Christopher Nolan may be current cinema’s most insightful fabulist. Depending on who you ask, that means he has the rare 21st-century gift of creating spectacle with real weight and emotional basis behind it – enough to make you believe that a man can fight crime while dressed as a bat, at least for a limited period – or that he’s beloved by the original movie brethren. Perhaps it’s that cycle of diligence and sublimity that makes him an ideal lightning rod against Homer. odysseyThe ancient Greek epic they filmed on IMAX celluloid cameras, no less – as it’s more decidedly titled odyssey. After all, carrying all that equipment around the film’s real-world locations (spiritually, anyway; he’s probably not carrying cameras himself) may well make Nolan, no matter how polite he attempts to remain, feel like Odysseus himself. Then again, making big budget movies these days can seem like a Sisyphean endeavor.
odyssey This seems to be Nolan’s most straightforward project in some time, given that his previous film won a bundle of Oscars while attempting to wrap its arms around the life and legacy of Robert Oppenheimer, and the film before that attempted what I think is known as the temporal pincer movement. In Hollywood terms, Homer’s epic tale of a warrior and his men attempting to get home to Ithaca after their Trojan War victory is a veritable set-piece machine. Even those who haven’t read it all (ahem) will know some of its themes: the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the Sirens. (duck stories offered a generation of particularly fascinating CliffsNotes. I’ll stop before they cancel my English degree.)
So it would be quite easy to declare that by splitting the story into a non-linear narrative the writer-director has Nolanified Homer. Some of these are complete sequences; Others, just a flicker or two of reflection. So while we experience the hardships of Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men more or less chronologically, the film intertwines these adventures with those of his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland), who are awaiting his return, grumbling at the dangerous grooms lurking around the queen, and (in the case of Telemachus) attempting to figure out whether the man is actually alive or dead; Some early flashbacks of Odysseus and Penelope before his journey; The Trojan Horse episode, told in large (if incomplete) part by Menelaus (Jon Bernthal); And Odysseus himself is trying to remember his life before he meets the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) on the beautiful, endless, forbidden shores of Ogygia.
In fact, almost every landscape these Greeks encounter is beautiful, endless, and forbidding – not to mention IMAX size, capable of presenting the film at its full, eye-filling, ceiling-scraping height on at least two dozen screens. (I’ve only seen the IMAX print, but all indications are that the regular-theater version plays just as well—perhaps better, creatively speaking.) Sequential chronology; Real IMAX cameras; Damon, Hathaway, Robert Pattinson (he plays Antinous, Despicable Me’s most aggressive villain). God, where have we seen this thing before? somewhere around PrincipleNolan reached the point where you can either actively resist his visual, thematic, and aural trademarks, or embrace them all as part of it. For anyone inclined towards the latter, a special delight odyssey Looking at such a familiar story through a Nolan lens – and as always, the timing tricks serve a greater purpose. Without spoiling the emotional impact of the film too much, let us explain odyssey has more in common with deep hurt, slow growing despair oppenheimer Than Nolan’s grand spectacle dark knight Trilogy, although there are also more traces of those films in particular the dark Knight Rises.
Time-jumping editing, maintained under the supervision of Jennifer Lamm (who won an Oscar for Oppenheimer and brought notable comedic rhythms to some Noah Baumbach/Greta Gerwig films) odysseyPace, even while allowing for some narrative sleight of hand – no Prestige-level twist as a lesson from that film’s mix of magic and science, although here, confusingly, the science provides the visual effects, leaving the magic to the movie stars. On a pure production level, this thing has all the grandeur of a 1950s Biblical epic, with a cast so large that it encompasses several other 2026 movies in crossword-puzzle fashion (Pattinson and Zendaya make a cameo). Drama; he is also involved in this Spider-Man: Brand New Day with Holland and Bernthal).
