Christopher Nolan is “hardly a stranger to ambition”, said John Nugent on Empire. His first major film, “Memento”, told its story in two sequences – one that moved forward in time, the other backwards. Since then he has tackled wars, “dreams, wormholes, the nuclear apocalypse and Victorian teleportation machines”. But his adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey” – the 8th-century BC Greek poem that is the definition of epic – may be his most ambitious yet.
The first feature to be shot entirely on giant Imax 70mm cameras, it is “jaw-detaching” in its scope and scale. Plunging the viewer into a world of both “divine fantasy and grounded realism”, this is filmmaking “at a magnitude” few directors could imagine, let alone execute.
Nolan has produced a “mythic spectacle” that honours its ancient source material, “while also addressing more topical themes of exile, war trauma and survivor’s guilt”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos From
Like the poem, the film unfolds in multiple timelines. The present-day framing takes place on the island where an exhausted Odysseus (Matt Damon) washed up 10 years after the Battle of Troy, and is now held captive by the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron).
In the same time frame, we meet his sad queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) who – back in Ithaca – is being besieged by “power-hungry suitors”, including Antinous (a marvellously venomous Robert Pattinson), while her restless son Telemachus (Tom Holland) waits for the return of the father he has never known. Incidents from the previous decade are then woven in as Odysseus recovers his battered memory – the deception at Troy, and his adventures in the years after that, including an encounter with the enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton), and a diversion through Hades.
Nolan has conjured some “tremendous” scenes, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, some of which would not be out of place in a horror film (the cyclops is “truly terrifying”). I had my doubts about Damon’s casting, but in the end he does make you care about the man broken by the years he has lost. And though some may find the modern speech jarring, what’s the alternative? We’d struggle if they spoke in ancient Greek.
But for two hours the film is just set-piece after set-piece, backed by a deafening score, which becomes rather wearying. Yes, it’s short on jokes, said Kevin Maher in The Times; but “The Odyssey” – with its extraordinary cinematography and big ideas “about the impossibility of home” and “the absurdity of heroic individualism in a boundless universe” – is a masterpiece nonetheless.
