, a little more skin, a little more heart, a little more human stuff? And instead, it's just like, I'm hearing you say, it's just like, this is a whole, this is a whole lot of homework. Yeah, but for some people, the homework is the sex. And this is the most devastating criticism that has ever been made of me. Wesley Morris, I hate and love you. Thank you for cutting to the core of what me and this show apparently has been all along. Oh, I don't believe that. Not as a regular listener of the show, I definitely don't believe that. Thanks for having me. I'll see you on Reddit. Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tuminello. Studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bursik, digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, theme song, as always, is by John Bravo. And we'll talk to you next time. you