There’s more than a bit of hubris in adapting Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic to the screen. But Christopher Nolan, fresh from his Oscar-winning triumph with Oppenheimer, has managed to pull it off. What’s fascinating about his nearly 3-hour version of The Odyssey is not the just visual grandeur of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s visuals, which blend impressive CG monsters with practical effects. (And yes, the first film shot entirely shot in IMAX cameras looks and sounds suitably all-encompassing when viewed in the biggest, most IMAXy screen you can find.)
Where Nolan truly succeeds is in articulating a modern approach to Odysseus’s journey. He blends genres, from war film to body horror to seat-of-the-pants action. But he also imagines Odysseus himself as a blend of clever war hero, serial endurer of misfortunes, and nearly retired gunslinger with one last fight in him. Matt Damon, who became a box office favorite as the supersmart action hero Jason Bourne, proves a savvy choice to play the title role. Bourne and Odysseus share an intelligent craftiness, a moral compass that prevents them from inflicting too much harm (or deeply regretting it when they do), as well as a telltale period of profound memory loss.
One of Nolan’s most striking departures from the original text is his version of Calypso, the seductively ethereal nymph goddess who keeps Odysseus in her lair for years after he’s overcome most of his post-Trojan War obstacles and emerged as the sole survivor among his army of Ithacans. Charlize Theron’s Calypso is less a jealous hoarder of her mortal lover than a glorified trauma therapist who coaxes Odysseus to confront the pain he has endured and inflicted on others. She even helps to wean him off the narcotic-like Lotus leaves that have kept him in a state of blissful forgetfulness. She’s a kind of psyschopharmacologist with benefits. (In Homer’s epic, the drug-loving Lotus eaters distract our hero and his men earlier in the story, on an entirely different island.) Puzzlingly, she also voluntarily gives up her longtime Love Island hookup and encourages him to head home when she deems him ready for it, without the intercession of the more powerful gods Mercury and Jove.
Calypso’s therapy sessions replace Odysseus’s trip to mythical Scheria, where in the book he regaled the court of King Alcinous with his misadventures after leaving Troy in triumph. There is now a therapeutic purpose to the hero’s recounting of his journey, one episode at a time. It allows him to grapple with the consequences of his actions, the ways in which he lied and manipulated his men ostensibly for the greater good but also because he didn’t complete trust anyone but himself. The boy soldier Sinon (Elliot Page) is killed delivering the warrior-filled horse to the Trojans without knowing it’s a ruse; Odysseus steers his boat away from the deadly whirlpool of Scylla into a channel where he knows the boulderlike monster Charybdis will nab six more of his crew — infuriating his men who’ve been kept in the dark about the fate of their comrades. Even when he’s transparent, Odysseus can’t win. His crew defies his warnings not to eat the cattle of Helios on the next island they find, incurring the wrath of the gods when they finally set sail for home.
Odysseus’s memory loss extends to his ignorance of whether he has a wife or son — a confusion that he articulates so that Nolan can shift the action back to Ithaca, where Anne Hathaway’s stoically defiant Penelope is fending off suitors (led by Robert Pattinson’s weaselly Antinous) who’ve turned her court into a raucous frat house. We also catch up with the eager but untested Telemachus, whom Tom Holland plays as a kind of slightly more grown-up Peter Parker, full of plucky determination to live up to expectations. In another nod to Nolan’s contemporary approach, the young man refers to Odysseus as “dad.” He also speaks in an American accent — as do other Brits in the cast like Pattinson and Mia Goth (as Penelope’s duplicitous servant Mélantho).
While The Odyssey nods to Old Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics, the IMAX camerawork and Nolan’s Dark Knightly sensibility shift even daytime scenes into a kind of foreboding gloom. That’s apt for carefully choreographed sequences like the one set in the cave of the casually cruel cyclops (who bites the heads off of humans as if they’re gummy bears) or the violent sea storm that ultimately separates Odysseus from the last dregs of his crew. But it also underscores how this auetur wants to challenge our understanding of a war hero — to interrogate the requirements of leadership as well as its costs.
To this end, Nolan presents the Trojan War three times: First as a brief bit of Old Hollywood ’50s hagiography, a song sung by a court poet (Travis Scott) in Penelope’s banquet hall back in Ithaca. Later, we get more detailed and graphic account through the eyes of Spartan warrior Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), who shares the “inside” story with Telemachus when he seeks out Menelaus for word about his father’s fate. Holland’s earnest, untested prince knows that his own future is precarious since Penelope’s suitors have grown impatient with her reluctance to remarry and are likely to kill him before he can make his own claim for the throne. Menelaus’s version unfolds like a thrillingly detailed battle sequence, shot in short blurry bursts by torchlight that underscore the brilliance of Odysseus’s strategy but also its violence. The scene, which composer Ludwig Göransson sets to drumbeats that speed up like a racing heartbeat, recalls the visceral battles of ’70s films like Apocalypse Now or The Deer Hunter.
But when the hero himself begins to recall the details of the fateful campaign, after we’ve seen all the other hardships he’s endured in his decade-long journey to return home, he sees the events in a very different light. His horse gambit was clever but controversial. A statue delivered as a gift to the goddess Athena was used as a weapon of war; offerings to the gods are not meant to have strings attached. After being trailed by the stern, sad-eyed apparition of Athena herself (Zendaya), Damon’s Odysseus comes to understand the full scope of his actions. His brilliance won him a war and esteem, but he’s also fallen short of his ideals both as a Greek and as a leader. He needs to atone.
But first, he also needs to rescue his wife and son — leading up to a propulsively entertaining final battle scene where he confronts that frat house back in Ithaca with only the most peripheral assist from his son and a blind and blindly loyal servant named Eumaeus (played by a totally unrecognizable John Leguizamo). Nolan takes some more liberties here, letting the suitors retrieve captured weapons and having Penelope herself consign Mélantho to her fate. Even the saintly queen has blood on her hands and cause to seek atonement.
Damon’s Odysseus isn’t allowed to savor that final victory, or the reunion with his beloved. He still must make amends for all his missteps and betrayals, both large and small, and to honor the souls of all the lives that were lost so that he could reach his destination. He must complete the mission delivered to him by the crafty Circe (Emily Mortimer) in the movie’s most riveting setpiece. After drugging his hungry crew and turning them into pigs to be slaughtered, Circe sets her sights on Odysseus himself. He proves too crafty for her, but his escape comes with a prophesy that she describes as “not a curse but a truth” that provides the hero step-by-step instructions for the obstacles that await him on the path back home to Ithaca. Mortimer brilliantly underplays her character’s villainy, delivering her lines with cool-headed rationality, as if she were just another one of her conjured creatures acting purely according to its nature.
“When you see death,” Athena asks Odysseus at one point, “do you see chance or consequence?” Damon’s Odysseus wavers between those two poles — though the latter weighs more heavily once Circe lays out his future so clearly for him. But his journey changes him, and his PTSD merely slows his determination to just push through. Nolan’s biggest innovation may be his ending, which skips Odysseus’s reunion with his father, Laertes, and the insurrection that erupts among Ithacans upon their king’s return. Instead, our hero continues with his healing process, sailing off into the rose-fingered sunset with Penelope to make amends to the gods whom he has offended and the souls of all the people whose deaths he has caused. No homecoming comes without sacrfice, Nolan suggests in his sweeping and satisfying epic, and even the victors must face a reckoning for their shortcomings. ★★★★★
THE ODYSSEY
Rated R
Running time: 2 hours, 53 minutes