I thought Nolan’s Odyssey was an epic bore. If you want Greek myths brought to life, try the thrill of opera!

For me, the most astonishing thing about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is its barnstorming popularity. I found this cinematic epic for the ages visually bloodless, expressively monotonous and very, very long. Mind you, it is good to know that Nolan thinks that war is, on balance, you know, once you really think about it, probably a bad idea. The music, too, was disappointing. If I were Nolan, I’d have asked Mica Levi to score The Odyssey. Ludwig Göransson could have surely done more to make a soundworld of genuine strangeness, but all he could manage is a falling tritone and then a descending fifth on the two reeds and pipes of a recreated aulos, which he uses as a melancholy leitmotif in all-too-conventional Hollywood fashion. (The aulos is beautifully played by Callum Armstrong on the soundtrack, at least.) The best sounds in the film come in the scene with Samantha Morton’s Circe, in which the crew’s gluttony is horrorshow ASMR: surround-sound mastication that threatens to devour the audience. Millions of people around the world are sitting through three hours of this monumental mythoverse, without so much as an interval to break up the monotony. And this gives me hope for another artform that thrives on its hubris and excessive self-importance: opera! There is no continuous sit in the entire operatic canon that’s as long or demanding as the three hours of The Odyssey (the most even Wagner asks in a single session is the two-and-a-half hours of Das Rheingold). I promise you, if you can make it through Robert Pattinson’s one-note scowl for 180 minutes, you are well-prepared for the demands, longueurs and joys of opera. Opera, like film, has often turned to tales of ancient Greece for inspiration: here are a few highlights in which I guarantee the music’s better, the storytelling more compelling, and the emotional experience more involving than Nolan’s film. And when appropriate, there are intervals, too! Strauss: Elektra Richard Strauss’s savagely dramatic o…