‘The Odyssey’ Review: A Lesson In Never Doubting Christopher Nolan
With his third film of the decade releasing, at this point it’s fair to say that Sir Christopher Nolan is only in the business of crafting masterworks.
When it was announced a little less than two years ago that the man whose previous film had secured seven Academy Award wins including Best Picture, was adapting Homer’s The Odyssey next, everyone across the internet was put into disbelief, facing waves of emotion filled with excitement, yet one could say there was a sense of doubt due to the unruliness of the source material.
I’ve been reading Homer’s “The Odyssey” before this film’s release and just managed to finish reading on the very same day of the premiere, and it honestly feels a little exaggerated that this is something unadaptable. It is adaptable, but only very few could do so, and one of those people is Christopher Nolan. Of course the man who, in almost of every single film of his, has the main character yearning for his dead wife, decided to adapt the story of Odysseus who spent 20 years struggling to get back home to his wife. This really does feel like the perfect follow-up to Oppenheimer, at times it’s very similar to it thematically.
It’s a nice change of pace for him to move on from puzzling sci-fi flicks and World War II-set pieces to be adapting a mythic epic like this, you’d also think he’d abandon his nonlinear structure of storytelling in The Odyssey but it’s done very well here that and I do believe it may end up being one of his best uses of dual plotlines. Moreover, I do think this might be his best film ever to tackle colossal set pieces. Every single set piece you see here will keep you unable to shut your eyelids or avert your gaze. That’s not to mention stuff like the puppetry for the Cyclops. It does look a little obvious in the film that Cyclops is not computer-generated, but let me tell you this, it’s the kind of thing that’ll make you appreciate the magic of movies, the entire Cyclops scene itself felt like Nolan’s take on a horror film.
The performances here are also superb, and I may be prefer the star-studded cast of The Odyssey over Oppenheimer, a lot of career-best performances here. Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Robert Pattinson are eleven out of ten. John Leguizamo, Hamish Patel, and Samantha Morton are standouts, and even Tom Holland, who could have found himself veering too close to his role of Spider-Man, gives a really good performance here. Ludwig Göransson’s score is nothing less than phenomenal, While I did not find The Odyssey‘s score as iconic as some of his latest ones like Oppenheimer and Sinners, there’s just something truly haunting in his score for The Odyssey, and it meshes so well with the film itself and rounds out the experience.
It’s hard not to think of The Odyssey as a lock for Best Picture even thought it’s still July, but at the same time it feels like the competition to this is not very major. It has literally everything you’d ever want in a Hollywood blockbuster, and it’s very emotional, especially the second half of the film. It may feel a little staggering during the first 15 minutes or so, but you will not feel that runtime in the slightest. An incredible experience too to be watching Hoyte van Hoytema’s camerawork tackling the Trojan Horse, witchcraft, sirens, and even undead soldiers rising from Hades.
Something else I did kind of struggle with was the fact that for such a fantastical story like this, you’d expect figures like Zeus and Poseidon to be showing up, but there’s a very specific take here which is more philosophical than literal, as these Greek gods do really exist, but they mostly are not to be seen. To be completely fair though I was expecting Nolan’s vision of The Odyssey to be including these figures. If you try to ignore historical inaccuracies such as the characters not wearing “the right kind of armor” and whatever, you’re in for a monumental treat. Infact, I thought for someone whose work is grounded in a sense, that he stepped up his game here with the entire surreal Hades sequence and the undead soldiers.
This film is a very modern take on Homer’s epic, like literally a film that has Travis Scott playing The Bard, but let me tell you this, it doesn’t fail as an adaptation in the slightest. I can already sense this being a pending classic for the years to come. I do think that Nolan’s kinetic energy this decade has been quite different from anything else we’ve seen, to be creating your Magnum Opus three years ago, only to follow with your second Magnum Opus right after, is an astonishing feat overall. And to have A-listers such as Matt Damon or Anne Hathaway give their most career defining performances ever, you’re functioning on an entirely different level. Bravo nonetheless, you do deserve another blank check for giving out an epic that criticizes this broken world which we live in.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hits theaters on Friday, the 17th of July and it stars Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Hamish Patel, John Leguizamo, and more.
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