So, “The Odyssey”… I’m going to get hate for this one. Get ready for a long review.
Christopher Nolan has become the definitive director of the 21st century. There’s no debating that anymore. He has essentially become this generation’s Steven Spielberg, and has a cultlike following around him that’s more blindly loyal and passionate than any other filmmaker’s fanbase.
But I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the man. “Memento” and “Inception” are some of my all-time favorite movies, and I likewise love “Interstellar” and “Batman Begins.” Yet Nolan has a malicious self-indulgence that hinders all of his other films. His nonlinear storytelling sometimes works in service of the film, but oftentimes feels completely unnecessary and only there for him to flex his pseudo-intellectualism. I’ve also found him to be, across each and every one of his films, an atrocious dialogist. His characters speak in empty platitudes, heavy exposition, or callbacks in which they repeat a line ninety times to force a theme. And Nolan’s worst cinematic crime, for me, was his complete misunderstanding of the Batman character in “The Dark Knight.” I won’t dive into that here, so if you’re interested, read this essay I wrote four years ago about his poor treatment of my favorite fictional character. That is by no means the best piece of film criticism ever written, but I maintain its sentiments.
The core issue with Nolan, though, is people will so blindly eat up anything he does, no matter the quality, that he can get away with any bad line of dialogue or nonsensical plot hole or casting Travis Scott. He has no one to tell him “no” anymore, when he desperately needs a Roger Corman or Scott Rudin or Bob Evans over his shoulder, reigning him in.
Okay, end of preamble. “The Odyssey” is based on Homer’s epic poem, perhaps the most famous piece of literature… ever. It stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, the King of Ithaca who, after ten years of war, struggles to return home in the face of monsters, witches, and nature itself working against him. Meanwhile, his devoted wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) faces several suitors hoping to attain rule over Ithaca, namely Robert Pattinson’s gloriously slimy Antinous. Penelope’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland), who has never met his father, struggles to gain respect among his kingdom, and ventures off to inquire on whether his father is alive after now being missing for nearly twenty years.
Before I start my complaint-fest, let’s delve into what works, because so much of “The Odyssey” is utterly fantastic. Obviously, Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is truly gorgeous. His use of blue and orange in particular always amazes me. I don’t jump on the IMAX train like many others do, but I will always compliment van Hoytema for making the human face as much of a canvas as the environments themselves. Furthermore, the film has a compelling central idea that Odysseus, through enduring so many harrowing obstacles on his way home, is essentially punishing himself for the atrocities he committed during the Trojan War. The film was at its best whenever it portrayed the magnitude of Odysseus’s guilt. Matt Damon has a monologue in the third act that brilliantly summarizes this, albeit through clunky expository dialogue.
Nolan once again relies on his nonlinear storytelling structure, with most of the story told as flashbacks within flashbacks. Outside of the disastrously clunky first twenty minutes, you get into the nonlinear groove once Odysseus actually begins the return home, and Nolan succeeds at always making it clear where we are, and when. I was pleasantly surprised.
But you see “The Odyssey” for the spectacle, so how was it? Hit or miss. Again, focusing on positives for now, the Circe sequence, final shipwreck sequence, and Trojan Horse sequence are all phenomenal. They’re largely close quarters horror scenes with the camera close to the actors as they’re either being turned into pigs or drowning or gasping for air inside of a wooden statue. Essentially, when the movie sticks to the “Dunkirk” boots-on-the-ground, battle against the elements spectacle, it becomes incredibly exciting. It’s visceral, grimy, muscular entertainment. I also thought Nolan succeeded at developing the camaraderie between the soldiers without needing to write kumbaya-around-the-campfire scenes; they feel like a family that has seen the world’s worst atrocities for a decade without ever having to speak about it. Himesh Patel, albeit a little too skinny for the role, gave one of the better performances in the film as Eurylochus, Odysseus’s hardened right hand man.
However, this is an epic. An epic, arguably above all else, needs grandeur. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has none. Despite all the propagandistic marketing materials about this being “the hardest shoot of our lives” and every frame being shot in IMAX 70MM, the movie feels oddly mundane. I think this comes down to three key elements: Nolan’s moronic insistence on realism, the repetitious set design and shooting locations, and Ludwig Göransson’s shamefully lame score.
Let’s start with Nolan’s direction, because those other two elements are really a result of his poor decision-making. In several interviews, Nolan has explained he wanted to shoot the film from the perspective of the humans and how they would subjectively experience gods and monsters. As a result of that sentiment, alongside his total opposition to CGI, everything is undercooked. Each time there’s a witch or a god or an undead soldier, they simply look like they’re playing dress up in the sand because of how understated these magical elements are. When Zendaya shows up as Athena, for example, she looks like someone who just threw on a robe and walked out of her house, and happened to run into Odysseus on the beach. There’s a reason why these figures have elsewhere been visualized as enormous or shrouded in light or even shrouded in shadow. That stylization helps illustrate their uncanny power, the threat they pose or the hope they bring. It’s what makes mythology so viscerally powerful.
