Synopsis: An epic adaptation of Homer’s classic, following Greek hero Odysseus on a perilous journey home after the Trojan War, encountering gods, monsters, and treacherous seas while his family faces turmoil in Ithaca.
Stars: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Himesh Patel, John Leguizamo, Charlize Theron, Travis Scott, Corey Hawkins, Mia Goth, Benny Safdie, Elliot Page, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Bill Irwin, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, James Remar
Director: Christopher Nolan
Rated: R
Running Length: 173 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: The first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm is a genuine event, but it only becomes a great film on the second viewing, when you stop staring at the size and start watching the performances.
The Odyssey Review: Twenty Years to Build One Ship
n 2004, Christopher Nolan was circling Troy at Warner Bros. before the late Wolfgang Petersen took it. Nolan made Batman Begins instead, and that decision changed the trajectory of his career. He has since admitted he was in over his head on Homer, which is a rare thing to hear from a filmmaker whose entire brand is built around control. Twenty years later, he finally came back for the other poem. Maybe he needed the time. Maybe Homer did, too.
The sheer scale of the Universal Pictures release isn’t a slick marketing line. It actually lives up to every bit of advanced hype and then some. This is a $250 million film shot over 91 days in six countries, and the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70MM cameras. Universal put opening-weekend IMAX tickets on sale a full year in advance, and half the eligible theaters sold out in twelve hours. It has since cleared $640 million worldwide. Those numbers tell you something about the anticipation, but they don’t tell you what it feels like to sit in front of a screen this enormous. The first time I did, I wasn’t thinking about the acting, the story or even Nolan. I was just trying to take it all in. It took a second viewing before I could form a real opinion.
A Kingdom on Hold and a King Who Won’t Arrive
The story opens with an intertitle, “A time of apparent magic,” and in Ithaca, twenty years after its king Odysseus (Matt Damon, The Last Duel) left for the Trojan War. His wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway,Mother Mary), has spent years fending off a hall full of suitors determined to claim her hand and the throne, led by the calculating Antinous (Robert Pattinson, The Drama). Their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland,Cherry), sets out with his guide Mentor (Ryan Hurst) to learn whether his father is still alive, traveling as far as Sparta to seek answers from King Menelaus (Jon Berenthal, The Accountant) and Helen (Lupita Nyong’o, Us).
The film then moves back into the Trojan War and follows Odysseus and his crew on their perilous journey home. Joined by his second-in-command Eurylochus (Himesh Patel, Yesterday), Odysseus faces a world of gods, monsters and supernatural forces, including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the witch Circe (Samantha Morton, She Said), the goddess Athena (Zendaya, Dune) and the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron, Dark Places). As years pass and the journey becomes increasingly dangerous, Odysseus must rely on his legendary cunning to survive the voyage and find his way back to Ithaca, where his family and kingdom are waiting.
Damon Rows, Pattinson Preens, Leguizamo Steals
On a whim, I saw it first in 70MM IMAX, front row, at one of the twenty-five American venues equipped for the format. Let me be honest about that first viewing: I was overwhelmed. At that size, with the screen practically filling my field of vision, I wasn’t thinking critically about the performances or the filmmaking. I was simply taking in the scale of it. There were moments when I felt like I was sitting inside that Trojan horse alongside Damon and his men, and I walked out knowing I’d experienced something extraordinary without being able to articulate much beyond that. The second viewing was different. Now that I knew the story and the characters, I could finally look past the spectacle and appreciate what the actors were bringing to it.
Damon proves to be more interesting than the marketing might suggest, moving naturally between Odysseus as a father, husband, commander and friend. He gives the character a physicality that never overwhelms the quieter dramatic moments, which is especially important in a film this enormous. Hathaway is an equally strong match. Her Penelope has spent two decades holding together a kingdom that has been left without its king, and Hathaway plays her strength not as something she announces, but as something she has learned to use. There is dignity to the performance, but also a sense that maintaining it has required constant effort.
Pattinson’s a scuzzy delight, a coward waiting for his moment, chewing every piece of scenery not bolted down. Holland gives the first of two unexpectedly mature performances he has this summer (Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which also stars Zendaya and Berenthal). Theron makes Calypso unreadable and Morton gets one powerhouse sequence as Circe and leaves little doubt she’s not to be toyed with.
