The Odyssey review
Christopher Nolan’s modern epic shows us the horrors of post-war. With a surprising emphasis on the horror.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
The Odyssey
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by Christopher Nolan
Starring Matt Damon, Tom Halland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morgon, Zendaya and Charlize Theron
The Odyssey Review
Christopher Nolan, who has never met a narrative he didn’t want to twist into a labyrinth of flashbacks and time jumps, might initially seem like an odd choice to adapt The Odyssey into an epic film. Sure, he loves his IMAX camera and throws an epic scope into most of his projects…but he’s rarely been bound by such a known piece of fiction. Yes, he made three Batman movies…but you can (and he did) take several liberties with the property. The Prestige was previously a novel…but not one that anyone was familiar with. The Odyssey is one of our most famous stories.
The Odyssey isn’t Nolan’s best film. It might be his most honest…but it’s not his best. There is still a fractured narrative unfolding here…but, for once, he isn’t using it to trick you or surprise you. He’s using it to make things as exciting as possible. He’s also using something that will probably be washed away as much as possible by more professional reviewers. Horror. If you wondered why a horror centric review site is reviewing the biggest “epic/fantasy/action” film of the year…it’s because it’s also a horror movie. IMDB won’t ever list it as such, of course. In fact, as of this writing, they’ve found TEN different genres to list it under with horror nowhere to be found.
This is the Parasite argument all over again. On the surface, Parasite is the dark comedy/drama/thriller it is listed as. But it works because Bong Joon Ho understands horror. His camera is shooting a horror movie. He’s using horror tricks. The suffocating suspense used in its finest moments contains ideas straight out of a horror movie. The Odyssey, admittedly, has so much going on that it would be easier to disguise the fact that Nolan is doing the same thing. It’s true that large portions of The Odyssey never touch on horror aspects whatsoever. It’s every bit of the Action Epic/Drama/Adventure movie you’ll see it credited as. It’s even whatever Sword & Sandal is. IMDB found room for that one.
What it omits is that Odysseus’s (Matt Damon) entire journey home takes him from one horror set piece to another. Whether it’s trying to survive the man eating giant cyclops they’ve trapped themselves in with or dealing with the body horror dealt out by a witch on a remote island…Nolan doesn’t hide that his main character’s titular odyssey is a horror story. There are jump scares here…there’s dark magic…there’s discussions with the dead…there’s true despair. It makes up everything about Odysseus’s part of the story. He isn’t a conquering hero who got lost on the way home. He’s the final girl dealing with every obstacle in his path to survival. He doesn’t come out of it as a heroic figure. He survives as one who knows he’s been damned…and is unwilling to let that stop him.
Not all of The Odyssey is told from his perspective though. Much of it comes from the POV of his son Telemachus (Tom Holland). He holds out hope that the father he never knew will return after two decades away. His mother Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is being pressured to remarry and give their home a new king. Among the many terrible suitors who have taken up residence in Odysseus’s home is Antinous (Robert Pattinson), a sniveling coward who Pattinson clearly relishes playing. Telemachus eventually sets out on his own journey to discover the truth about his father’s fate. This is part of how Nolan fractures the narrative…but he actually found a pretty elegant way to do so within the main plotline of the piece.
While we briefly see Odysseus before the Trojan War…we really meet him living with Calypso (Charlize Theron) with no memory of who he is or how long he’s been there. We see the bulk of his travels played out as memories returning to him. That’s where his horror story is contained. In flashbacks that return to him as they are revealed to us. The Odysseus we meet is the broken man who managed to survive it…and now has to relive the horrors. Worse…he has to remember that he deserved every bit of it. This is the true power of Nolan’s fractured narrative choice. Instead of leaning into the stock heroic archetypes that most Hollywood productions wouldn’t be able to avoid…The Odyssey is interested in exploring the opposite. There may be heroism in a doomed man defying that edict…but there’s tragedy in the man not seeing it that way.
One of the (understandable) criticisms of Nolan’s movie is the choice to use modern dialog in the story. I get that. It’s not set in modern times…so watching the cast talk like people do nowadays might seem a bit distracting. But it works. It works because the emotions that Nolan is aiming for are much easier to access when actors aren’t trying to sound like they’re from another time and place. Matt Damon is damned good here. So is Holland. So is everyone else. The Odyssey is a modern epic from sound design to editing to narrative tricks…why should the speech be any different?
As far as the only other complaint about the movie that I’m willing to even spend one moment’s thought on…unless you have a doctorate in bronze age armor…you aren’t going to make me care about this topic. It’s a movie…not a documentary. They wear old shit that looks good on film. Had this critique not been raised after the release of the first trailer for The Odyssey I’d have lived my entire life not knowing it wasn’t period accurate. You would have too. It’s hard to imagine walking out of the theater and honestly saying “I just couldn’t get into it because Trojan War armor didn’t look like that. If you do…congratulations on both your doctorate and inability to separate fiction from reality.
Scare Value
The Odyssey isn’t Nolan’s best movie. But it is a great one. It’s huge in ways most movies aren’t. It’s loud in ways that most movies wouldn’t attempt. A true epic for the modern age…with no apologies made for choosing to tell the story in ways that modern audiences will find appealing. Basically…it’s a movie. I’m not sure when that stopped being a thing people understand…but watching it play out might remind them of why that’s actually a good thing.
4/5
The Odyssey Link
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