Nolan's Odyssey: audacious but ultimately unrewarding

I was whelmed

Bronze Age Darth Vader looked cool as fuck, I’ll admit

It was certainly bold, what Christopher Nolan was trying to do with his adaptation of Homer’s 8th-century BC poem. Taking one of the foundational texts of the entire Western literary canon and making a 21st-century blockbuster out of it while offering a fresh take and, at the same time, staying true to the thematic core of the original work would be no easy task for anyone. You can be an Academy Award-winning director with an impressive filmography and a cult-like fan following, but even you will tremble before Homer. Whether or not a blind bard by that name actually existed, The Iliad and The Odyssey, the two epics historically attributed to him, are civilisational in their scope and impact. To adapt either one of them for the big screen in 2026 would require a creative courage that’s vanishingly rare in Hollywood, and carry significant reputational risk; then there are the hordes of nitpicking history nerds you’d have to fend off for the rest of your life even if — or perhaps especially if — you ended up bagging Best Director (again). So, mad respect for Nolan for daring to even try. It really cannot be overstated the sheer audacity needed for such an undertaking, in IMAX no less, so kudos to him. The man is, without a doubt, a filmmaking powerhouse.

That said, did he really achieve what he’d set out to do with his latest big-budget event? (That’s what his movies are, now; they’re cultural events). Now that the initial hype has settled a bit, it seems that that depends on whom you ask. Well, if you ask me, I’ll say maybe, but also not really? Two weeks into the film’s release, opinion on whether Nolan’s ambitious take on The Odyssey did, in fact, meet that ambition, seems somewhat divided. The moment the review embargo lifted just days before the movie’s release, critics were tripping over themselves to heap praise on the British-American writer-director, with some hailing The Odyssey as a career-best, a towering achievement, a masterpiece, and any other superlative you can think of. My expectations were already fairly high, despite my not being the biggest fan of his more recent work, and I couldn’t help but be swept up in the relentless hyperbole. It didn’t help that everywhere you looked, there was a new video or article or Twitter thread or whatever discussing in minute detail that good, old-fashioned movie magic that was fuelling this gargantuan production. I mean, a three-hour epic shot start-to-finish on IMAX 70mm film, almost entirely on location, with little or no VFX? In this day of green-screen slop, it was a film nut’s wet dream. Cinema was back, baby! I brushed aside any misgivings I might’ve had about Nolan’s well-known limitations as a screenwriter and just went all in; the thrill of anticipation was too strong. I also elected to ignore the distinct possibility that professional critics might be overcompensating for the racist backlash Nolan and the project had been facing online for months over his perfectly justifiable choice to cast minorities in key roles. Surely the likes of Peter Bradshaw, who gave the movie 5/5, would know what they’re talking about? Even if it turned out to be just okay as an adaptation of the poem, Nolan’s Odyssey was still guaranteed to be an entertaining spectacle. Right?

Well, I don’t know. I went to see it twice, both times in IMAX. The first time, it was… fine. There were some glaring problems that were hard to ignore, but, caught up in the “epicness” of it all, I made a concerted effort to focus on what was working for me, which there was just enough of. It was a decent time at the movies and that was good enough for me. In the end, I didn’t love what I’d just seen, but I decided that Nolan had attempted something brave with his interpretation of Odysseus as a character riven with guilt over his actions in Troy, and therefore the movie deserved at least some of the glowing reviews. I thought the performances were decent even if they were not particularly outstanding (with the exception of Samantha Morton as Circe who was, in fact, outstanding), and I appreciated Nolan’s stubborn admirable commitment to using practical effects for the more fantastical sequences even if he continued to be a poor director of action (that final battle with the suitors was straight out of 1980s Bollywood). I could, for once, hear most of the dialogue — a rare treat for a Nolan movie — and I didn’t hate what I heard. Like I said, the whole thing was fine, which is certainly more than I could say about most mainstream Hollywood fare these days. I walked away not totally dissatisfied and with a cautious optimism that I would enjoy the movie better on a second viewing.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was orders of magnitude worse the second time around. The shortcomings were coming at me like so many Laestrygonian giants. It was becoming harder and harder to ignore the glaring, if not fatal flaws. By the time the third act rolled around, I couldn’t take it anymore. The poor sod who got stuck in the bottom of the Trojan horse probably had an easier time. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but it really was kind of unbelievable how bad it was. Maybe ‘bad’ is too strong a word. Let’s go with ‘meh’, which is also not ideal, since “meh” is actually one of the worst feelings a work of art could evoke. A cardinal sin if ever there was one in cinema. Unfortunately, that’s what the movie did in the end, for me, personally. I was not annoyed or disappointed, just thoroughly unmoved. Which sucked because, as something of a history nerd myself, I needed this movie to good if not great.

