I’ve seen every Christopher Nolan film theatrically for the better part of two decades, with Tenet being the sole, COVID-necessitated exception, but even by Nolan standards, the anticipation surrounding The Odyssey felt different. When was the last time you saw a movie sell out opening-weekend IMAX screenings a full year in advance? It’s almost unheard of, and Nolan may be the only remaining director left in Hollywood whose name alone still moves tickets, no IP required.
I should say upfront: I’m not approaching this one from a place of neutrality. I fell hard for the Greek myths as a kid (I probably checked out Bulfinch’s Mythology from my school library a dozen times or more), and you’d be hard-pressed to find me complaining about a “sword and sandals” epic being put in front of me, even those on the lower end of the quality scale (Sir Ridley Scott’s Exodus is a guilty pleasure, countless flaws and all). So take the enthusiasm that follows with whatever grain of salt that requires, because there is a lot of enthusiasm to follow.
The Odyssey more than cleared the considerable bar I’d set for it, largely by refusing to be the movie its marketing sometimes suggested. There are stretches that recall the old Ben-Hur and Spartacus school of Hollywood epic, and Nolan’s insistence on capturing as much in-camera as possible rather than farming it out to various post-production houses gives the whole thing that exceedingly rare sense of scope and scale. But calling it “sword and sandals” sells the movie short, because Nolan is aiming for something more ambitious here.
Structurally, the film unfolds the way memory actually works, with fragments surfacing out of order, their meaning shifting each time they resurface. Odysseus (Matt Damon) pieces his own story together the same way Guy Pearce’s Leonard did in Memento two decades ago (my first exposure to Nolan’s work). But here, the fragments are decades old and the man doing the piecing is exhausted rather than desperate. I’ve seen complaints about the opening stretch feeling disorienting and overcomplicated, but I never felt that way — although I’ll grant that my familiarity with the source material might have helped.
The choice that’s already generating the most argument and division, and will likely continue to do so, is the dialogue. Nolan’s cast speaks primarily in plain, American-accented English, a notable departure from most historical dramas where the British accent reigns supreme, regardless of the time and place being depicted. This choice was admittedly jarring for the first twenty minutes or so, but I stopped noticing it entirely once I was invested in the story. The same goes for Nolan’s decision to strip back a lot of the more overtly supernatural material, which will no doubt rankle some purists, but I don’t think fidelity was ever the point. Nolan seems far more interested in unpacking the toll that twenty years of guilt exacts on a man — mentally, emotionally, and spiritually — and I don’t know that having Charybdis appear as a fully rendered sea monster instead of being evoked (rather ambiguously) by a giant whirlpool would have made much difference. Even the gods get this treatment. Zendaya’s Athena never announces herself so much as she haunts the edges of the frame, glimpsed in half a dozen strangers Odysseus passes on his journey, never quite confirmed as real. Nolan is smart enough to leave it unresolved whether she’s a genuine deity or just a story Odysseus needs to keep telling himself.
Where Nolan does lean into the fantastical, though, it’s extraordinary, and it’s in these moments where you’ll find two of the film’s best sequences. The Cyclops cave escape is intense and terrifying, staged with the instincts of a seasoned horror director. Elsewhere, in what’s bound to be the most talked-about moment in the film, Nolan leans into full-blown body horror as Samantha Morton’s Circe transforms a group of soldiers. But this transformation doesn’t come about via a flick of the wrist; instead, men’s faces are reshaped like wet clay under Morton’s fingers as she pinches and kneads them as though she’s working a pottery wheel. It’s absolutely horrific, and my wife, sitting next to me in the theater, was still raving about it on the walk home.
Technically, the film is remarkable, which should prove no shock to anyone even passingly familiar with Nolan’s resume. The Cyclops effect is baffling in the best way; I can’t tell you how they pulled it off practically, and I’m already looking forward to whatever behind-the-scenes material eventually surfaces on Blu-ray, because it feels like sheer wizardry and I need to know how it was accomplished. The armor-clad giants (presumably the Laestrygonians, although differing drastically from their depictions in the source material) who batter Odysseus’s men through a shape-shifting forest are nearly as impressive, and Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography captures it all in stunning detail. I caught this in 70mm rather than the full IMAX presentation (that’s this weekend’s plan), and it looked immaculate. My advice: don’t wait for the 40-inch TV in your living room; instead, find the biggest screen in your city (or the second biggest, in my case) and indulge.
Robert Pattinson, as the chief suitor Antinous, is a slimy, conniving little chickenshit of a man, and Pattinson clearly relishes every second of making the character as delightfully hateable as possible. Tom Holland, as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, turns in probably his best dramatic work yet, but I’ll admit that some corner of my brain kept half-expecting him to swing through the banquet room and web Pattinson’s mouth shut; it’s practically impossible to separate Holland from the role of Peter Parker at this point. Anne Hathaway, meanwhile, spends much of the film behind a loom, reweaving the same tapestry night after night to keep her suitors at bay, and there’s a steeliness to Penelope that Hathaway only lets surface in glances, enough to make clear this is a woman capable of outlasting men far less clever than she is.
But it’s Matt Damon who carries the whole thing on his back, with one of the finest performances of his career. There are a number of standout moments to highlight, but for me, Damon’s best work comes late, when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar in his own hall, recounts the fall of Troy. What’s been sold as a glorious conquest that inspired legends gets reframed, in that moment, as a catastrophic error in judgment, one that reshaped an entire civilization for the worse. That’s the movie’s real thesis: victory has to be measured by what’s lost, not what’s gained, and Odysseus spent nearly twenty years of his life finding that out the hard way, for a world that ended up no better off, and arguably worse, for his trouble. Three thousand years later, and this is a lesson humanity still hasn’t learned.
It’s a heavy note to hang a summer blockbuster on, and yet Nolan pulls it off, because everything happening at the craft and performance level primes you to feel that thesis rather than just hear it stated. I went into this film bracing myself for a handsomely mounted spectacle; what I found instead was proof that Nolan remains one of the only directors left who can turn a film into an honest-to-god event. There’s no franchise setup happening here, no post-credits tease, just a uniquely gifted filmmaker operating at the absolute pinnacle of his abilities; we just get to reap the rewards.