Time has always been an obsession for director Christopher Nolan. In one of his earliest films, Memento (1999), time means nothing to a man with no short-term memory. In Inception (2010), dreams constrict and warp time as much as space travel does in Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), while in Tenet (2020), time literally goes backwards.
Dunkirk (2017), Nolan’s depiction of the Dunkirk evacuation of WWII, is parsed across three nonlinear narratives, all told in parallel: a week with ground troops on the beach, a day amidst the flotilla sent to rescue those troops, and an hour of air combat in the skies surrounding this rescue. He’s tearing time apart to reassemble it into something, anything, that could make sense of all the death and misery that’s closely accompanied humankind.
Which brings us to now and The Odyssey, the Oscar-winning director’s 13th film and latest bid for a surprisingly robust box office take, despite it being a three-hour adaptation of a nearly 3,000-year-old epic by the ancient Greek poet Homer. Translated across eons and attributed to a guy who may have actually been an amalgamation of many, the film begins with the only words to appear on screen until its title is revealed during the end credits. That opening text offers the “once upon a—” timbre of a fairy tale: “A time of apparent magic…”
Like in his Batman trilogy, where he imagined the caped crusader as a traumatized vigilante with no time for a comic-friendly suspension of disbelief, Nolan here grounds the fantastical elements of storytelling with historical grit, making the ancient Greek myth of Odysseus (played by Nolan regular Matt Damon, this time super-shredded) breathe with realism even as a bunch of crazy shit goes down. Yes, in The Odyssey, characters commune with gods, navigate prophecies, and try to survive vicious sea creatures, but they also offer obligatory gifts to the goddess Athena (Zendaya) with the same sincerity as Starbucks celebrating Pride month.
In this time of apparent magic, civilization is in its infancy. Kingdoms seem always on the brink of collapsing as belief systems and corresponding deities clamor for supremacy. The known world is beset on all sides by untold wonders. The sea consumes every horizon.
Called by King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) to lead an army to the gates of Troy, Odysseus must leave his kingdom of Ithaca to cross the Aegean Sea and ostensibly “rescue” Helen (Lupita Nyong’o), wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), from the Trojans. Though it’s his duty to go and encourage a cadre of young men to face certain death, Odysseus intuits that the rescue mission is only an excuse to finally bring down the Trojans and claim their favorable trade routes.
Following a 10-year siege on Troy, Odysseus finally concocts a plan to get through the supposedly impregnable walls of Troy: a giant wooden horse, abandoned on the shores of the Aegean as an ostensible offering to Athena and a parting gift of deference from the defeated army, but secretly packed with Odysseus, Menelaus, and their men. The Trojans take the bait, bring the horse into the city, fall to a surprise attack, etc. You know this story already: Odysseus is responsible for finally breaking the 10-year siege and taking down the un-take-down-able fortress city. The titular Odyssey is what happens next. Eponymous Odysseus sets sail with his men on a journey back to Ithaca, but encounters a menagerie of monsters, fiends, giants, zombies, witches, nymphs, and other unexplained exigencies of the still-magical world that keep him away for another 10 years.
Meanwhile, Odysseus’s now-adult son Telemachus (Tom Holland) and wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) await his return, besieged by suitors—including Antinous (Robert Pattinson) and Polybus (Corey Hawkins), two especially odious fellas—who hope to take Penelope’s hand in marriage, and therefore Odysseus’ place on the empty throne of Ithaca, before Telemachus can prove himself a sufficient heir.
As an adventure, The Odyssey is often astounding, every new phenomenon Odysseus and his crew come upon is a chance for Nolan to masterfully balance horror, awe, action, and melodrama. Composer Ludwig Göransson follows closely, dicing up ambient techno and contemporary classical for a score that is so much better than that description allows. Similarly, Nolan’s long-time collaborator, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, has made a career of restraining epics through stark realism, aiding Jordan Peele in bringing aliens to earth in Nope (2022) as ably as he abetted James Gray in near-silent sad-dad space drama Ad Astra (2019). Shooting all of The Odyssey on massive, specially constructed 70mm IMAX cameras—a small miracle given the cinematographer’s knack for handheld camerawork—van Hoytema makes the incomprehensible feel remarkably…well, comprehensible.
As an adaptation of an ancient literary tome, The Odyssey is an incredible act of popular movie-making. Which has always been Nolan’s talent since his Batman days: He’s a high-brow auteur, an anti-streaming advocate for film stock, who cranks out well-loved blockbusters. If this film can get your Everyman Dumbass, in this age of overwhelming illiteracy, to pick up a book—an old book at that—then there is still beauty in this world.
Nolan, for all his aspirations, seems intent on capturing some of that beauty, and he finds the means to do so through storytelling.
People tell stories throughout The Odyssey. Stories, after all, shaped our world in the archaic era, through campfire recitations, gossip, confessions, threats, prophecies, polite dinner conversation, and, ultimately, myths. Stories conveyed what little information was ever available, bearing bits and pieces of reality like shrapnel from a shipwrecked vessel across the vast ocean of time.
As is the case with Nolan’s previous films, The Odyssey is about time, and especially how storytelling—whether between two people at dinner or between a director and his audience in a theater—can manipulate time to reveal hidden truths. The film takes place over two decades but unfolds in flashbacks, in stories told by Odysseus, told by Menelaus, told by the revenant of a dead soldier (Elliot Page), told by blind shepherd Eumaeus (John Lequizamo), and largely told to Telemachus, who knows nothing of his father or anything outside of Ithaca.
The original text of the Odyssey is likely the result of oral tradition, a plot potholed with huge gaps of time to allow storytellers to add or subtract events based on the context of their telling. It might not logically follow that Odysseus takes so long to get home when he only really makes like five or six stops, but Nolan knows that if the audience can emotionally sense the weight of so much time passing, they don’t need to see it happen.
None of this is exactly subtle. Every actor telegraphs their emotions in legible monologues—via exceptionally American accents—or else they simply tell the audience how they feel. Nolan means this to be accessible in the most obvious of ways, but rather than lumping a dumbed-down version of this story on a presumably dipshit audience, he brings vital life to a text many of us must’ve yawned through in high school.
Maybe this gives Christopher Nolan too much credit. He still can’t quite write a woman character that transcends “woman character.” Sometimes, like Odysseus eating the amnesia-inducing lotus flowers, the film forgets itself, and Nolan leans a bit too easily into lazy action movie tropes or jarringly modern language. But when it remembers that it’s a $250 million behemoth? It gives us spectacle so indelibly thrilling—simultaneously familiar and so unlike anything we’ve really seen before—that it journeys past studio storytelling into the realm of something mythical.
The Odyssey opens in wide release Fri July 17, 173 minutes, rated R. See it in standard and “premium” 70mm formats at Regal and Cinemark theaters, and at the Hollywood Theatre.