But first, let me just say I’m not going to make any comparisons to the original text, because that would just be silly. For one, film is obviously a different medium with its own rules and heavy emphasis on the visual, and, secondly, anyone is free to do what they like with the source material they’re adapting for the screen, especially when said material predates the very concept of intellectual property by several thousand years. Besides, there is nothing to be gained, in terms of critical appreciation, in making such an inherently meaningless comparison. I will, however, note that this movie is less an adaptation than it is a wholly new retelling. It’s very much Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. Homer recedes so far into the background that he is all but invisible and you could almost call this an original work. Almost. Whether or not it’s a good, or even passable original work is what is up for debate.

First, the writing. I take no pleasure in saying this because I do think he is an immensely talented guy, but Christopher Nolan is just not a very good writer. Or at least he is a better director than he is a writer. I have long suspected that his brother Johnathan, who co-wrote such cerebral-popcorn hits like Memento and The Dark Knight was the more gifted of the two Nolans where writing was concerned. The older Nolan’s more recent output, where the absence of Johnathan is keenly felt, is plagued by weak writing and expository dialogue that borders on breaking the fourth wall. This was more obvious than ever in The Odyssey, with Nolan once again showing that he cannot write dialogue that isn’t strictly mechanical, that isn’t in service of something else. It’s all exposition, all day, every day. Characters speak just to explain the plot; things happen just to advance the plot. Character-development, if it happens at all, takes the furthest seat at the back of the boat so that we can speed along to the next set piece. There is no time spent at all to let a scene breathe and allow both the characters and the audience along with them to take stock of the monumental events unfolding in rapid succession. However, in fairness to Nolan, this may not entirely be down to bad writing. While Tenet was a veritable disaster in terms of writing, the Best Picture-winning Oppenheimer wasn’t really all that bad. There may be another, more charitable explanation for what happened this time around. If you look up the technical limitations of 70mm IMAX, it becomes pretty clear that this movie suffered for being shot entirely in this famously demanding format. Because there was a physical limit to how long the projection could run (three hours max) and how long each reel could shoot for (just three minutes), it meant each individual scene had to be rushed, with quick cuts and no breathing room in between. This, in turn, meant there was no time for any emotional weight to accumulate over the course of the narrative, with dialogue serving a largely expository function with little or no reflection on the part of the characters. All this ultimately made for a technically groundbreaking but otherwise unsatisfying experience overall that leaves you feeling just a little bit cold. In other words, a Christopher Nolan film.

Which then begs the question, is Nolan really that great a director? Or, at least, did he do a good enough job directing this particular film? I’m sort of a fan of the guy in spite of everything, so I want to say yes, but the more I think about it, the less sure I am. But it wasn’t always like this. Whatever you think about comic book movies, The Dark Knight remains a masterclass in three-act-structure storytelling. Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Dunkirk are all mostly solid movies albeit with some imperfections. Then there are the various Nolanesque idiosyncrasies, such as his preoccupation with time and memory, his predilection for non-linear narratives, his aversion to CGI and to VFX in general (as opposed to SFX), his rather infuriating reluctance to add recorded dialogue in post (ADR), a growing obsession with doing everything in camera, etc, all of which would be challenging for the best of them but are handled with remarkable ease throughout his career. The problem — and it’s a big one — is that, even as he is getting exceedingly good at this stuff, it is increasingly and quite frustratingly at the expense of cinematic merit. Which is unfortunate because, with every new film, Nolan feels like he is at the cusp of greatness (for a Hollywood guy making billion-dollar blockbusters, that is), but his own apparent hubris as a supposedly infallible filmmaker holds him back, with true greatness (by a pedestrian yardstick admittedly) always just out of reach. Sadly, nowhere is this more apparent than in The Odyssey.

