It’s not just the film bros and the film girlies who hail Christopher Nolan as a prolific director. With films such as The Dark Knight trilogy, The Prestige, and the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, Nolan has established himself as a household name. Now he takes on another adaptation: The Odyssey, Homer’s classic tale about a hero’s journey, with a stacked cast, Ludwig Göransson’s score, and a fleet of IMAX cameras. Brick by brick, Nolan has created a timeless classic.
The story of Odysseus, played by the perfectly understated Matt Damon, is relatively simple. After fighting in the Trojan War, he seeks to return home to Ithaca and his wife. But the way home is far from smooth. However, in true Nolan fashion, the way of telling this tale is far from straightforward. Odysseus’s journey takes place in the past, while in the present, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) holds court at home and fends off a room full of hungry suitors eager to wed, bed, or slay her in order to take the throne.
The entire film is a breath held, weighted in anticipation for Odysseus’s return.
Casting Matt Damon to play Odysseus was extremely clever. Damon, though an incredibly solid actor, has never been called one of the greats; though handsome, he isn’t distractingly so. For the audience to follow and believe Odysseus, he needed to be charismatic but not overly boisterous in a way that overshadowed the mythology.
There’s a fantastic shot in the movie where King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) literally towers over Odysseus. It’s a silent interaction that sizzles with power, dominion, and defiance. Odysseus literally pales in comparison to this man who feels closer to a god, and we get behind him instantly. He is us. The kind of guy you’d share a drink with at the tavern. Not everyone could pull it off, and that is why Matt Damon was perfect for this role.
Alongside Damon, there is a plethora of talent sprinkled throughout the movie. Anne Hathaway is a force of nature as Penelope, wrought with pain and anger and delivering a career-worthy performance. Robert Pattinson transforms as the wicked Antinous, pulling strings and biding his time, hoping to sit on the throne.
However, standout performances came from cast members with less screentime and star power: Samantha Morton’s witch, Circe, punishing men by returning them to their true forms; the loyal but challenging Himesh Patel, who plays Odysseus’s second in command; and Corey Hawkins, a spiteful suitor taking advantage of Zeus’s law.
Nolan proves that there are no small parts, with each character filling and expanding the mythological world, giving it a sense of scale without losing the humanity at its centre.
The Odyssey is about more than a man journeying home. I mean, it wouldn’t be a Nolan film if it was about the thing you thought it was about, would it?
The use of Zeus’s law provides a perfect anchor for the film. The law states that one must provide food and shelter to all who knock, even beggars, should they be gods in disguise. The movie uses this as a tether to explore hospitality, migration, man’s defiance of the gods, and the cost of taking control of your own life.
That mixture of myth and truth not only gives Odysseus a deeper emotional journey than a man simply not being able to find his way home, it also makes us question how we, as a society, treat those from different shores.
And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about Nolan’s Odyssey.
He’s a man who’s not sure he wants to return home.
The Odyssey, much like this review, is nearly three hours long, but you never really feel that runtime. However, there are a few moments where the movie does lag.
For example, during Odysseus’s time with Calypso, they walk back and forth across a stretch of desert sand as he weaves his tale. These scenes looked and felt like something out of a Noughties music video compared to the rest of the movie.
When it came for Odysseus to face himself and the gods and return home, we got a skip in a puddle compared to the oceans of time and investment that had gotten him to Calypso’s island in the first place. It was almost laughable that, after all of his trials and tribulations, his final one—the one that would return him home—would be so visually and structurally anticlimactic.
With movies such as Interstellar and Tenet, we know Nolan is a fantastic storyteller, but, controversially, it’s in this movie that he has finally shown himself to also be a director.
The silent fall of Troy, the intentionality of Agamemnon and how he was perceived throughout the movie, from his helmet and his stance to the way he glided when others walked—all of these point to Nolan’s hand as a director, as does his collaboration with Ludwig Göransson.
This is their third collaboration following Tenet and Oppenheimer, but in The Odyssey, the music takes the audience on its own journey. It ensconces Nolan’s story in a language of sound that drives tension, plays with emotion, and heightens the audience’s senses, using repeated tones to create a score that is more than the cherry on top of this movie.
As an adaptation, some will compare the film to Homer’s original poem. Most, however, will not. For them, this is their tale of returning home, not through song, but through IMAX 70mm, as Nolan intended.
Rating: 4.5/5
What did you think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey?
Any thoughts on the film?