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TRAILER
Weathering it
By all means if you go out to movies, see Nolan's Odyssey. It's a fair bid to be this year's best summer blockbuster and one of the top films of the mainstream year. It's also a classic, wonderfully rich story with no links to comic books, instead rooted in ancient Greek. Which would you rather know about, comic books or our western cultural heritage stretching back millennia? Mr. Nolan has spent a lot of money and he likes to make it real, editing or blending elements of his images by computer after the shooting, but constructing oddities like the giant one-eyed monster Polyphemus (an animatronic puppet powered by Bill Irwin) and ancient style ships and buildings physically. This is an epic film of an epic poem and deserves to be seen on an epic scale, on a movie theater on the biggest possible iMax or 70mm projection screen to fully enjoy the stunning cinematography of Hoyte van Hoytema.
Coming to the new Odyssey with memories of many grand past cinematic extravaganzas, people are going to notice a turnabout: in the past American actors were instructed to mimic the posh accent of the English stars in the cast, and this time the Anglos have been directed to talk American. (Haven't you noticed that they do us better than we do them anyway?) There's already plenty of debate about this choice (as there is about the willfully diverse casting), and there's been a focus on an early line from Odysseus' son Telemachus, played here by Tom Holland, a Brit: "my dad is coming home." "Dad?" people say. What a way to talk. In fact, it blends in, and "dad" turns out to be word that goes back 500 years. Perhaps I miss the formal language of older movie epics, but the theatrical British voices, which the American's accents clashed with, stuck out too much. Homer is contemporary with the Old Testament, and in the case of Homer at least we all acknowledge this is myth. Either the modern language works or it doesn't. The action here is remarkably compelling and fluid.
Nolan looks for intensity and intimacy. There are lots of closeups and hand-held, wobbly effects. There are hair-raising times of danger at sea in those ancient sail-and-row boats Odysseus and his men travel and get trapped in. What is somewhat lacking with this is some of the old epic-style grandeur, the sweeping epic effect of long shots with many extras seen at a vast distance. There are a few welcome landscape shots, notably the haunting image of battlefields strewn with corpses from the end of the Trojan war, which along with the Trojan Horse staging area was filmed at Aït Benhaddou, a UNESCO World Heritage ksar in Morocco. That was my favorite scene. I also liked the archaic warrior helmets worn by Odysseus and his men, which certainly would add greatly to a man's height, Odysseus' helmet getting the tallest plumes to designate his status. These are completely inaccurate, and the helmets ancient Greeks actually wore were round affairs made of leather and dozens of boar's tusks. But Nolan's helmets and black armor evoke ancient Greek pottery.
I will bow to D'Angelo and grant that maybe the final extravaganza when Odysseus slays the suitors who have been freeloading off his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) shows Nolan "still isn't a great director of close-quarters action." Maybe: but in the poem itself as we know it, isn't this sequence chaotic? There's too much to get even into a movie only eight minutes short of two hours long - and it does go fast, though, also as D'Angelo says, so you might justify Nolan's conflating the Lotus Eaters and the much later story of Calypso. Nolan's Odyssey weaves in the story of the Trojan horse (and a very beautiful horse it is) from The Iliad and a new idea is developed - of Odysseus' feeling guilty of war crimes, equating the siege of Troy (as D'Angelo puts it) "with (say) My Lai, positioning Odysseus as a blend of Calley and Thompson." Posing the Trojan horse as "original sin" Mike calls "a radically provocative idea" that "retroactively reconfigures the entire movie (including Zendaya's Athena, who had previously seemed kinda useless."
No; guilt is in the poem, though greater emphasis on it owes something to the 2017 Odyssey translation by Emily Wilson that Nolan relied on, but Odysseus is depicted as deeply flawed throughout the poem. Afterwards D'Angelo claims Nolan undercuts his originality, lowers the film in his estimation, by not ending there, instead going on - despite his somewhat out of order storytelling, to the actual end of the poem, Odysseus' final return home and revenge against the suitors.
Odysseus' famous and proverbial characteristic as a wily liar and deceiver gets underplayed in this film until that final part, which is pretty enjoyably well told (it's too good a tale to spoil), where Odysseus, after advice not to come home in the front door but approach indirectly and cautiously, comes, long-bearded now (we've seen him at several stages of tonsure and age), disguised as a worn, shabby beggar. Nolan plays down the classic scar-recognition scene with the old nurse (Kate Fuglei). Perhaps the scar-recognition was felt hard to get across on screen. But this elides what has become one of the most famous single scenes of The Odyssey due to the famous chapter analyzing this moment in the poem and the long flashback the scar evokes in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis.
People have said Tom Holland has delivered a great, "career defining" performance as Odysseus' son Telemachus left behind growing up with the obnoxious suitors (led by Robert Pattinson's Antinous) and his mother. Hmmm... Well, one thing that's clear is that James Remar is fine as the pivotal blind seer Tiresias. Samantha Morton may be good - she's certainly arrestingly un-Hollywood - as a rather homely version of the enchantress Circe, and the way she slowly turns Odysseus' men gorging on a meaty stew into pigs is memorable. Charlize Theron has been admired for her performance as Calypso, the sea nymph who holds Odysseus captive on her island. She seemed to me a little too bland and, in contrast to Samantha, movie-ish.
This only touches on a film that is a remarkable feat of condensation as well as a riot of emotions and action, danger, excitement, though it's even more a celebration of great storytelling than a feast of emotion. You can read lots into it. You can puzzle over the way the condemnation of war and violence is contradicted by the ultra-violent slaying of the suitors. Their prolonged presence is an egregious violation of Xenia, the sacred concept of hospitality and guest-friendship, one of the greatest values of the ancient Greeks. The importance of hospitality is underlined by Eumaeus (John Leguizano) when he insists on hosting the shabby beggar who's the disguised hero. Tradition was that you must host even a shabby beggar because he may be a god in disguise.
Which brings us to the big question: where are all the gods in this film? Christopher Nolan is clearly rather allergic to the whole idea of them, and so their overriding importance and insistent presence in the poem - except for Zendaya frequently at Odysseus' side as Athena - is something we don't feel at all here. This is the one biggest fault of Nolan's Odyssey, which is a full and enjoyable experience otherwise.
Matt Damon doesn't seem the most noble or the most wily and Odysseus-like choice that could have been made, but this veteran of the great Bourne films does project resilience. Maybe the only overriding definition of the Odyssean hero is a capacity for weathering any challenges he's dealt. Damon conveys that. Appropriate to this story and its character is that the film itself is not only grand but nimble and fluid.
As with any great film, one viewing won't be enough. We must continue to question it. Translator Emily Wilson in an interview is disappointed that Nolan settles for "the easy idealization narrative" for Odysseus when modern cinema and TV have plenty of room for "ambiguous, bad-guy heroes," which Homer's Odysseus is, but not Nolan's, she says.
The Odyssey, 172 min., premiered in London July 6l, 2026. Opened in the US July 17.Screened for this review on that day at Cinemark Century Hilltop 16, Richmond, California. Metacritic rating: 𝟪̶𝟫̶ 88. See James Hancock's online review of the controversies around the film.