OVERVIEW
Ten years after the fall of Troy, the king of Ithaca, Odysseus (Matt Damon), remains marooned on a small crescent of sand where a nymph keeps him (Charlize Theron). Haunted by unexplainable visions, he reckons with the journey that got him there, a sail past the Cyclops, the Sirens, giants, and sea creatures. Half a world away, his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), holds a palace besieged by suitors while their son (Tom Holland) sets out to find the father he cannot remember. Christopher Nolan reads Homer’s three-thousand-year-old epic through his usual themes of absence, guilt, and the passing of time.
BACKGROUND
Nolan’s history with the material traces back to 2004, when the director, already critically acclaimed but unproven with large budgets, began developing a Homer-related epic at Warner Bros. That project fell through once Wolfgang Petersen turned his own attention to Troy, and the studio handed Nolan Batman Begins instead, a consolation prize, as he later called it. It worked out for him, since that first blockbuster became the step that, two decades on, turned him into arguably the director with access to the largest budgets in Hollywood.
That access, reinforced after the financial and critical success of Oppenheimer, gave him the freedom to take on the material with little studio interference and the leverage to keep pushing his fixation on IMAX. A new, quieter camera was built for the production, making it the first film shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras, though the roughly three-hour ceiling of those film prints forced him to trim a longer version down to fit.
Homer’s poem has had its share of adaptations, from the classic Hollywood spectacle of Ulysses (1954) with Kirk Douglas, to Andrei Konchalovsky’s acclaimed two-part NBC miniseries, to the more recent The Return, where Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche stripped the story of every god and monster until only a low-budget psychological drama remained. Nothing about Nolan’s version is stripped or low-budget, running to a 91-day shoot across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, and Scotland.
THE REVIEW
Nolan strives to make his biggest film yet, and in terms of scope, he succeeds. Monumental sets fill the screen, made even larger by Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography. The scale comes at a small cost, since the cameras are too big to move freely, and Nolan bridges his widest shots to his closest ones with cuts that occasionally jar. None of it dents the overall effect, which makes the film feel like the event of the year (that is, until Dune: Part 3).
As in his other films, sound carries much of the immersion, loud and enormous, chasing the maximal wall of noise that some adore and others loathe, though it is more dynamic here, alert to smaller textures, a feast scene rendered so closely you hear every wet detail of the chewing. Ludwig Göransson builds his score from a blend of the modern and the ancient, layering the reedy aulos and the plucked lyre over synth textures and struck bronze, which is exactly the sound you would expect from a Nolan film set in Ancient Greece. It makes the heart pump, but its reluctance to settle into a melody robs several sequences of a clear emotional center.
Göransson’s score embodies the film I feared this Odyssey might be, since I imagined Nolan’s growing appetite for impressing and oppressing audiences would deliver something that commands attention without ever pulling you under, and without truly moving you. The surprise is that the straightforward emotions are where the film works best: the longing of a wife waiting for her long-gone husband, the guilt of a warrior who has seen what the war cost, the ache of a boy who knows his father only as a legend. All of it sits close to what Nolan has explored before, yet here he reaches it through sincerity and simplicity, trusting close-ups to carry the emotion, even against the distraction of the score and the often clunky dialogue that keeps having characters announce what they feel.
Most of these scenes fall in the last hour, which stands far above the rest of the film. From the beggar’s arrival at the palace to the closing image, it moves between emotional monologues, crowd-pleasing confrontations, and Game of Thrones-style scheming and payoff, without losing the smaller moments, one of them built around nothing more than the twitch of an old dog’s tail. The cast reaches its strongest here as well, with Holland’s emotions feeling earnest and giving the film its heart, while Pattinson is pure fun to watch, menacing enough to make plain why the suitors are a threat, lending that whole strand its urgency. Damon and Hathaway have the harder task, since neither is the obvious fit for a couple two decades married with a grown son, and yet their intensity makes you believe it anyway.
The first half does not reach that level, since the same instincts Nolan reins in later are the ones he lets run loose here. The score and the editing are the worst offenders. The ‘Nolan sound’, that unstoppable engine of momentum and thrumming low noise, has its admirers, and it has worked superbly before, from Inception to Oppenheimer, but paired with Jennifer Lame’s no-room-to-breathe editing, it clashes against the very size Nolan is going for. Homer’s poem is fragmented and loose, and yet it lets each episode keep its own beginning, middle, and end, every landfall a self-contained ordeal that makes the whole return feel long and hard-won. Nolan, Lame, and Göransson do not want you to feel that anything is long, and they succeed, so a film of nearly three hours flies by. The cost is that the episodes blur together, and before the last danger has registered, Odysseus and his crew are already inside the next one, which rarely feels any thornier than the last. Each set piece is built to be extraordinary, only for the film to rush past most of them before they can land.
Whenever the film does stop to breathe, things change, as in Odysseus’s encounter with Samantha Morton’s Circe, terrifying and easily the film’s most memorable scene, or his haunting passage through the Underworld. Around them are scenes and characters that needed more runtime. Charlize Theron’s Calypso and Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen don’t have as much impact, and out at sea, as the crew drifts from one shore to the next, you rarely feel the years piling up or the slow rot of men losing their souls. Himesh Patel does what he can to give that decline a face as Eurylochus (the only discernible crew member), but the pacing is too hurried for it to fully register.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The Odyssey finds Nolan at his most technically ambitious, and the result is immense to look at, and more emotional than I expected. It is at its finest when he lowers his style and serves the story with respect and simplicity, as he does through much of the final hour, culminating in a monologue from Damon’s Odysseus that ties the film back to Oppenheimer, the same study of a man hollowed by the destruction he caused, unwilling to return to the life waiting for him because of what he has done. It is one of the most powerful scenes of Nolan’s career, and reaching it means sitting through a film that too often rushes itself, above all around the crew’s many stops.
I am usually the first to argue that a film should be shorter, and yet if any film ever earned a runtime past three hours, or better still a proper intermission, it is the journey of Odysseus, the epic of all epics. I wanted to be fully immersed in that world, to dread each new danger and to feel Odysseus losing hope of ever seeing home again. The film gave me only some of that, and yet I walked out wanting more of it, not less, which is the most welcome surprise of all.