Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited epic adventure film The Odyssey opens this weekend, and I won’t be there to see it because the IMAX theater near me is already sold out except for those really terrible seats way down in front.
Which is fine, really: at a running time of two hours and 53 minutes, I’m much more likely to be thinking about how badly I need to pee than focusing on Matt Damon’s adventures.
Besides, I’ve just gotten a sneak peak of the story of The Odyssey by playing the 2012 point-and-click adventure game The Odyssey, a mobile game developed by Crazysoft (they’re crazy, you guys!) that was ported to Steam in 2016.
Hoping for a comparable cinematic experience, I played it for the exact running time of the movie: two hours and 53 minutes. If the film follows the game’s blueprint—and I have no reason to believe it won’t—here’s exactly how the movie will go. I just saved you like $25. You’re welcome.
Hour one: Matt Damon tries to operate a loom
The poem, the game, and presumably the Nolan film all begin the same way: Odysseus is held captive on Calypso’s island, but Hermes shows up and is like, hey, Cal, he’s not into you so maybe just let him go? My first task in the adventure game is to build a raft to escape the island, something that Odysseus has apparently not even contemplated before because he has to ask Calypso for step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
And it’s easier said than done. If the movie is like the game, Matt Damon will wander back and forth between Calypso’s small cave and the beach outside, occasionally picking up a handful of mud or touching a vase, staring intently at everything and wondering why simple tasks, like using an axe to chop down a tree, simply don’t work.
This game is the definition of a pixel hunt: it’s extremely difficult to tell what is a clickable item and what isn’t. For example, the reason I can’t cut down the tree with the axe is because I haven’t gotten a branch from the tree yet, and that branch takes me, no lie, several minutes of clicking every square inch of that tree just to locate. It does not stand out from the rest of the tree at all.
This is not the only time in the next three hours this will happen.
The most frustrating thing for my impatient little Matt Damon is the part that seems like it should be easy. I need to weave a sail on Calypso’s loom, and before asking Calypso how to do it, I just start clicking on the various handles and pedals of the loom, hoping that will work. It doesn’t, so I ask Calypso for help, and she tells me only one handle and pedal needs to be pressed, though she won’t say which.
Since I stupidly already monkeyed around with it, I’m not sure which state the pedals and handles are in, pressed or not pressed, so with a deep sigh Matt Damon methodically tries every single combination of them before finally stumbling on the solution. This is similar to how Matt Damon will soon use every item in his inventory, including a handful of mud, on every single other item on the screen, including himself and Calypso.
Even when Matt Damon finishes the sail, he’s stumped for several more minutes because he needs two long, sturdy pieces of wood for his raft, and can’t find them anywhere despite having (finally) leveled a forest’s worth of trees with his axe. That’s because he needs to break pieces of wood off the loom itself. I know Calypso has kept him prisoner for years, but it still seems rude to bust up her only loom before peacing out.
Hour two: Matt Damon swears a lot while trying to identify constellations
Let me give you a hypothetical. You’re on a tiny raft. Your rudder has broken. You’re Matt Damon. You ask a god for help and they magically summon a fish into your empty food bowl.
What do you do with that fish? Name the first 50 things that come to mind.
Was any of them “throw the fish into the ocean?” No? Why, because it would be completely nuts to throw away the life-sustaining gift of food a god just broke the laws of the universe to deliver to you?
That’s the solution. Throwing the fish away summons a talking bird who gives Matt Damon 12 statuettes with images carved on them, and to figure out which way to sail, Matt Damon has to identify 12 constellations in the sky and match them to the statuettes.
Fine. Easy. Click on the constellations to get a bit of info about them, click on the statuettes to do the same, then take a statuette and use it to click on the correlating constellation. Right? WRONG. WRONG, MATT DAMON.
It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work! I take each of the 12 statuettes and click on each of the 12 constellations and nothing freakin’ happens. I click and click and click.
And then I click one of the statuettes against the raft, just because there was literally nothing else to do. That worked.
“Welldone,” [sic] the game said. “You rub the statuette on the trunk of your raft and symbols and illustrations appear on it.”
No one told Matt Damon that rubbing rocks on his raft was part of the puzzle. No one, not the talking bird, not Calypso, not the stupid fish I threw in the stupid ocean, gave Matt Damon even an inkling that might be part of it. And it’s not even necessary! I could already tell which statuette and constellation was Orion and Zeus and Cancer and all the rest! Matt Damon is furious.
Hour three: Matt Damon makes tea
Matt Damon is in a black mood when he’s shipwrecked by Poseidon and wakes up half-naked under a bush near two women playing with a ball near a river. The game tells him he can’t stand up: the women might see his unclothed body! So what does he do? He lies there clicking on everything in the world before discovering he can pick up stones and throw them at the women’s ball, knocking it into the river, at which point he stands up and they can see his unclothed body.
That’s a lot of clicking for Matt Damon to discover how to do the thing he was told he can’t do.
To win the women’s trust so they’ll give him clothing, he agrees to get the ball he just knocked into the river, and also to fix their broken wagon wheel. At least the wagon wheel makes a bit of sense: take the iron wheel from the wagon, heat it in a fire, and melt an iron blade to fix the gap in the wheel. (I said it made a bit of sense.) Affixing the wheel to the wagon means finding the smallest stone ever hiding on a bridge.
Could you have spotted it if I hadn’t told you it was on the bridge?
Inside the city, Matt Damon learns he needs to make tea so Athena can turn him invisible to sneak him in to see the King, and I get most of the way there: I find a bowl and a mint leaf, I start a fire, but I can’t brew the tea without making the fire hotter by using some bellows that a soldier won’t let me have.
At this point Matt Damon is up to here with this shit and pulls out a scroll some might call “a walkthrough” to discover the solution: he has to pick up a piece of a wood, find a knife under it, cut a rope hanging on a wall, tie the rope to the trident on a statue of Poseidon, pull the rope that makes the trident move, which makes the soldier think a miracle is taking place, which lets Matt Damon steal the bellows while the soldier is distracted.
Please enjoy watching Matt Damon eventually figure out how a loom works
Of course. It’s such an intuitive solution, because statues always have moving parts and soldiers historically can’t see ropes!
Athena turns me invisible by surrounding me with mist, which I suppose counts as invisibility, but whoops! Two hours and 53 minutes have elapsed in the game, so yeah, the movie is over. (Judging from the length of the walkthrough I used, I’m about a third of the way through the game, though one Steam reviewer played it for more than 50 hours—and doesn’t recommend it.)
If you go see The Odyssey this weekend, please enjoy watching Matt Damon eventually figure out how a loom works, get furious at stars, and make tea. Sounds like an Oscar-winner to me.
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