The whole project was an ambitious endeavour, to be sure, and from a financial perspective he has more than delivered. The movie is already making obscene amounts of money for everyone involved, despite the best efforts of Elon Musk and his army of far-right intellectuals. It will also likely secure Acting, Directing and Score nominations, among others, at the Oscars next year, though I’m sceptical that it will win any outside the technical categories. But more importantly, it’s made a convincing case for the theatre experience in this age of ADHD-friendly streaming and also got people excited in real filmmaking again, which is, needless to say, a huge win for cinema. Nolan deserves all the accolades for that alone. But does technical mastery and getting butts on the seats make for a compelling film on its own? The Odyssey, to me, proves that it does not.

Which brings me to my exhaustive list of grievances with this film, which I will not bore you with. My biggest gripe, if I had to pick one, is that this is an adaptation that doesn’t know what it wants to be. If that sounds unhelpfully vague, those are the exact two words I would use to describe the film’s central theme. What was Nolan’s Odyssey really about, in the end? It did swing at some grand ideas, but I think it missed every shot, frankly. We know from Homer that his Odysseus did not have strong feelings about the ravages of war, except where the fate of his own fallen comrades was concerned. Far from feeling deep remorse or crippling shame over the destruction left in his wake, Homer’s Odysseus, described as a “man of many twists and turns” (or just ‘complicated’, if you read Emily Wilson’s translation) is quietly proud of his cunning, conniving, scheming ways. His mother-of-all-deceptions with the Trojan horse, which Nolan casts as an anachronistically Christianised ‘original sin’, is celebrated by Homer and his Archaic Greek audience. It is only villainised much later, by Virgil, in The Aeneid, which is essentially Latin fan-fiction of The Iliad that doubles as an origin myth for Rome. But as I said earlier, this is not Homer’s Odysseus, nor Virgil’s; it is Nolan’s. He is free to prick and prod at Matt Damon’s conscience all day long. The problem, however, is that it’s not especially interesting, which I realise is entirely subjective. Also, this approach still demands some internal consistency within the confines of the movie’s narrative, and that’s simply not there. Or if it is, we’re just not shown it, because the movie is too busy telling us rather than showing us anything that matters. Anything that might even accidentally add some depth or complexity to these characters always happens off-screen. Any glimpses that the script reluctantly provides are all too brief, because the next set-piece awaits and we mustn’t lose any time.

On the lack of consistency, just to illustrate, Odysseus had just spent “10 years on this fucking beach” doing what exactly? He probably wasn’t playing tic-tac-toe in the sand with the boys the whole time. When the city of Troy is eventually sacked, thanks to our hero’s masterstroke with the 3D-printed horse, Agamemnon Skywalker, king of kings, leads his men to do what the conquering Achaeans always do: slaughter, plunder and pillage, with a great deal of raping and mass-enslaving thrown in. It’s fine to cast Odysseus as a reluctant participant in the carnage, being forced to make choices he’d rather not have to make — “Agamemnon will come for all of Ithaca if I don’t go to war for him,” he says to Penelope (paraphrased), which is a fair though not, in my opinion, compelling enough a reason for him to keep fighting someone else’s fight for as long as he did — but it is hard to suspend our disbelief that Odysseus, even this Odysseus, would find no joy in it. Just as he and the horsely crew open the city’s gate, he is shown letting out a battle cry in triumphant exhilaration as the Achaean army storms through. But we can forgive this since it is just before his transformative moment of enlightenment at the expense of Zendaya’s neck. The newfound, post-decapitation pacifist illusion is also shattered the moment Odysseus is shown leading his men to sack an unsuspecting island as their first stop on their scenic route home (though it is implied through already tired exposition that this, too, was his men’s doing, as he stood helplessly by), or when he shoots an arrow at the now-raging cyclops he and most of his men had just escaped alive, endangering them all, all over again. More egregiously, it is hard to believe that Nolan’s Odysseus, a poster boy for integrity, wouldn’t have been wiser to the horrors of war or seen the error of his ways until he happened to witness a priestess being beheaded. So we’re forced to buy into this hugely overcooked notion of Zeus’ law (‘Xenia’ in the original), whose violation through his personal trickery is a sin so unforgivable that it precipitates the collapse of an entire civilisation. Never mind that it was the Trojans that violated Xenia by abducting Helen in the first place. Ah, but, as we are told, Agamemnon’s righteous anger at this infraction is just a pretext for him to wage war for those sweet, Trojan-controlled trade routes. Does that somehow cancel out the Trojans’ complete lack of regard for Zeus’ silly little law? And if so, does it mean Odysseus’ horse trick was a fresh, momentous violation and not yet another tactic in the midst of a 10-year siege? It didn’t look like they were mere guests taking a decade-long sun tan, so it’s not quite clear how they broke the rules by figuring out a way to end a stalemate.

