Matt Damon in 'The Odyssey'. CREDIT: Universal
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‘The Odyssey’ review: cinema may have peaked with Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster epic

Featuring a star-studded cast and towering set pieces, this mind-boggling adventure should be seen on the big screen

by · NME

The word “epic” has been tossed around a lot over the last 3,000 years… Leave it to Christopher Nolan, then, to remind us what a proper epic looks, sounds and feels like. If Oppenheimer was a small story made big, The Odyssey is a big story made impossibly huge: delivering yet another landmark summer cinema event that might just be the director’s most accomplished film to date.

It’s certainly his most ambitious. Based on one of the foundational texts of Western civilisation, adapting The Odyssey is a bit like taking on The Bible. The story of a soldier, Odysseus (Matt Damon), taking the long way home from war to his wife (Anne Hathaway) and son (Tom Holland), Homer’s original poem has provided the bones of basic storytelling that still shore up nearly everything we watch and read today.

Take away all the baggage though and The Odyssey remains a daunting text to adapt. It’s a salty, sad, human story about getting old, having PTSD and living with your mistakes. But it’s also about rolling around the Med with the boys, fighting giant cyclopes and meeting sexy sea witches.

Just like an old Hollywood blockbuster, Nolan casts just about everyone on the A-list. There’s Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya. Samantha Morton, Charlize Theron and Benny Safdie. Jon Bernthal, Himesh Patel, Mia Goth, Travis Scott and Elliot Page – all somehow standing out across the film’s sprawling three-hour runtime beneath Damon’s smart-dumb Odysseus.

Always a master of structure, Nolan’s real coup here is cutting the poem up into bits and piecing it all back together again. Set in “a time of apparent magic”, the story’s most fantastic elements play out like fever dreams; mini movies told by a mad middle-aged man who might have been there or might just be struggling to accept his part in it all; a story as much about our own world as the ancient one.

Skipping around Odysseus’ mental crisis, the film’s towering set pieces are every bit as impressive as you’d expect from a director obsessed with using as many real multimillion-dollar props and special effects as possible. Beautifully shot with texture and detail – all on mammoth IMAX cameras – expect storms so powerful they make you feel seasick, at least two genuinely terrifying dips into horror and a full-on restaging of the siege of Troy. Swords are swung. Boats are rocked. Eyes are well and truly poked.

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As ever with Nolan, it’s a typically marquee release – with only three cinemas in the UK showing the “full” building-sized frame – and the effect of sitting in the biggest screen around is an elemental experience. Add in Ludwig Göransson’s visceral score and The Odyssey lands harder than even 3,000 years of cultural heft have a right to.

Less a case of them not making ‘em like they used to, watching the film leaves you with a sense that this sort of thing probably won’t be made at all for too much longer – the sheer scale, ambition and weight of it seeming to belong to a different world already. It’s hard to see how cinema can get much bigger than this.

Details

  • Director: Christopher Nolan
  • Starring: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway
  • Release date: July 17 (in UK cinemas)