Film review: ‘THE ODYSSEY’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’

Homer’s epic tale The Odyssey, which describes Odysseus’ tumultuous journey home to his family and his Kingdom of Ithaca following the Trojan War presents not only a thrilling adventure but a psychological landscape of human struggle against the forces besieging us in life.  Its influence on literature, storytelling and culture is immeasurable having inspired countless works including James Joyce’s Ulysses, probably every fantasy adventure novel and even the Cohen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou.

Now, Christopher Nolan has taken on the daunting task of bringing The Odyssey to the big screen.  Nolan’s films have become event cinema, with feverish anticipation amped up by lengthy marketing campaigns.  This has also meant they have increasingly become subject to social media speculation and outrage from those who take offence at some aspect of a trailer.  Never has this been more potent or toxic than for The Odyssey where grumpy blokes on the internet have railed against a film they haven’t seen and complained bitterly about its so-called “woke casting”.  It’s unfortunate that a film has to run headlong into that sort of storm but this is the reality of the social media age.  That being said, The Odyssey is an erratic film.  Thanks largely to Homer it’s a cracking epic adventure, thanks to Nolan it’s also technically brilliant in some sequences but it’s also infuriatingly clumsy and poorly judged in others.

An important question was how Nolan would approach The Odyssey.  Would he take the path of Wolfgang Peterson in Troy (an adaptation of Homer’s previous poem The Iliad) and make it a straightforward macho sword and sandals adventure or would he embrace the full gods and monsters mythology of the original story. It’s a bit of both. Nolan delivers the iconic otherworldly sequences such as Odysseus’ (Matt Damon) brutal confrontation with the Cyclops, Polyphemus (Bill Irwin), the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) turning Odysseus’ shipmates into pigs, Odysseus lashing himself to the ship’s mast to avoid being lured to his death by the sirens’ song and the deadly encounter with the six headed serpent Scylla.  On the other hand, Nolan is intriguingly coy about the supernatural elements. The film’s opening title card talks about a time of “apparent” magic and while Odysseus has visions of Athene (Zendaya) and appears to experience the wrath of Poseidon and Zeus in ferocious storms, all these events could be given earthly explanations.

Plotwise, the film covers most of the main points from the original story: Odysseus’ various violent adventures, his son Telemachus’ (Tom Holland) journey to find his father and wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) trying to hold off hordes of suitors (including Robert Pattinson’s Antinous) who wish to marry her and claim the Kingdom of Ithaca in Odysseus’ absence. Nolan, however, makes a few changes. Some, such as the excision of the sequence with the Phaeacians appear to have been made out of necessity to prevent the film running for about 10 hours while others have been done to alter the tone of the action and emphasise particular themes such as the futility of war.  Some of these changes work well but a few hurt the film.  One of the better examples is his handling of the suitor Antinous’s plot to kill Telemachus at Pylos. In the poem this is a fairly rudimentary sequence but in the film Nolan situates the action within a wonderfully atmospheric religious festival and efficiently combines this part of the story with a different section of the poem in which Odysseus deals with a local Ithacan bully.  Nolan also focuses more than Homer on the Trojan Horse sequence.  The original story only briefly mentioned the Horse.  It was described in more detail in other works like Roman Poet Virgil’s The Aeneid.  Here, Nolan makes this sequence not only a visually striking set piece that weirdly evokes Plant of the Apes but it also allows him to examine the ugly reality of war and provides insights into Odysseus’ psychology.

Less successful, though, is Nolan’s treatment of some other critical characters and events.  Odysseus’ battle with Polyphemus has been hugely truncated here and is resolved much too quickly. The poem featured a fascinating dialogue and psychological by-play between Odysseus and the cyclops but here Polyphemus barely speaks.  Nolan tries to explain this but the reason doesn’t ring true.  To be fair, any sequence with a giant cyclops is going to be great but it still feels rushed.  Also, the encounter with Calypso (Charlize Theron) has been neutered.  In the book, Calypso is described as a powerful seductive goddess nymph who basically makes Odysseus her sex slave (something he’s ok with for about seven years) and presents a challenge to his fidelity to wife Penelope. Here, Calypso is just someone on an island to whom Odysseus relates his story. There’s none of sexual frisson between them or pervasive sense of dark magic that worked so brilliantly in the original story.

