‘The Odyssey’ Review: In Christopher Nolan’s Vast, Thrilling, Slightly Aloof Epic, Homer is Where the Heart is Not

More than 70 years have passed since Hollywood last attempted a straight-up adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey,” which is an unfathomable eternity considering both its standing as a foundational epic narrative — the hero’s journey to end, and begin, all hero’s journeys — and the industry’s tendency to recycle any halfway proven story material until it positively disintegrates. Is it the well-worn familiarity of the text that has protected it from complete cinematic exhaustion, or the great, daunting heft of it? Either way, making a full-tilt film of “The Odyssey” in the year 2026 is at once a job for the heedlessly adventurous and the staunchly traditionalist.

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Enter Christopher Nolan, the man who has built a bazillion-dollar career on both those virtues. He’s a blockbuster merchant who makes ’em like they used to, but also not quite like anyone else has made ’em before — who has extracted a singular auteur reputation from genres, like the superhero movie or the prestige biopic, that don’t tend to favor an idiosyncratic approach. It’s to be expected, then, that Nolan’s take on Homer is thorough, robust and attentive both to scholarly detail and old-school moviemaking craft; it’s likewise no surprise that it’s been reshaped to fit the director’s predilection for trickily non-linear storytelling, its disordered timeline a feat of intricate weaving and unweaving to rival Penelope’s shroud, further complicating even the in medias res ploy of the text.

It is understating things to say the result is no small achievement. A genuinely grand, gutsy vision, “The Odyssey” thrills generously for the bulk of its near three-hour running time: Every few minutes, it seems, it throws at its audience another mighty setpiece that, in almost any other summer studio spectacle, would be a climactic standout. If the language of Homer’s epic has been simplified and modernized in Nolan’s screenplay, the stakes and scale of its storytelling have suffered little corner-cutting: It’s so very big, in terms of mythological scope and human consequence, not to mention the sheer volume of incident stuffed into it, as to remind us why other, less intrepid filmmakers have stayed away.

But if this “Odyssey” is consistently involving and frequently dazzling, it’s never exactly moving; it keeps the eyes and ears so lavishly occupied, while engaging the mind with its structural games of cat’s cradle, you almost don’t notice, or mind, that your heart isn’t quite in it. Almost. “The Odyssey” stirs on a scene-to-scene basis, as its haplessly drifting hero’s long-awaited homecoming is repeatedly waylaid with any number of cruel obstacles, proceeding with the frustrating, inexorable tension of a bad dream. (Here’s a film that, if not for its famous provenance, could fittingly wear the title “One Battle After Another.”)

Where it holds our sympathies, that’s in large part thanks to the inspired casting of Matt Damon, the unassuming but sturdily capable everyman of contemporary American cinema, as the endlessly thwarted Odysseus, king of Ithaca and conqueror of Troy — there’s a crushed, grizzled sadness to his countenance, and even to his otherwise strapping physique, that cuts an altogether more poignant figure than Kirk Douglas’ lean, hungry warrior in 1954’s rather more condensed “Ulysses.” Time has collapsed, and so has he, in the increasingly unmarked years following his already long Trojan War stint. Some viewers may feel that chronological stretch blunted by Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame’s repeated structural switching and circling, which leaves the film, especially in its more frenzied first half, almost without a present tense. But it proves an effective way of channeling our hero’s own bleary disorientation, his sense of being ceaselessly buffeted by the elements, the tides and the whims of the gods.

Yet if we care in the moment for his survival, it’s harder to summon as much feeling for his return, to a kingdom where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway, stoic but tremulous) and son Telemachus (an over-callow Tom Holland) are barely holding down the fort, fending off the aggressive advances of scheming suitor Antinous, lasciviously played by Robert Pattinson as an outright pantomime villain. Nolan’s writing is sharper and more surprising on matters of honor and betrayal among men than it is on more vaguely outlined family relations: It says much for a superb John Leguizamo’s frail, quavering but staunchly upstanding performance as Odysseus’ blind servant Eumaeus that his patient pining for his master is the film’s most palpably felt emotion.

For better or worse, however, “The Odyssey” impresses most at its most nakedly, viscerally spectacular — those scenes in its episodic shuffle that showcase the lurid showman in Nolan above all. The near-capture of Odysseus’ army by the giant cyclops Polyphemus (somehow played, with brain-melting digital assistance, by Bill Irwin) is realized with riotous, shrieking monster-movie gusto, only slightly tempered by an aftertaste of compassion for the beast. Another extended sequence of surreal peril, as the men fall under the literal spell of predatory enchantress Circle, is as strange and darkly, hilariously sensual as anything Nolan has ever directed, galvanized by a raw, wily, volatile Samantha Morton, giving the film’s most indelible performance. And the Trojan Horse sequence, delivered after a teasing setup involving Elliot Page’s tersely vulnerable sacrificial soldier Sinon, is as rousing and as funny as you’d hope.

“The Odyssey” is a veritable banquet of such loud, grandiose, movie-movie pleasures, so brashly, confidently lavish that it can afford to throw away a significant portion of its all-star cast on lily-gilding cameos. (Zendaya arguably gets least the least to do here as a recurring vision of Athena, though costume designer Ellen Mirojnick’s starkly beautiful goddess gowns are no afterthought; even in a fraught dual role as sisters Helen and Clytemnestra, one wishes for more of Lupita Nyong’o, though the characters’ conception makes a nonsense of the right-wing culture war declared over her casting.) Viewed in IMAX, in particular, Hoyte van Hoytema’s burnt, bleached, sprawling vistas of sand, scrub and sea invite actual awe; ditto the deep electro-orchestral throb of Ludwig Göransson’s score. There’s so much to feel here at a sensory level that the film gets away with its slightly aloof, soul-skirting chill; we leave it feeling that we’ve been to hell and back, and exhilaratingly so.