Likewise, whenever Nolan shoots monsters, it’s commonly in handheld shaky cam, frequently cutting away from the beasts to the reaction shots of Odysseus’ men. If Nolan were to hold onto the monsters in a straight-on, classical medium wide or wide shot, emphasizing their threat instead of distracting us from it with, again, the incessant cutaways to reactions, it would be more effective. No where are Nolan’s failures more evident than in the Cyclops sequence. The creature design and sound design are absolutely brilliant, but he almost always shoots the Cyclops from the same handheld low angle while cutting away to some random soldier every other second. He never gives you a chance to breathe in the danger and magnitude of this being. It is appallingly over-edited. Thus, when you combine extreme understatement, poor shot composition, and quick-cut editing, you get largely unremarkable sequences.
Likewise, Nolan has never been good at shooting close-quarters action. Perhaps the Bane fight in the middle of “The Dark Knight Rises,” but that is it. Again, he resorts to this shaky cam at odd angles, often using telephoto lenses that flatten the frame. None of the sword fights feel dynamic or dangerous because the camera is strangely off to the side, sort of swaying around without any diegetic motivation. Proper action requires simple camera angles that leave all the fighting clear and distinct to the viewer, balanced with camera movement that matches the dynamism of the bodies clashing against each other. That is an incredibly overgeneralized one-sentence summary, so if you want a better idea of what I mean, watch the bathroom fight in “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” or pretty much any scene from the “Extraction” movies.
Now, returning to the other filmic components that diminish grandeur, let’s discuss production design. Every single island in “The Odyssey” looks the same. Odysseus and his men will land on one island, flee a beast, sail to another island, and repeat the cycle. But when each beach they land on looks truly identical, as do all the shrubbery and nature, everything blends together and loses any distinctiveness. Again, Nolan’s insistence on doing everything practical and outdoors actually hurt the film rather than helped it. There needed to be some panache in the locations, some, again, otherworldliness. Even if that meant shooting inside a studio where you could manufacture your own environment. Ultimately, much “The Odyssey” just feels like men in costumes walking along the coast of a beach in 2026. Likewise, the actual sets are nothing to write home about. We hear all this talk of Troy, all this talk of Ithaca, but when we’re actually there, they each consist of about two to three sets. This is actually where a massive CGI aerial shot would be helpful, because as is, these cities look so unremarkable and small. When Odysseus and Agamemnon’s men storm the gates of Troy, it looks so fake and, once again, small because it’s just two walls, a massive door, and some stairs built with supplies you could get at Home Depot. Ithaca is certainly superior in design, but not by much. You get about ten shots across the film of the villages in the city, so you don’t truly get a feel of what life is like there. “Ithaca” might as well be nothing but Penelope’s castle, because almost every scene in Ithaca takes place in Penelope’s dining hall. Now, that set is actually quite beautiful, but since about a third of the film takes place there, including the bulk of the final act, you get tired of it quickly.
Thirdly, we have Göransson’s forgettable score. I’m starting to think we overhyped this man. The “Oppenheimer” score was one of the best of the century, yes, but beyond that I have never been all that impressed by his work. His score for “The Odyssey” is largely just beating drums and various groaning noises that work well enough at maintaining the energy of a scene, but do little else. No one will actually listen to this score for fun on their own time.
Aside from the lack of grandeur, an issue I had with this film and, I suppose, Homer’s original poem was the immensely boring B story of Penelope and Telemachus waiting for Odysseus to return. Every time the film cuts away from the titular Odyssey to Hathaway or Holland sulking, all the momentum got sucked out of the story. To Nolan’s credit, this was how the original poem was structured, and about 75% of his film directly follows Odysseus. So, the cutting away is annoying, but certainly not egregious.
The final component to note is one I’ve already hinted at: the ear-scraping dialogue. Ear-scraping on two counts. The first is the stilted way of speaking, often in platitudes and exposition, the worst being when Helen of Troy tells Telemachus, “[Agamemnon] was with my twin sister Clytemnestra,” as if in normal conversation you’ll say “my twin sister” to someone who already knows of your relation. The second count is, of course, Nolan’s odd choice to have everyone speak in American accents in 2026 dialect. We all knew this going in, and it’s not nearly as disruptive as I thought it would be… except for the times when it got so bad that I couldn’t help but smirk. Seeing Greeks from millennia ago shouting “let’s go” over and over again just did not work. But at least Travis Scott utters a 12th century BC rap which both opens and closes the film. That’s right: the first voice you hear is Travis Scott, and as that “Directed by Christopher Nolan” end credit drops, you hear Travis Scott some more.
Believe it or not, I did not hate “The Odyssey.” I launched criticism after criticism, yes, but only because a film with this much money and supposed prestige dedicated to it needs a harsh eye. We cannot accept anything less than epic from “The Odyssey.” The final product is one that is quite watchable and contains a few transcendent moments, yet ultimately flounders for most of its overlong runtime as Nolan crushes himself under the weight of his excessive realism.
C