Nolan has also sought to connect The Odyssey’s themes to our present-day concerns by giving the film a contemporary flavour, an approach that has mixed results. It’s still set in the Ancient Greek world but characters talk like present day Americans even using the f word.  As some have pointed out, it’s a little presumptuous to expect people in a fantasy version of Ancient Greece to talk like Royal Shakespearean actors but given the intricately reconstructed historical environment, Nolan’s approach to dialogue often jars badly. More effectively, Nolan presents the story through a contemporary social and political lens which will no doubt irk the YouTubers even further. He doesn’t cling to the tenets of the hero’s journey or old Hollywood notions of the noble warrior. Instead, he holds Odysseus to account for his actions and forces him to confront the slaughter he helped inflict on Troy. His odyssey is in many ways a journey through combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder.

In part because of the awkwardly contemporary dialogue, the performances don’t always work. Matt Damon is invariably a likeable screen presence but he doesn’t feel quite right here.  For much of the film it feels like we’re watching Matt Damon not Odysseus although he is more effective in the film’s final stages.  Tom Holland should have been an ideal Telemachus. He has shown, particularly as Spiderman, an appropriate mix of innocence, vulnerability and determination but he doesn’t deliver a particularly convincing performance. Again, it felt as if we were watching Tom Holland not Telemachus.  As Penelope, Anne Hathaway is more convincing and she effectively conveys the characters’ dignified resistance amid conflicting emotions although some of her dialogue is drowned out by Nolan’s and composer Ludwig Goransson’s thundering soundtrack.  Unfortunately, in the brief scenes they have together their isn’t a lot of chemistry between Damon and Hathaway.  Robert Pattinson is disappointing as the despicable suitor Antinous.  It’s a one note performance in which he mostly just snarls contemptuously.  Anthony Quinn was far more charismatic in the role in the 1954 film Ulysses. Jon Bernthal is miscast as Spartan King Menelaus. As he counsels Telemachus, he sounds like some guy from the neighbourhood in Jersey. Charlize Theron hints at a compelling performance as Calypso but simply isn’t given enough to do to make that character memorable. John Leguizamo, though, is impressively soulful in a Mark Ruffalo-esque performance as Eumaeus the pig herder and Odysseus’ family confidante. Elliot Page does decent work as Greek soldier Sinon, a character borrowed from the Aenied and reworked for this film to embody the destructive impact of Odysseus’ actions.  Lupita Nygono isn’t given a lot of screen time as Helen of Troy but makes an impression in a fleeting appearance as Helen’s identical twin sister Clytemnestra. The best performance, however, comes from Samantha Morton as the witch Circe. It’s a fairly brief role but she makes the character both a threatening predator and sympathetic victim.

Much has been made of Nolan’s decision to shoot on location around Greece, Morocco, Italy and Iceland and in this age of CGI trickery this decision is extremely welcome. The location shooting gives some of the outdoor sequences a rugged beauty that is possibly the film’s greatest strength. Admirably, Nolan has also opted for practical effects over CGI which adds to its earthy visceral feel.

Unfortunately, some of the film’s visual impact is badly undermined by Nolan’s manic, choppy editing style and gratuitous use of extreme close-ups and wobble cam.  A crucial fight scene in the latter part of the film suffers appallingly from these problems and becomes almost incoherent.  Fortunately, most of the big action set pieces such as the battle with the Laestrygonians are more clearly shot.

Nolan has attempted something both intimate and epic with The Odyssey. He doesn’t always get there. The film doesn’t wield the emotional power it should and there are some glaring missteps but more often than not Nolan’s artistic vision wins out.

Nick’s rating: ***1/2

Genre: Fantasy/ Drama/ Action/ Adventure.

Classification: M.

Director(s): Christopher Nolan.

Release date: 16^th July 2026.

Running time: 172 mins.

Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.

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