REVIEW:
The Odyssey was good without being great. Like too many movies by terrific filmmakers these days (such as Scorcese,) the problem with making a movie that feels and is too long is that audiences generally don’t want to see it more than once. That’s certainly the case for the Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s three hour epic that tells the story of Odysseus as presented in Homer’s classic poem.
This movie seemingly captures everything from the book. Yes, there are small things left out, but all of the major obstacles the men come across, as well as the desire to get home after spending years at sea, are really captured here. Truth be told, this is probably Nolan’s best movie in some time. Yes, audiences gushed over his recent work like Oppenheimer and Interstellar, but Nolan really excels when he takes on fantasy. That’s what we got with his Batman series, and that’s what we get here. A fantastical world full of larger than life creatures.
Now let’s be clear, when talking about Nolan’s work… his best movies were earlier on in his career. Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Batman Begins, and the Dark Knight. Saying the Odyssey is his best in a while, doesn’t even put it in the same ballpark as those others. That being said, it is still a very well-made movie.
The fact is, I can’t imagine a version of this story done any better than this one is. The movie needs to be long to capture the feel of the epic, and the long amount of time that Odysseus was away from his wife. And the A List, star-studded cast go all out, with everyone of these actors giving powerhouse performances. it’s hard to say who the actors doing it best are here. Most will probably point away from Tom Holland, as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, since Holland is basically doing his usual voice and sounds like he is using modern lingo and dialogue, like “I will see my dad again.” And yet it’s that way of using modern language, as opposed to forced British accents and proper tones, that make this movie feel different than one might expect. There’s no attempt at sounding like Shakespeare or speaking in a classic tongue, the way most directors would tell this story, and that is a nice change.
Christopher Nolan employs his usual fractured narrative structure here, showing us parts of the Trojan Horse situation at the start of the film, parts in the middle, and then the whole thing at the end. This works out very nicely here, with us getting different pieces of the puzzle at different times. Nolan hasn’t always been great at this (his Tenet was nothing short of a disaster,) but here, for this epic war film, it works out.
The story is about this ship full of men who get stuck at sea, arrive on different islands, and have to deal with one challenge after another. First it’s a cyclops who traps them in a cave. Then it’s giants who viciously slay as many of them as they can. Next it’s Cersee, a witch who turns men into pigs. But the time we get to a monster of the sea, it’s almost as if Nolan has run out of energy. This could have easily been one of if not the coolest scenes in the movie, and instead it is sort of rushed over with the monster never being shown in closeup. I suppose that’s to give us the point of view of the men on the ship, and to see only what they saw, but still, it would have been pretty neat to see what a monster looks like through Christopher Nolan’s eyes.
There are but two issues I have with this movie. The first is that for all the talk about spectacle and how great it was that Nolan did everything for real, instead of using CGI, there isn’t a whole lot that is truly memorable. There’s not any one scene that I say, “I can’t wait to see that again,” about. The closest I come to that is with the giants. But for the most part, this looks and feels just okay. And maybe this looks sensational on an IMAX screen, but a great movie is one that holds up on a regular screen as well.
My second issue is with the ending. After Odysseus returns home. It seems to take a really really long time for him to get to fighting the suitors. There is a whole portion of the film when he is at home, pretending to be a beggar, and letting them beat him, while he collects information about the state of his home. And I know this was all in the book, but a movie is different. An audience gets restless. Especially one that has already been on this journey at sea for hours. I’m noticing more and more these days that filmmakers don’t know how to end their movies, and that more is not better. It happened with Masters of the Universe, early this summer, where the movie would have been far better if it didn’t give us ending after ending after ending, Return of the King-style. The same thing goes here, in the Odyssey. More attention needs to be paid to how the audience is feeling. It’s a good movie, but it’s definitely not great.