The Odyssey
Updated: Jul 23
Matt Damon defies the Gods in Christopher Nolan's passionately anguished vision of Homer's Odyssey
After you have conquered the Dark Knight, WW2, the father of the atomic bomb, explored deep space, and the vast complexity of the mind, memory, dreams, and time, where can you go from here? Well, when you are Christopher Nolan, you go to the ancient story of stories, Homer's Odyssey. Nolan continues to raise his game as the master of the big cinema spectacle, pulling out his most audacious bag of tricks and reinventing the long absent sword and sandals epic with his most gigantic film yet.
It has been 20 years since the end of Trojan war where songs tell of the great and noble Odysseus's (Matt Damon) great victory, however Ithaca's king has still not returned leaving his kingdom squandered by the decadence of a gang of suiters led by the slimy Antinous (Robert Pattinson). As the suitors leer their way to the hand of Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) who lives in a wearying hope of her husband's return, the young Prince Telemachus (Tom Holland) makes haste to learn of what has become of his estranged father. Stranded on an island at the mercy of Calypso (Charlize Theron), the memories of home, war and the cursed voyage have become fragmented pieces of a shipwreck that Odysseus must put back together to finally come home. Only the apparition of the Goddess Athena (Zendaya) accompanies Odysseus, who harbours some unspoken guilt and trauma that he cannot escape.
While this mythical world of Gods and monsters is daring new territory for Nolan, the director's signature approach of large-scale vision designed with grounded detail brilliantly immerses into a world of the fantastical and the brutal. The Odyssey features some of Nolan's boldest and awe-inspiring visual creations, from the exhilarating siege of Troy within the wooden horse half buried in the sands, nightmarish encounters with the Cyclops, Sirens, giants, and a haunting journey to the underworld, yet the fury of the Gods is only expressed through the elemental forces of wind, thunderstorms and whirlpools. Nolan's Odyssey is visceral, dreamlike, all-encompassing and ground-breaking for the first feature film shot entirely in IMAX.
But all of Nolan's sense of scale is second to how much it ultimately serves the story. Like Inception (2010), and Interstellar’s (2014) journeys of fathers desperately trying to get back to their children, as well as the guilt-ridden torment that have plague characters like Leonard Shelby and J, Robert Oppenheimer, The Odyssey has a fitting place amongst Nolan's thematic landscape with Odysseus struggling to come to terms over his war crimes while trying to find his way back to a home he may not recognise. Ludwig Göransson’s ambient score provides the soulful melody of flutes that carries Odysseus internal despair that founds the emotional pull of the drama.
As for the leading man Matt Damon who is a natural screen legend with reliable charisma and fierce leadership, has a challenging weight to carry. Damon manages to find a natural way into Odysseus that is brave, wise, dubious in nature, but brings an overwhelming passion in his strongest moments, only matched when he is opposite Anne Hathaway who together unearth the most human and heartfelt qualities of the story. The other cast highlights come from John Leguizamo’s portrayal of Eumaeus, Robert Pattinson's dastardly Antinous, and a thinly present Zendaya, the latter of which comes to serve the film’s greatest trick. The mighty stand out of course is Samantha Morten who steals the show midway with demented rage where the film shifts into grisly body horror. Tom Holland is the unfortunate weak link with one of the most pivotal roles, but he never gets the emotional thrust he needs to make Telemachus' coming of age arc convincing. It is sometimes the fault in Nolan’s dialogue just not landing the way it should or at the right time, but also an imbalance of screen time.
As the film intercuts between Odysseus’s voyage and Ithaca, the structural integrity sometimes falters as it juggles to equally serve all of its characters. It is second instinct for Nolan to direct such interceding timelines, but it occasionally takes its time for the film to finds its footing. Some scenes feeling made with haste whether intentional or not, or it could be Nolan trying to keep the runtime under 3 hours in order for the whole film print to actually fit on the IMAX reel, who is to say?
What ultimately makes the Odyssey triumphant is the fact that Nolan understands the timelessness of Homer’s poem, which acts as a grand parable for humanity’s moral compass radically shifting when the sins of war have been unleashed. Believing the Gods to always be amongst them, the Greeks live by a societal code called 'Zeus's law,' (to treat those as you would treat yourself), but this way of life is gradually falling apart with the rise of invaders spreading across the sea. The floodgates have been opened and what was once thought of as heroism has now become barbarity, and hospitality has become hostility. Nolan’s film culminates as powerfully poignant outcry over the horrors of such animosity that cast an overbearing shadow for the world to come.
It could easily be all too much to grapple for any other director, but Nolan is such a confident filmmaker that the risks he takes just seem to payoff greatly. Nolan is one of the last directors working who still makes the cinema going experience an event, like a remanent of old Hollywood style film making to the likes of David Lean making Lawrence of Arabia (1962). In an age of aggressive artificial content, thank the Gods for directors like Christopher Nolan to keep the practical magic of filmmaking alive.
Comments