Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Review: A Huge, Brutal and Surprisingly Human Epic

One of the first things I liked about the film is that Nolan doesn't treat Homer's story like some sacred text he's frightened to touch.

He's clearly having fun with it.

The film opens with a storyteller standing on a table in a banquet hall telling the story of the Trojan War.

Before long we're seeing Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, crammed inside the Trojan Horse alongside Menelaus and the other Greek warriors.

And this isn't the nice wooden horse we've seen a hundred times before.

Nolan's version is this huge, heavy thing partly buried in the water and sand. The Greeks inside have apparently been stuck in there for days, and some of them haven't even survived the wait.

Which immediately makes you think about something most versions of this story conveniently ignore.

Imagine the bloody smell inside that thing.

Thankfully Nolan doesn't go into too much detail there.

Probably for the best.

There's something else interesting about this opening too: the Trojan Horse isn't actually part of Homer's Odyssey. Nolan pulls material from other ancient accounts and folds it into Odysseus' story.

That's basically his approach to the entire film.

Rather than making a completely faithful adaptation of one text, he's built his own enormous version of the legend from different tellings of it.

And I think that's absolutely the right decision.

These stories have been retold and changed for thousands of years.

Why stop now?

Matt Damon might not have been the first person I would have pictured when somebody said "Odysseus."

But he works.

Really bloody well.

His Odysseus is absolutely capable of being the traditional hero. He's brave, intelligent, strong and a natural leader.

But he's also arrogant.

He's stubborn.

He's a hypocrite.

And occasionally he's a complete arsehole.

That's what makes him interesting.

Odysseus talks constantly about honour and doing things properly. There's even this little ritual where he'll twang the string of his bow before firing an arrow, almost like he's giving his opponent a fair warning.

Very noble.

Except when following his own rules becomes inconvenient.

Then suddenly those rules don't seem quite so important.

The film isn't afraid to show that contradiction.

This isn't a spotless superhero wandering around ancient Greece defeating monsters.

He's a warrior who has done terrible things.

And the further into the film we get, the more you start wondering whether the gods really are preventing him from returning home or whether, somewhere deep down, Odysseus doesn't believe he deserves to go back.

That's where Damon's performance really started working for me.

If you know the basic story, you'll know Odysseus leaves Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War.

The war lasts ten years.

Getting home takes another ten.

That's one hell of a delayed flight.

Back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, is still waiting for him.

Unfortunately, her home has basically been invaded by a collection of absolute bellends who all want to marry her, eat her food, drink her wine and help themselves to the kingdom while assuming Odysseus isn't coming back.

Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, easily one of the slimiest of the bunch.

He's brilliant.

Every time he's on screen you want somebody to smack him.

Meanwhile Odysseus' son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, has grown up without his father and starts searching for answers about what happened to him.

That father-and-son element gives the story a surprisingly strong emotional centre.

Telemachus isn't simply looking for Odysseus.

He's trying to work out what being a man actually means when the legendary man he's spent his life hearing about has never been there.

And Yes, We Get the Monsters

Obviously Nolan wasn't going to make The Odyssey and leave out all the good stuff.

The Cyclops is here.

Scylla is here.

The Sirens are here.

Poseidon is causing trouble.

Athena, played by Zendaya, appears to Odysseus.

Charlize Theron plays Calypso, while Samantha Morton appears as Circe and manages to be genuinely unsettling.

There are gods, monsters, nymphs, warriors and enough Greek mythology flying around to keep you busy for nearly three hours.

What I particularly liked, though, is that Nolan doesn't suddenly turn the film into a glossy CGI fantasy whenever something mythical happens.

Everything still feels dirty and physical.

The Cyclops, for example, isn't treated simply as a monster waiting for our hero to defeat him.

There's actually a point where you start feeling a bit sorry for the poor bastard.

When you really think about it, he's basically a massive shepherd minding his own business when a gang of armed strangers turn up at his home and start causing trouble.

Suddenly the heroic version of events doesn't seem quite so simple.

And that's something the film keeps doing.

I mean that in the best possible way.

If there's one reason to see The Odyssey on the biggest screen you can find, it's the sheer physical scale of the thing.

Nolan's obsession with shooting things practically whenever possible really pays off here.

You feel the weight of everything.

When people are dragging the Trojan Horse, it genuinely looks heavy.

When buildings collapse, you feel the impact.

When people are fighting, it feels violent rather than choreographed.

The sea looks enormous.

The landscapes feel endless.

Everything has texture.

You can almost smell the salt water, smoke and blood.

There are moments where I genuinely wondered how much of what I was watching they actually built or destroyed.

That's something I've always appreciated about Nolan.

