PLOT: Odysseus (Matt Damon), reeling from a decade fighting the bloody and endless Trojan War, begins the long journey home, only to find the gods themselves conspiring against him.
REVIEW: Every Christopher Nolan movie is an event, but even as far as his endlessly debated work goes, the build-up to The Odyssey has been exhausting. Rarely has a movie ever been as exhaustively picked apart even before it came out, with every trailer and piece of new footage being finely dissected. Love him or hate him, no one inspires more chatter among audiences than Nolan, with him perhaps the only director who could turn a movie about the father of the atomic bomb into a billion-dollar blockbuster. But, even by Nolan’s own standards, The Odyssey is a giant, with him tackling Homer’s ancient Greek epic, albeit through a controversially contemporary lens, with color-blind casting and modern vernacular.
Many may have already made their minds up about whether or not they’ll like this without even seeing it, but if you’re willing to go along for the journey, you’ll realize that Nolan has crafted perhaps his most ambitious film to date. It’s A LOT of movie, and one that I’ll fully admit may take more than one viewing to fully appreciate—something that has been the case for several of his films. Yet, it can’t be denied that The Odyssey contains some of the most dazzling filmmaking in recent memory, with certain set pieces ranking among the finest of his career.
But does it all hold together?
That’s what I kept thinking about on the drive home from my screening. While running close to three hours, The Odyssey moves along at a fairly quick pace and is never less than compelling. Yet, it didn’t leave me with my jaw on the floor, as earlier Nolan movies like The Dark Knight or Inception did, nor did it overwhelm me emotionally like Interstellar. But, it also didn’t piss me off like Tenet, a movie I was convinced I hated after my first viewing but later came around to.
Narratively, this is Nolan’s most experimental film since Memento, with him adopting a highly non-linear style (slightly more extreme than what he did in Oppenheimer). It starts with Odysseus having been gone from Ithaca for twenty years, with his now-grown son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), fighting off would-be suitors for his mother, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), each wanting to become the new king of Ithaca. One of the suitors, Antinous (Robert Pattinson), is more calculating than the others, hoping to provoke Telemachus into violating Zeus’s law, which states that he must provide the suitors with hospitality. If he attacks them, they are within their rights to exile him, leaving the throne to be theirs.
From there, we find Odysseus, older and living on an island with Charlize Theron’s Calypso, a sea nymph who has used magic to make him forget his past life. But things start to come back, and from there the film intercuts between Odysseus’s memories of the perilous journey home after the end of the Trojan War and Telemachus’s struggle to keep Ithaca under his father’s absent rule.
Despite the structure, The Odyssey is always easy to follow, and the pacing is excellent, with Nolan still a master of his craft. The cast is strong, with Damon ideally cast as the heroic but flawed Odysseus. Physically, the role must have been a monster, with him in the best shape of his life and plunged into some incredible hand-to-hand action sequences, particularly in the jaw-dropping finale, which ranks alongside Nolan’s best action scenes. But Odysseus also has to be somewhat impulsive and haunted, something that comes into play when we finally see the Fall of Troy, which isn’t actually depicted until the film is nearly over.
Damon is well-supported by Tom Holland, who is excellent as the conflicted prince who’s been coddled by his mother but now has to become master of his own fate, with the actor growing into a solid leading man. By contrast, Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is more conniving than you’d expect, with her trying to keep her son in his place, even if you understand her reasons—namely, that she doesn’t want to lose him like she lost his father. Outside this trio, the strongest supporting roles go to Robert Pattinson, who seems to be having the time of his life as the sleazy, conniving, utterly evil Antinous, while Samantha Morton anchors the movie’s best sequence as Circe, a witch who runs afoul of Odysseus’s men.
One notable thing is that despite the stacked cast, many of the biggest names are playing relatively small—but important—parts, with Theron and Zendaya (as Athena) essential to the plot but not in the film all that much. The same goes for Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy (and her sister Clytemnestra), who only has a few minutes of screen time, although the scenes with her and her husband, Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus, are potent.
Technically, the film is a marvel, but I have a strong caveat here. For some reason, Universal opted to show us the movie in 70mm, but not IMAX, meaning we saw it in 2.35:1. It honestly felt like I was watching the movie in pan-and-scan, with it obvious the movie was composed for the large-format IMAX frame. One of my complaints coming out of it was that it was too dark and that the compositions lacked scale, but I imagine one can’t really judge Hoyte van Hoytema’s work without having seen it the way it was intended—so I guess I’ll be seeing this twice. One thing that did work, though, is Ludwig Göransson’s score, which is awesome.
Again, I hesitate to give The Odyssey a definitive rating, as I feel like I truly didn’t get to see it the way it was intended—on an IMAX screen—but even still, I was mostly captivated by it. While not, at first glance, among Nolan’s absolute best, it’s still a stunning achievement and among the most ambitious films of its time. It’s a full meal, that’s for sure.
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