THE ODYSSEY

Christopher Nolan Finds Awe and Terror in an Uneven Epic

Review By John Larkin

For me, the middle of July has become Christopher Nolan season. Going back to THE DARK KNIGHT in 2008, so many of his films have arrived during this particular stretch of summer that seeing one has become something of a personal tradition. Whether I am buying a ticket or attending a screening, the experience often brings me to AMC Lincoln Square, where Nolan’s enormous images have come to feel especially at home.

I went into THE ODYSSEY relatively fresh. I was familiar with the broad contours of Homer’s story, but I had not recently immersed myself in all of its characters and episodes. That allowed Nolan’s interpretation to reveal itself without my constantly measuring it against the source. I expected a major cinematic event, and I was not disappointed. This is a huge, ambitious, sometimes astonishing undertaking that could only have been mounted by a filmmaker with Nolan’s influence, resources and command of large scale production.

It is also an uneven film.

That qualification matters, but it does not erase the film’s accomplishments. THE ODYSSEY contains three or four superbly constructed sequences, including two that have remained vividly lodged in my mind. Without revealing their circumstances, both create an overwhelming combination of awe, suspense and deep, almost primal dread. These passages do not merely impress through their size. Nolan controls the space, sound, anticipation and gradual release of information so masterfully that the film temporarily crosses from epic adventure into something approaching horror.

Those sequences alone are worth the price of admission.

In fact, they left me thinking that Nolan’s next film should be a large scale horror movie. There are moments here in which his familiar interests in time, enclosure, uncertainty and human beings confronting forces beyond their comprehension suddenly seem perfectly suited to the genre. I found myself thinking of Stanley Kubrick eventually turning his rigorous formal control toward THE SHINING. Nolan is not imitating Kubrick, but THE ODYSSEY suggests that horror could provide him with a similarly ideal destination. If Nolan were to announce a full horror film next, these passages would already feel like a proof of concept.

The difficulty is that they account for only a portion of a film that runs nearly three hours. Much of what surrounds them is respectable and often impressive, but not always equally involving. Nolan has a curious relationship with pacing. Early in his films, he can move so quickly that scenes seem to end just as we are beginning to inhabit them. Characters are introduced, information is delivered, and the narrative races onward before an emotional connection has fully formed. Later, particularly as the film approaches its climax, he can suddenly begin dragging his feet. THE ODYSSEY exhibits both tendencies. It moves too quickly when I want it to breathe, then takes too long to arrive at a destination we know is coming.

The film could probably lose twenty minutes without sacrificing its epic scale. A more measured opening and a more direct path toward the climax might even have strengthened the sense of an immense journey. Length alone is not the problem. Homer’s story certainly warrants a massive canvas. The issue is how the time is distributed.

Nolan’s devotion to nonlinear storytelling also produces mixed results. His manipulation of chronology has been central to some of his greatest achievements, but it can occasionally feel like a reflex, as if a story must be fractured before it can become cinematically interesting. In THE ODYSSEY, the structural complexity creates momentum and intriguing correspondences, but it can also weaken the characters’ emotional progression. The audience is sometimes kept busy assembling the narrative when it might have been more valuable to remain with Odysseus and experience the accumulating psychological weight of his journey.

Matt Damon is good in the central role. His natural everyman quality helps ground Odysseus, while his physical presence makes the character’s toughness credible. Damon can suggest intelligence without turning it into a performance of intelligence, which is valuable for a hero defined as much by cunning as by strength. At the same time, Odysseus presents a nearly impossible challenge for a modern actor. How does someone embody a figure who has survived for thousands of years in the cultural imagination without looking like a contemporary movie star dressed as an ancient warrior?

That question extends to the entire ensemble. Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and the rest of the cast are among the most recognizable actors in the world. None of them is poor, but their collective familiarity can make it difficult to disappear completely into this ancient Greek setting. Nolan’s physical realism sometimes intensifies the problem. By grounding the world so firmly in recognizable textures, landscapes and human behavior, he occasionally makes the myth feel less distant and mysterious rather than more convincing.

Some of the dialogue contributes to that effect. There are deadpan lines that sound strikingly contemporary, creating moments of humor that may not always be intentional. Pattinson’s villainous performance, complete with elaborate facial contortions and an almost gleefully overstated menace, can be entertaining while also calling attention to itself as a performance. The film moves between historical gravity, modern directness and theatrical exaggeration without always finding a seamless tonal balance.

This may partly be a consequence of age and accumulated moviegoing experience. When I saw GLADIATOR in 2000, I found it easy to surrender to its world. Its actors did not yet carry quite the same overwhelming collective aura of celebrity, at least to my younger eyes. I accepted them as inhabitants of ancient Rome without continually thinking about the performers beneath the costumes.

A younger viewer encountering THE ODYSSEY may have no such problem. They may be swept away by the scale, adventure and unfamiliarity of it all. They may not notice the self consciousness that occasionally prevented me from losing myself completely. That distinction is important because Nolan has made the kind of film that could become a formative theatrical experience for someone seeing an epic of this magnitude for the first time.

On a technical level, the achievement is formidable. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, editor Jennifer Lame, composer Ludwig Göransson and Nolan’s entire production team have mounted a genuine old fashioned epic using the resources of modern filmmaking. I did not necessarily see radically new photographic language, though there is more prominent aerial and drone work than I expected. The accomplishment is cumulative. It is found in the scale of the locations, the physicality of the environments, the density of the sound, the coordination of immense sequences and the confidence required to bring such a monumental production together.

The technology behind the film may be historic, but its visual grammar is not always revolutionary. That is not necessarily a criticism. Nolan and his collaborators understand how to turn landscape, architecture, weather and human movement into spectacle. The technical categories at the Academy Awards should certainly take notice.

I did not see THE ODYSSEY in IMAX, so I cannot yet assess the film in the format for which it was conceived. My screening was presented in regular 70mm at AMC Lincoln Square, and I did not feel deprived. I have sometimes found the IMAX screen there almost too large, even from the back rows. The 70mm presentation was expansive, richly textured and completely immersive without requiring me to strain to absorb the entire frame. I may eventually see it again in IMAX, but the standard 70mm experience was more than sufficient to demonstrate the enormity of Nolan’s achievement.

And I do want to see it again. There is so much movie here that a single viewing feels inadequate, particularly when its finest sequences exert such extraordinary power. A second encounter may clarify some of the structural decisions and allow the quieter passages to settle differently. It may also confirm that the imbalance is fundamental to the film.

Either way, THE ODYSSEY is a must see summer event. It is big, tactile, strange, exciting and made with a level of ambition rarely permitted in contemporary studio filmmaking. Not every passage works equally well, and the distance between its greatest moments and its merely functional ones can be considerable. But when Nolan finds the right rhythm, the film becomes overwhelming. It inspires awe while also reaching toward something darker and more frightening.

An epic can be uneven and still be essential. THE ODYSSEY is both.