Greece is the word! Christopher Nolan's colossal adaptation of Homer's classic is as epic as cinema gets
Take a sweeping retelling of one of history’s oldest and most thrilling tales, featuring battles, gods and monsters, then shoot it entirely on IMAX cameras to ensure limitless scope. Pepper it with an all-star cast including Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway and Charlize Theron. Finally, bring it to the boil under the watchful eye of Christopher Nolan, arguably the greatest director of the 21st century, who in the seven years between 2005 and 2012 made The Dark Knight trilogy, The Prestige and Inception.
This is the recipe for the year’s most propulsively watchable blockbuster, The Odyssey, an extraordinary feat of filmmaking that is, to quote a famous meme, pure cinema.
At the heart of it all is Odysseus, played by Matt Damon. He’s the kind of lead character that’s as synonymous with Christopher Nolan films as the deep blues and greys of the colour palette, the incredible sound design, and the odd bit of inaudible dialogue.
Odysseus is Batman, the hero who increasingly struggles with the moral complexities of the life he’s chosen. He’s also J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man whose efforts to bring a resolution to a war he didn’t start have dire consequences upon the world and his soul. There are plenty of other allusions to Nolan’s other films too, with the interminably long time Odysseus and his men spend on the beach outside Troy recalling his World War II epic, Dunkirk.
Unlike other Nolan films, The Odyssey doesn’t dazzle from the off. The talkiness and choppy editing of the first 20 minutes do little to quicken the pulse, though may elicit minor pangs of panic in those with the loftiest of expectations. Thankfully, it’s an expositional preamble, putting all the chess pieces in place before the next two-and-a-half hours breathlessly takes you from one extraordinary set piece to another, as Odysseus and his men desperately try to make their way home to Ithaca in the face of extraordinary odds.
Those odds manifest themselves in appalling ways. An encounter with a cave-dwelling Cyclops and a forest attack by giant knights are truly unsettling. As are the claustrophobic realities of soldiers crammed inside a Trojan Horse without toilet facilities when the tide comes in. Other moments are pure nightmare fuel, such as the questionable hospitality of Samantha Morton’s Circe, and Odysseus having to converse with fallen comrades in Hades. These moments present a side of this director we haven’t seen before, a gift for horror it would be great to see more of. Is there anything he can’t do?
Since we’re asking the question, Nolan still doesn’t excel when it comes to writing for women, even those with a basis in Homer’s almost 3,000-year-old poem. This means the performances of his female cast members, though uniformly strong, do a lot with a little and in roles generally limited to being vague figures of attraction, conscience, or treachery – the excellent Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, notwithstanding.
Christopher Nolan’s films don’t often come up for air, as is the case here, with the majority of its running time a maelstrom of relentless action and cacophonous music – courtesy, once again, of Swedish maestro Ludwig Göransson. This relentlessness can come at the expense of emotional depth, even in a film with such unbelievably high stakes, though scenes with Odysseus’ loyal old hunting dog, Argos, offer enough heartbreak to go around.
You may wonder whether in another director’s hands, the quieter, more delicate moments might be made more impactful. The thought doesn’t last long, though, as that’s not really what people are buying tickets to see this in 70mm for – and if you’re not electrified watching this on the biggest screen possible, then you probably don’t like movies, and are more than likely dead.
There’s certainly plenty of death wrought in the film’s climactic confrontation. When Batman Begins was released in 2005, some criticised Nolan’s approach to shooting action. Watching this sequence, pitched somewhere between The Red Wedding in Game Of Thrones and the hammer fight in Oldboy, you appreciate how far he’s come in improving his flaws as a filmmaker.
The Odyssey is a staggering achievement with passion and ambition in every frame, as well as some subtext relevant to our current climate baked in, about the spiralling destructiveness of war and imperialism, and its cost for the innocent.
Time will tell if it’s to be Nolan’s finest work, but it’s certainly his most comprehensive. Visits to the cinema are rarely so rewarding.
Verdict: 5/5
The Odyssey is out now via Universal.