The longer you think about it, the less sense any of it makes. The idea of a PTSD-stricken Odysseus harbouring any kind of guilt over his role in the destruction of an enemy city is profoundly un-Homeric — Homer actually uses the epithet ‘sacker of cities’ for Odysseus, and not at all with a negative connotation. But again, this is Nolan’s reinterpretation of Odysseus as a very contemporary, pyschologised character study. Which is actually fine, and it could’ve been interesting had Nolan spent a little more time fleshing out his protagonist and giving him better lines than “our Age of Bronze is collapsing” (talk about on the nose). Instead, we’re treated to a very flat character that just does things that the screenplay demands of him. Personally I think this is because Nolan simply does not possess the writing chops required for this kind of reinvention. It isn’t limited to the hero either; almost all the characters exist as props rather than real people, reading dry, sterile lines stripped of any colour or vitality. At the very least Nolan could’ve given a little more screentime for Zendaya, whose “is she a literal goddess or simply a manifestation of the hero’s conscience or is she both” ambiguity was actually one of the more interesting aspects of the movie which, like most things in this movie, was woefully underexplored. Sorry, folks; we don’t do complexity here. Also, as historian Mary Beard pointed out, the movie is also entirely sexless, which does a great disservice to world of the story, but this is actually something that Nolan is notorious for. He doesn’t do sex. Or fun. (Oppenheimer’s very awkward sex scenes don’t count and, in fact, prove this point). It doesn’t help that he is famously bad at writing women. The movie is also very bloodless, which is weird for a story set in the Bronze Age. I’m not saying it should’ve been a 300-style gore fest, but Nolan’s refusal to showcase the scale and ferocity of the violence only serves to undersell the reality of the world in which these people lived. Why even bother with an R rating when your movie looks like the most PG-13 thing ever? Just so someone could say ‘fuck’ a couple of times? (According to reports, Nolan actively sought an R rating; only the gods know why).

All of this could’ve been overlooked if it was at least unapologetically fun and entertaining, which it just wasn’t. Nolan is far too serious for that. I love me some practical effects and on-location shoots, but his stubborn refusal to “overuse” CGI is not all it’s cracked up to be. The sea monster Scylla, for instance, could’ve really benefited from some well-placed VFX. The thing looked like a stop-motion prop from Jason and the Argonauts. Took me right out. The destruction of Troy could’ve looked far more epic had he augmented the physical sets with CG backdrops and maybe even CG people if they didn’t have the budget for more extras. Then there was the weirdly choppy editing, which, again, I suspect might’ve had something to do with the IMAX format, but that is no excuse for a movie of this scale. Which reminds me, the story actually, shockingly lacked a real sense of scale. You did not feel the enormity of the events taking place, the otherwordliness of the exotic locations (save for Hedes, which was nicely done, I thought). Nor did you really feel the passage of time; when he finally returns, 20 years had supposedly passed since Odysseus set sail for Troy, but it might as well have been a couple of months. Then there was the laughably bad fight choreography, especially in the climactic battle with the suitors where you can almost hear the “pew pew” as Odysseus shoots his little arrows at everyone around, not to mention the (unintentional) hilarity that ensues when the exhausted middle-aged man takes on at least 50 other guys if you discount the suitors that yield to him in a bunch of “blink and you miss it” cuts, almost offscreen.

There is a whole lot more I could say, but I think I’ve made my point, and the three of you still reading are probably more fed up than Odysseus himself. Did I hate it? No; there was a lot about it that I liked. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough. Not for the price I paid for those two IMAX tickets.