Review Roundup: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Introspective and haunting, The Odyssey feels like Nolan is turning a new page in his filmography; a film that continues the soul-searching introspection that his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer grappled with, and deepens our understanding of one of the oldest stories in history. But it’s also a crowdpleaser in every sense of the word, a rousing and spectacular feat of blockbuster entertainment that wrestles with monsters and myths in equally dazzling ways.

The mark of a good adaptation is not that it plays every note, but that it honours every beat. But a great adaptation takes the material and makes something new from it, and so it is that Nolan does what I believe Homer did with the songs and folktales of his region. The Odyssey is an urgent diagnosis of who we are as a species at this point in our social evolution. Crucially, Nolan, like Homer, uses the key art form of his time to tell his version, in the largest format currently available. He has made a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar horror movie about how the moral abomination of “winning” has destroyed our notions of morality, along with our essential decency.

Yes, it’s straightforward — but it’s also Nolan, at the height of his power, using every skill, trick, technique, and ounce of Hollywood cred at his disposal to tell a story that’s both awe-inspiring and shockingly unambiguous.

With The Odyssey, director Christopher Nolan tries to thread a particularly difficult needle — as if Odysseus, on his long journey home from the Trojan War, had attempted to sail between the whirlpool and the six-headed Scylla. Nolan takes Homer’s ancient tale of a fabled warrior and molds it into a moral awakening about the ruin of warfare. It’s essentially Odysseus as J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Beyond imploring viewers to be kind and welcome immigrants, Nolan seems to be asking us to reckon with what horrors we have accepted to remain comfortable, to take stock of these things and to do what we can to make things right in the future. It’s a surprisingly nuanced and emotionally impactful political argument for a major summer blockbuster.

As a feat of pure adaptation, Nolan has achieved something I admittedly thought was near impossible. His stamp is all over the film — this is intellectual, brutalist, muscular Hollywood fare — yet it never wavers in its commitment to, and comprehension of, its source text. There’s not a single decision here that’s been thoughtlessly made, nor that I imagine Nolan himself couldn’t easily defend, much to the imagined chagrin of certain lawless parts of the internet.

It takes audiences on an incredible ride. A ride that, we believe, happens to be a little smoother in some places, and a little bumpier at others. In the end, it’s an awesome, fully satisfying film, but one that’s just a tad less than the perfection we’re all expecting.

One of the foundational stories of the Western canon has a grand, sweeping, meticulously diligent new version in writer/director Christopher Nolan’s epic version, bristling with Oscar-winning talent and impressive seriousness of purpose. It is, with a few significant exceptions, true to Homer’s story dating back to at least 300 BC and probably earlier. But there are also vestigial reflections of Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer, both about men who must grapple with the consquences of their destructive, even ruthless, acts during wartime.

For all its monsters, gods, armies, and thunder, The Odyssey finds its grandest image in a man confronting the dark mirror of what he has wrought. Nolan’s massive achievement understands that home is a place, a family, a memory, and a judgment. Odysseus may still recognize Ithaca when he reaches its shores. The more frightening question is whether Ithaca will recognize him.

This is the best part of Nolan’s commitment to (mostly) analog filmmaking, including the shot-on-film part: it makes you feel physically connected to onscreen events, in ways you can’t with slovenly, weightless “miracles” slapped together with ones and zeros in an entertainment factory.