I'm certainly not against CGI. Some incredible films have been made using it.

But there is something different about watching something that feels physically present in front of the camera.

Your brain knows.

And on an IMAX screen, this thing must be absolutely insane.

Nolan Is Still Nolan

Of course, this being Christopher Nolan, he can't just tell the story from A to B like a normal human being.

Where would the fun be in that?

The film jumps between different periods of Odysseus' life, moving through memories, stories and stories being told inside other stories.

On paper that sounds like it could become an absolute nightmare.

Strangely, it doesn't.

Jennifer Lame's editing deserves a lot of credit here because the film apparently runs for 172 minutes, yet it rarely feels like you're sitting through something approaching three hours.

Rather than treating time like a straight line, Nolan treats Odysseus' life almost like a collection of memories scattered across a table.

We move between them as their meaning changes.

Something we see early in the film can feel completely different once we understand what happened before it.

Yes, it's Nolan doing Nolan things again.

But here it actually suits the story perfectly.

After all, The Odyssey itself is a story about storytelling.

There was inevitably some noise online about the casting choices.

Apparently, even Greek mythology needs a culture war now.

Lupita Nyong'o plays Helen and Clytemnestra, Zendaya plays Athena, John Leguizamo plays Eumaeus, and Elliot Page plays the Greek warrior Sinon.

Personally, I couldn't care less.

We're watching a story involving gods, giant one-eyed shepherds, sea monsters, magical women turning men into animals and supernatural creatures singing sailors to their deaths.

I think we can survive an actor not looking exactly how somebody on Twitter imagined an ancient Greek character.

More importantly, the cast works.

John Leguizamo in particular is terrific, and Robert Pattinson seems to be having the time of his life making Antinous as smug and punchable as humanly possible.

For me, that's far more important.

These stories have survived for thousands of years precisely because every generation gets to reinterpret them.

This might be my favourite thing about Nolan's version.

A lesser blockbuster would have cleaned Odysseus up.

He'd still have a few flaws, obviously, because apparently every hero needs those now.

But ultimately we'd be told he's a good bloke who made a couple of mistakes.

Nolan doesn't really do that.

The sacking of Troy is horrible.

We see what these supposedly heroic Greek warriors are capable of doing once they've won.

People who aren't fighting are killed.

Women and children die.

Elsewhere, Odysseus and his men are openly accused of committing horrific acts in Greece's name.

The film doesn't forget any of that when it reaches the big heroic moments later.

And that matters.

Because Odysseus can love Penelope.

He can desperately miss his son.

He can want to return home.

He can be courageous.

He can also have done terrible things.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

That's far more interesting than turning him into another squeaky-clean Hollywood hero.

Penelope Isn't Just Sitting Around Waiting Either

Anne Hathaway gets some great material as Penelope.

She's surrounded by men who effectively assume that because her husband has disappeared, everything he owned—including her—is eventually going to become theirs.

You can feel her anger.

These men are sitting in Odysseus' home, eating his food, drinking his wine and gradually stripping Ithaca of its wealth while expecting Penelope to eventually surrender and marry one of them.

And she knows exactly what they're doing.

That gives the scenes in Ithaca a different sort of tension from Odysseus fighting monsters.

There might not be a Cyclops standing in the room, but Penelope is fighting her own battle.

Absolutely.

But don't go in expecting three hours of Matt Damon stabbing monsters.

There is plenty of spectacle here, and when Nolan goes big he goes really bloody big.

But that's not actually what stayed with me.

It's the idea at the centre of the film.

What happens when the legendary hero finally has to live with everything the legend conveniently leaves out?

Odysseus has spent years fighting wars, killing enemies, tricking people and surviving things that should have killed him.

Everyone back home has turned him into a story.

But underneath that story is still a man.

A very complicated one.

And perhaps that's why The Odyssey has survived for thousands of years.

Not because Odysseus is perfect.

But because he isn't.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is huge, beautiful, violent, occasionally strange and far more emotionally complicated than I expected.

Matt Damon gives us an Odysseus who can be heroic one minute and completely infuriating the next. Anne Hathaway gives Penelope real strength and anger, while Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong'o, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton and John Leguizamo make this feel like one of those ridiculously stacked casts where another famous face seems to appear every ten minutes.

And visually?

It's Nolan.

You already know you're getting your money's worth.

But the spectacle isn't really the point.

For all the monsters, battles, gods and enormous IMAX photography, The Odyssey ultimately comes down to something much simpler.

A man has spent twenty years trying to get home.

The question isn't whether he can make it.

It's what kind of man is going to walk through the door when he finally does.

And I bloody loved that.