Why is Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey full of puppets?

The Cyclops in the Odyssey is a huge animatronic figure. The Trojan Horse was built in reality. Circe’s transformations are mostly achieved with prosthetics, rubber and mechanical tricks. Christopher Nolan chose to adapt one of the most fantastical epic poems in history, relying as little as possible on digital effects. This is neither a nostalgic whim nor an exercise in virtuosity; it is the culmination of a trend in which practical special effects have returned as a design choice in contemporary blockbusters.

In 2015, when Disney released The Force Awakens — the first new film in the Star Wars saga in over ten years — one of J. J. Abrams's most surprising decisions was to use practical special effects for the aliens. By that point, computer graphics had already reached an impressive level of photorealism at relatively accessible costs. Digital effects had become so widespread that they had become standardised: flawless, but increasingly devoid of personality. Abrams used puppets, prosthetics and rubber to give the film a more evocative aesthetic. Since then, this approach has become much more than a nod to the past.

It was one of the first and most significant acts of a return to practical special effects in high-budget filmmaking. This has not halted the continuous development of digital visual effects, of course. An increasing number of films that aspire to high box-office takings but also have intellectual ambitions choose to use computers only for the impossible and do everything else analogically. The reason is neither practical nor economic: it is simpler to use digital technology, and restarting an analogue production chain that has been dormant for decades would be expensive. If anything, it is aesthetic. The new standard of intellectual blockbuster cinema is that practical design, which is a victim of the limitations of the physical world and can only imagine what is feasible and transportable.

The result is that, at the height of this trend, Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is a film that tells a fantastic story in the most analogue way possible. The fantasy scenes were shot on location (not in production studios with green screens), the monsters are giant robots or men in masks, and digital effects were used to enhance the real effects, make them look more realistic, and for the usual background touch-ups and minor improvements. Everything that the viewer will never notice is done digitally, while everything in the foreground that will be patently false is done analogically.

Years ago, Michel Gondry was the first to discover an analogue aesthetic in the digital era, which has had a tremendously influential impact. From the music videos of the 1990s to the films of the 2000s, he has always used digital effects invisibly so as not to reveal the artifice to the viewer, using practical effects instead to make the art of design the focus. This is the opposite of a magician, who always shows the strangest and most daring trick to hide the simple one. Today's blockbusters cannot afford this kind of radicalism, but they have borrowed an idea from that experience that has become a new aesthetic of old tricks.

This idea of design influences the final outcome of the entire film; it is not an addition, but rather a decision made at an early stage that alters the result. In order to depict something fantastic using analogue methods, we must invent visual techniques and solutions that did not previously exist, thereby altering the production process and consequently the film itself. Of course, many tricks have always been the same — those from the silent era, for example — but others involving design cannot be taken from the past.

They no longer work. We cannot imagine monsters or transformations as we did decades ago because they no longer correspond to our taste and would appear kitsch. However, it is not possible to stray too far from digital perfection, otherwise the fictional pact with the viewer is broken. We need new techniques and ideas that are plausible. These can only produce a new and different result that strikes the viewer differently.

In The Odyssey, the programme's manifesto is encapsulated in the scene where the sorceress Circe transforms men into pigs. This is a type of magic or transformation that has been reinvented completely. If it had been done with digital effects, it would have been fully visible and clearly shown. Instead, Nolan conceals it somewhat, as they used to do, revealing only certain details and making it imperfect to prevent it from looking too artificial. We see the sorceress manipulating the bodies with her hands, massaging faces, heads and arms until they are deformed and become pig-like.

Therefore, at every stage of the transformation, everything is imperfect because it is being manipulated and is still in the process of stretching and swelling. It is like the creation of a clay vase. The pieces of rubber layered on the actors’ bodies are not perfect, but that is fine because we are watching a manual process. In the story's fiction, even magic itself becomes a matter of craftsmanship, arriving not with a spell or a gesture, but by hand. This makes it a true manifesto. Rather than being hidden, imperfection is accepted and brought to the fore in an analogue triumph.

This new aesthetic does not reject technology, of course; on the contrary, it embraces it, hiding it and emphasising manual labour. Films present themselves as labour machines, showcasing materials, craftsmanship, and the art of carving and textiles as much as the engineering of the animatronics. The trickery and inventiveness that, in 1950s blockbusters, was used to distract the viewer and break 'the magic of cinema', is now used as elaborate scenography to attract them.

Analogue manufacturing is a marketing tool, sold as a good reason to buy a ticket — tangible proof that this film was a major undertaking and therefore worth seeing in cinemas. It cost a lot, and the money was not invisibly given to visual effects studios who worked hard for months to create perfect spaceships without viewers perceiving the amount of work that went into them. Instead, the money was visible, spent on rubber and artisanal ideas.

This aesthetic satisfies the spectator-producer, a type of viewer who is increasingly gaining ground and who is aware of how films are made and what happened during the production of the film they are about to see. They know or think they know about the industrial issues of cinema, the deals between directors and production companies, and all the working methods.

The viewer must first be satisfied on an informational level, with notions and a narrative about the production before even the plot. They then find satisfaction in a story that displays all the disclosed information: here is the mechanical Cyclops, whose feet and hands move poorly up close, like the King Kong of 1976; here is the open sea in all its grandeur; here is the cave echo and the transformation of men into pigs, clearly done using analogue techniques.

This aesthetic quickly became a pose and then a commercial strategy, of course, but behind it lies a precise concept of cinema that never died, merely fell asleep. It is a concept that Werner Herzog has always embraced and one that Quentin Tarantino has kept alive. According to this concept, the strength of a film lies in the fact that certain things were actually done on set. This means acting scenes as faithfully as possible to the dialogue, rehearsing them in full as much as possible and trying to replicate what happens in the story on set. American authors do it, as do J. J. Abrams and Tom Cruise when he flaunts his dangerous stunts in the promotion of his films. This allows viewers to enjoy the films as both spectators and spectator-producers, i.e. they are aware of how the films were made and how much of it is real.

ForThe Odyssey , a 12-metre-high, 4-tonne horse was built without digital aid. A 6-metre-tall animatronic monster was created to play the Cyclops using technology that allows puppets to be remote-controlled, and its movements were then improved digitally. Nolan took Matt Damon and the crew into caves in Greece and onto the beaches of the Aegadian and Aeolian islands. They actually filmed in the open sea. The fire is real fire and the water is real water. The result is that the film, which aims to resemble nothing else and partially succeeds, achieves this not only thanks to this, but precisely because of it.

Featured image: The Odyssey , Christopher Nolan, Odysee, 2026; Courtesy of Universal Pictures