★★★★ (4 out of 4)
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is a cinema colossus that strides and struts across the screen in 70mm or Imax (what else?) on waves of roaring, ravishing sounds and images that thrill and delight even as they knock the wind out of you. Nolan’s been accused of hubris for taking on Homer’s classic, a foundational pillar of world literature from 700 B.C. and definitely before the advent of AI slop. Hubris, from the Greek, indicates excessive pride and an overestimation of one’s own competence, accomplishments or capabilities. Nolan has swagger for sure, but he also has the skills, right there for all to see in everything from “The Dark Knight” to “Oppenheimer.” So why not challenge himself by going to the mountain with this unwieldy, unfilmable text? Nolan’s response to an artistic dare has always been the same—bring it on! And here in the best movie I’ve seen this year, Nolan shoots for the stars. Do you see much of that in blockbuster Hollywood? I don’t.
“The Odyssey” cost $250 million, runs nearly three hours and has been prejudged into prickly cultural sound bites about those slangy, off-putting American accents, the woke politics, the dark armor worn by Benny Safdie’s King Agamemnon that looks “Dark Knight” adjacent and the lack of Greek actors, though room has been made for rapper Travis Scott as the poet Demodocus. That joke of a social critic Elon Musk has joined the protest crowd against Nigerian beauty and Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, meaning she’s supposed to be white. I guess the same goes for Helen’s twin sister Clytemnestra, also Nyong’o doing double duty with half the screen time. The noise should die down in the face of the film itself, which the British American Nolan, 55, invests with scale, surprising intimacy and a virtuoso’s gift for pow.
Everything great about Christopher Nolan is stirring in ‘The Odyssey.’ This is a cinema colossus you don’t want to miss.
If poetry really is words written by flashes of lightning, then Nolan is a true visionary poet. Roiling passions and battle scenes take center stage, but Nolan keeps a keen eye out for what happens, often glancingly in the space between words and murderous revenge, when humanity stakes its claim against the rule of gods and monsters.
In case your memory of high school lit is rusty, the tale follows Odysseus, the warrior king of Ithaca, played as a conniving ruler and empathetic Everyman by Matt Damon, who meets every challenge in what is surely the role of his career. Damon’s ruler is capable of despicable behavior—that sneaky Trojan horse for example—that seems to hold his human flaws in bold relief. Much like Oppenheimer in his deal-making with death.
Like a hunter home from the hill, Odysseus is on a tumultuous, 10-year voyage home after the war. Blown off course, he takes another decade to reach his destination, forced to negotiate with mythological creatures such as the one-eyed Cyclops (Bill Irwin), the protective goddess Athena (a sublime, centered Zendaya) and the clawing nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron believably holds Odysseus in sexual hostage for seven years where he suffers a kind of amnesia). Best of all is the enchantress Circe (a beyond great Samantha Morton), who in a scene of wicked perversity molds the faces of lustful soldiers into the pigs they are inside and now out. He is also cursed by Poseidon (god of the sea) in a storm that takes down most of his loyal crew.
Because Odysseus has been missing for 20 years total (10 at war, 10 at sea), he is presumed dead. His palace in Ithaca has been overrun by a group of suitors, the most aggressive being Antinous, slimed to the max by a hilariously hissable Robert Pattinson. Antinous wants to bed, wed and annex the power of Odysseus’ faithful wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway. She does more with a loaded glance than an army of the dead chasing a hero out of hell. Luckily, his loyal son Telemachus (Tom Holland not always winning the war against the bland contours of the role) is a fierce ally. Props to Hathaway for finding dazzling dimension in a role that could have slid by on insipid virtue. It’s the swirling emotions of the wife and son that gives “The Odyssey” the bruising heart it needs.
The film’s creative contributions merit superlatives. Dutch cinematographer Hoye van Hoytema, shooting every scene with Imax cameras (a first on film), matches his Oscar-winning artistry on “Oppenheimer” by using faces in closeup as a landscape of beauty and terror that rivals the eye-bruising spectacle of the bloody sacking of Troy. Likewise, editor Jennifer Lame, who also mined gold for “Oppenheimer,” edits even the quietest scenes with a stirring momentum. You feel it in your bones just like Ludwig Göransson's score, built from ancient instruments, Bronze Age percussion and reconstructed aulos, a double-pipe reed instrument depicted in ancient Greek and Roman art.
You might call Nolan the David Lean of his era, not just for the pageantry Lean brought to “Lawrence of Arabia,” but for the quiet emotions that flowed through, say, “Brief Encounter.” “The Odyssey” is the work of an artist who defies the notion that something can’t be done. And we’re all the better for it. Whether it’s Oppenheimer with his atomic bomb or Odysseus springing his Trojan horse, Nolan is fascinated by strategic brainiacs who come to regret the violence they’ve unleased. For Nolan, the idea of audiences crowded into a theater to share the experience of an artist’s provocation, love it or hate it, is the greatest show on earth. I tend to agree. Everything great about Nolan is stirring in “The Odyssey.” This you don’t want to miss.