John Leguizamo, doing career-best work as the half-blind swineherd Eumaeus, is the film’s soul. After wonderful work in Bob Trevino Likes It, he’s on a hot streak and might well wind up with his first Oscar nomination this year. Elliot Page, as the invented soldier Sinon, walks away with a late scene set in the underworld. It lands with a haunting sincerity that lingers.
Two Million Feet of Film and Forty-One Screens
The technical achievement outweighs almost everything else. The catch is that most people watching The Odyssey will never see the full-frame Hoyte van Hoytema shot. Only forty-one screens on the planet can present the 1.43:1 version. Everyone else gets a crop. If you can reach one, go, even if it means making a pilgrimage.
The logistics border on the insane. More than two million feet of IMAX film ran through cameras Nolan had built lighter and far less noisy for the job. A single magazine holds about three minutes, meaning actors were sometimes stopped mid-scene and forced to wait out reloads. For dialogue scenes, the cameras went into soundproof blimps, with mirrors allowing performers to maintain eye contact. None of that shows up on screen, which is probably the highest compliment you can give the work behind it: all that effort was worth it.
Ruth De Jong’s production design and Ellen Mirojnick’s costumes do the heavy lifting on texture. Mirojnick builds everything around tactility, giving linen, leather and bronze the weight of real wear. De Jong’s Trojan Horse stands thirty-six feet tall, weighs 8,800 pounds and traveled to the shore in twenty-seven crates. It’s the single most impressive object in a film full of them.
The Cyclops is a combination of animatronics, puppetry, and a motion-captured Bill Irwin on set, with its design lifted from Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. The creation of the Laestrygonians uses forced perspective, wirework and seven-foot stuntmen opposite five-foot doubles. Scylla is mostly digital, and while the effects have a few glitches, they achieve the suspense the scene is aiming for.
Ludwig Göransson’s score refuses the swords-and-sandals orchestra entirely. Bronze gongs sit under synthesizers. Callum Armstrong and Rosa Fragorapti play replicas of the ancient aulos and lyre. There’s Albanian iso-polyphonic choral singing, flutes recorded by shepherds and cacophonies of sheet-metal alarm drums. At first listen, it’s discordant and, at times, unpleasant. On my second voyage, I understood its placement and purpose. James Blake and Travis Scott contribute vocals. It sounds like a Bronze Age that never got sanded down.
Jennifer Lame cuts nearly three hours into something with a pulse. The film has peaks and valleys, and I won’t pretend the valleys don’t exist. The peaks are breathless. The valleys give you a chance to bring your heart rate back down. A handful of water sequences expose the limits of what visual effects can do with an ocean, but the detail work on the ship gives you somewhere better to look.
Wrong Helmet, Right Myth
Before a frame was public, historians were already unhappy. Damon’s first-look image released by Universal showed Odysseus in a red-plumed Corinthian helmet rather than the boar’s-tusk helmet described in the Iliad. Greek critics objected to a cast without a single Greek actor in it. Then came the argument over the casting of Nyong’o. The Oscar winner is one of the most beautiful women on the planet, yet somehow that wasn’t enough for some people to accept her as Helen of Troy. The racism in that objection wasn’t particularly difficult to recognize, and neither was the fact that it said more about the people making it than it did about the casting.
Some of the historical criticism is fair, and some of it misses how the poem has always worked. Every era that has retold The Odyssey has found ways to make its characters look like the people telling the story. Nolan’s position is that the oldest surviving depictions dress Homer’s characters as Homer’s own audience might have imagined them. That’s the register he chose. Others argue there is no historically accurate Odysseus to begin with because the man is a myth. You can’t demand documentary-like rigor from a fictional hero and then turn around and accept that he fought a giant with one eye.
What’s not really arguable is the size of Nolan’s swing. He has spent his career building cinematic machines out of time, memory and identity. Homer hands him all three in their original packaging. The Odyssey isn’t the tightest thing he’s made, and Oppenheimer remains the more disciplined film. But this is the bigger one, and perhaps the more generous one, because it wants an entire audience inside the same three-thousand-year-old story at once. Weeks after its release, people are still buying out showings. As a country, we haven’t agreed on much lately. We seem to have agreed on this.
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