Eye of the Giant: Cinema’s Cyclops Problem

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is so stuffed with technical triumphs that singling out one feels a little like complimenting Poseidon on his puddles. The world’s largest operational Viking ship replica! The first film photographed entirely on IMAX! A strapping, 3.5‑tonne stallion of a Trojan Horse! All remarkable. All very Nolan. But his most unlikely filmmaking feat? Making the Cyclops feel real.

Polyphemus has had a tough time of it – especially on the big screen. A bit of dodgy design here, some cut-rate CGI there. He needs to look impossible, yet believable. Sadly, most of the time, the one-eyed giant ends up tumbling out of his cave and straight into the uncanny valley. Nolan, however, practically and predictably approached the classic monster a little differently, taking a sideways look at Cyclops design – literally.

But before we get to that, we must survey the ghastly graveyard of Cyclopes that came before Nolan, because cinema has produced some howlers. Many of the worst offenders, admittedly, don’t even bear the Polyphemus name. Among them, Tyson, the half-brother of Percy Jackson, who looks like a bad Photoshop job in every adaptation of the book series, and Rell, the plasticine-faced fiasco from 1983 sci-fi fantasy curio Krull.

Even bigger budget efforts, such as Wrath of the Titans, struggled with the challenge. For that film’s Cyclopes, visual effects studio Framestore used performance capture of former rugby player Martin Bayfield to nail the physicality. ​“But, when studying human eyes, it became immediately apparent that they don’t work as singular entities,” says Mark Wilson, Framestore’s global head of CG. ​“Early on, we experimented by taking videos of our faces and merging the eyes together. Although the results were quite horrific, they were very informative regarding structural changes. But fitting the nose around the eye was tricky, as there was nowhere for the bridge to go.”

“The further the design moves away from human eyes, the more creative freedom you have with movement and performance,” Wilson adds. The trade-off, however, is that the more abstract a monster becomes, the harder it is for audiences to connect with it. Such was the issue faced by Olympus, a one-and-done Syfy series from 2015. Its Polyphemus had a single eye that emerged from the monster’s mouth – a fairly effective design, but one that looked more extraterrestrial than mythological, and lacked the ability to convey any expression or emotion.

For BBC’s Atlantis, Vine FX got much closer. Rather than sticking a solitary eye onto an otherwise human face, Matt McKinney and his team tried a variety of designs. ​“With a normal nose in place,” he says, ​“the creature looked inherently comical.”