Review: THE ODYSSEY

 by Rob DiCristino

“Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost.”

It should come as no surprise that Christopher Nolan would choose to follow his Best Picture-winning Oppenheimer — the purest, most ideal synthesis of his lofty thematic sensibilities and blockbuster storytelling instincts — with a retelling of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. It’s almost too perfect, really: The storyteller of storytellers presents the story of stories, the classical text widely considered by scholars to be the foundation of all literature ever recorded by mankind. Who else but Christopher Nolan — the Thinking Man’s Studio Director, now at the height of his power — could do it justice? Nolan is our last remaining above-the-title auteur, after all, the only filmmaker whose mere involvement in a project all but guarantees both critical and commercial success. An opus like The Odyssey deserves such pomp and circumstance. It deserves to be brought to life by a master craftsman like Nolan, who’s intelligent enough to appreciate its momentous influence on the modern world and articulate enough to effectively stage it for a mainstream audience.

For my friends who have forgotten their school days (or who never bothered to read it in the first place): The Odyssey begins in the banquet hall of Ithaca's king, Odysseus (Matt Damon), now gone twenty years since Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) called his commanders to the Trojan War. In Odysseus’ long absence, his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), has been besieged by a host of wealthy suitors, each one scheming to marry the would-be widow and seize the throne before Odysseus’ rightful heir, Telemachus (Tom Holland) comes of age. The most prominent among them is the pompous Antonious (Robert Pattinson), who, though he admired Odysseus in his youth, has come to resent the great king and plots with Penelope’s handmaiden Melantho (Mia Goth) to win the queen’s reluctant hand. Frustrated by his powerlessness to stop these evil machinations — and dreaming to one day reunite with a father he never knew — good-hearted Telemachus sets sail to Sparta, where he hopes to find incontrovertible proof that a forgotten hero will soon make his way home.

Meanwhile, an amnesiac Odysseus lays on a faraway shore, held an unknowing captive by the nymph, Calypso (Charlize Theron). Though their lives are peaceful, Odysseus is plagued by an emptiness that Calypso finally lifts by restoring his memories of the war: These memories include his forces’ sack of Troy, their battle with the fearsome Cyclops, their encounter with the alluring Sirens, their confrontation with the transmogrifying witch, Circe (Samantha Morton), and their descent into Hades, where they communed with dead comrades — including Sinon (Elliot Page)— whom Odysseus, in his lust for glory, failed to honor with proper burial. In Sparta, King Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and his wife, Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) regale Telemachus with stories of his father’s exploits but offer no news of his fate. When Odysseus and Telemachus finally do return to Ithaca, they’ll rely on the bravery of stalwarts like blind herdsman Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) and the guidance of gods like Athena (Zendaya) to defeat the suitors and return their kingdom to glory.

If this is sounding like yet another sprawling Christopher Nolan film, it should. In fact, it’s remarkable just how comfortably The Odyssey’s non-linear structure suits Nolan’s signature talent for elliptical storytelling and, frankly, how willing the director is to trust his audience to track how each segment influences the others. True to Homer’s original text, much of The Odyssey is told in episodic flashbacks, with many of its dramatic revelations — most of all, Odysseus’ moral awakening after the Sack of Troy — coming in the final movements of each story thread. While The Odyssey lacks the character complexity of Oppenheimer or the sci-fi intricacy of Inception, Nolan’s ability to keep us invested in a variety of sequences often separated by time, place, and, in this particular case, planes of existence, remains his most significant contribution to blockbuster filmmaking. It’s almost funny to consider that a man once accused of pretension for writing labyrinthine screenplays like Memento and The Prestige was — perhaps unintentionally — actually using some of the oldest tricks of all.

Craftswise, The Odyssey is predictably spellbinding, with lush IMAX cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema and a guttural, understated score by Ludwig Göransson. Nolan shoots on location, of course, at the summits of ancient islands, in the depths of gigantic caves, and aboard massive warships replicating the designs once used by Achaean armies. While it’s completely inappropriate for me to dismiss such profound, exhausting work with just two sentences, Nolan and his team have unfortunately cultivated such a reputation for this sort of excellence that it’s become de rigueur; you’d be more surprised to hear that The Odyssey wasn’t an immaculate exercise in filmmaking prowess — an accomplishment that even the 70mm IMAX screen on which the film played in front of me could barely contain — than you would be to hear just how blown away I was by its depth and precision. However, like Oppenheimer before it, The Odyssey is also an epic of faces, with just as much time spent on the internal battles — tonally, think Bergman, not Harryhausen — as on the external ones.

The cast is uniformly excellent, with Nolan once again keeping his audience oriented throughout the story using recognizable faces who embody each theme, idea, and emotion he needs to communicate without relying on leaden exposition: Lupita Nyong’o, for example, as a face worth going to war for (no shit), Robert Pattinson as a slimy opportunist, Jon Bernthal as a cocksure ruffian with soul, and Zendaya as the ephemeral personification of wisdom. Matt Damon gives Odysseus a jolt of mischief (in the first act) and pathos (in the last). Anne Hathaway and her gigantic eyes play the tension boiling below Penelope’s regality. It might be young Tom Holland, though, who impresses the most: Iterating on adolescence in a much different mode than his spastic Peter Parker, Holland leans on Telemachus’ sense of duty; what seems like timidity is actually product of his breeding, a respect for the weight of each individual action he takes (or doesn’t take). It’s nice to see Holland not overcrank it for once. His path away from the MCU is starting to take shape.

For all the film’s virtues, though, some audiences will certainly grate against The Odyssey’s three-hour running time, and I’ll admit that there’s a clunkiness to some of the movements — mostly due to their episodic nature, which precludes sufficient momentum from building to a powerful ending — that may lead to some watch-checking even amongst Nolan’s most faithful. Worse, by singling out non-negotiable chapters from Homer’s text to include — the Trojan Horse, the Sirens’ song, etc. — Nolan also removes a few formative episodes that would have made his hero’s ultimate catharsis feel as stirring as it did in, say, Oppenheimer — which remains his masterpiece — and given us enough time to really chew on his myriad concerns about gods, men, and the future of civilization. Odysseus is clearly a great warrior, but the time and energy it takes for Nolan to depict those great wars leaves less time for his conversion from brash hero to penitent acolyte than Homer was able to give us. That’s a small quibble, though, and one that will almost definitely diminish with multiple viewings.

And honestly, that may just be me wanting more existential direction than a $250 million summer blockbuster featuring a one-eyed, man-eating giant is able to give me. But like Oppenheimer — I promise to only invoke Oppenheimer one more time, okay? — The Odyssey is concerned with the righteous and unrighteous behavior of human beings. It’s concerned with the empathy we extend to our neighbors and the mercy we extract from the gods and goddesses above. Just as Robert Oppenheimer wonders if his invention really had turned him into the destroyer of worlds, Odysseus wonders if humanity will ever be forgiven for the sins that he and his warriors committed against those who had been foolish enough to trust them. He laments that his song will be sung, not written, because he has damned civilization beyond the written word. That may be true — I don’t know about you, but current events don’t exactly instill me with a ton of confidence to the contrary — but as long as masters like Christopher Nolan are playing his tune, I think we stand a fighting chance.

The Odyssey hits U.S. theaters on Friday, July 17th.