2026 | rated R | starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Charlize Theron, Corey Hawkins, Mia Goth | directed by Christopher Nolan | 2 hrs 52 mins | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
After winning the Trojan War, Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his crew are delayed another 8 years, encountering cyclopes, giants, witches and sirens, in a quest to get back to home to Ithica where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) hold off a palace full of suitors led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson) who aggressively courts the queen’s hand in marriage waiting for her husband’s return.
Earlier this year the studio gifted a Mummy movie the possessive title by its filmmaker, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, prompting many to wonder who the heck Lee Cronin is. It would have been far more appropriate to call The Odyssey “Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey”, not only because he is one of the few celebrity directors left who can open a movie on his name alone, much less command such audacious material on a budget of this scale, but also because this very much is an adaptation of Homer’s epic Greek song that was broken down to its elements and reshaped in Nolan’s distinct voice, trademark visual style and run through the filter of his most often explored themes. That’s not inherently a criticism; this is a very entertaining movie and remains so for much of its almost 3 hour running time. The sets, the set pieces, visual effects, the sea-fairing atmosphere and several of the performances are all top-notch feats of filmmaking. But it’s an awkward, not so fitting arrangement of director and material that shows Nolan’s limitations. It’s kind of like the moment when you realized Wes Anderson is never going to make a movie that doesn’t look exactly like a Wes Anderson movie.
This has worked for him to great creative success in the past. He’s the guy who turned The Dark Knight into a grounded gangster movie, a movie about entering the dream world into a heist film, a movie about a future time war into a James Bond movie and a biopic about the inventor of the atom bomb into a riveting procedural and courtroom thriller. And those movies are great. I’m not going to even pretend to understand the hipster revisionist reactors in the darkest sewers of the internet now trying to claim The Dark Knight, Inception, The Prestige and even Oppenheimer were somehow never good. It worked because those types of films, particularly Batman, had been done before and needed that fresh take. Nolan finds the crack and worms is way into them, beating them out from the inside into his new vision. But The Odyssey is unlike anything Nolan has taken on before. Not only is it required school reading (so everyone online thinks they are an expert in it), but it has rarely been put to the screen. It’s also a sword and sandal fantasy film requiring a level of mythos, magic and wonder that Nolan’s workmanlike approach can’t provide.
That mechanical approach runs through the film. Every minute of it. Nolan embraces the story’s non-linear style, jumping back and forth in time for the entire run. It’s also completely cold to the touch, keeping an arms distance from its characters and their motives while it goes through the motions of hitting all the memorable set pieces. This forces the performances to fill in the gaps in characterization that aren’t in the script. Hathaway, for her 100th appearance on screen this year, does a terrific job building out the long-suffering Penelope. Tom Holland, not so much. The highlight of the film, both in performance and execution is Samantha Morton as a misandrist witch who so fears the Sea People that she turns the men who seek refuge in her home into pigs – and even describing this scene doesn’t do justice to how riveting and well done it all is.
The Odyssey rolls into theaters on a wave of hype and controversy as another piece barb in the culture war, based on historical inaccuracy, lack of Greek representation and bizarre casting choices. Those oddball historical anacronyms are mostly cameos, a distracting game of whose-who of Hollywood’s most over-exposed. Zendaya as Odysseus’ head-cannon guilt manifestation, Athena. Travis Scott as a Bard. Jon Bernthal as a soldier segueing us into the Trojan Horse story. Elliott Page, whose first scene is hilarious given the controversy. Lupita Nyong’o is Helen of Troy and because this is a Christopher Nolan movie he gives the face that launched a thousand ships a huge disfiguring scar down her cheek. It’s neither the masterpiece critics say it is, nor the disaster the internet claims. There is good stuff here and some of it that rings out of tune. There are some truly creative notes here and parts that feel perfunctory and dispassionate. The first act is actually pretty sluggish, and it takes a minute to get going. Once we’re following Odysseus things pick up again. It downshifts again in the third act, taking the time to reset the table when it should be hitting the gas (to mix metaphors).
Christopher Nolan isn’t Billy Wilder, he can’t meet the material with what it requires, instead he imposes his style upon it. The Odyssey is well done and also shows his limitations as a storyteller. When the film folds together for its thunderous final point, well, it’s just like the ending of Oppenheimer. Nolan has artificially withheld a piece of information, then uses the flashback structure to hit his final theses in the closing minutes and… well, I was a little baffled by it. This is where the art of the adaptation comes in because Nolan’s interpretation of this work is both interesting and also a complete twist on Homer’s story and Odysseus as a character – shoved through the modern lens of fashionable grief and trauma porn. Homer’s Odysseus was a boastful man, proud of his Trojan horse deception who was taken to task by the gods to change his ways during the course of the story. Nolan portrays him as full of guilt and shame, desperate to keep the remaining members of his crew safe. A shame, by the way that feels like it conflicts with the climactic violence. Like Oppenheimer, Nolan uses Odysseus as a symbol to explore the original rot that corrupted the future of the entire human race. It’s thoughtful, but it’s also a bit pretentious.