“The Odyssey” is one of the most ambitious and purely entertaining motion picture endeavors of the year, but it also feels like the logical, inevitable climax of the career of the writer/director who conceived of it.
Christopher Nolan has evolved from promising indie darling to one of the biggest directors on the planet in the last quarter century. As the scope and physical scale of his films have increased, his predilection for nonlinear storytelling and nesting doll layers of themes within his narrative frameworks have remained consistent. But the dichotomy between the emotional depth of his ideas and his ability to execute complex visions for the masses have made him something of an enigmatic contradiction. In his last film, “Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy, in the titular role, says of quantum mechanics:
“How can it be both? It can’t. But it is. It’s paradoxical, and yet… it works.” Nolan’s script may as well have been talking about his own appeal in popular culture.
Nolan was able to treat a thorny biography like “Oppenheimer” like a blockbuster. Its sprawling narrative hopped through the events of its subject’s life, taking turns framing those moments through different crowd-pleasing genres. He played the planning of the bomb like a heist movie, staged the senate committee like a legal thriller. “The Odyssey,” though more readily adapted from subject matter that doesn’t require quite as much jazzing up, rhymes with that picture and employs a similar structure.
Odysseus (Matt Damon) and the perspective of his torturous journey home are divided into two halves. Back home in Ithaca, years after the end of the Trojan War, his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), and his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), wrestle with his 20-year absence, with stories of his exploits reaching them through song, rumor, and hearsay. The other half comes in chronologically untethered bursts from the erstwhile king’s own memory, either to his curious companion Calypso (Charlize Theron) as he struggles to remember his past or directly to his family once they reunite.
This atemporal framework allows the narrative to hopscotch in tone in ways that deliver surface-level satisfaction upon first watch but require further viewings and the passage of time to glean the bigger picture. This has been the Christopher Nolan method for decades.
“Memento” and its mobius strip reverse chronology captured my attention and obsessed me at 15. Every time I’ve revisited it, it has made me love it more. But by the time I was 25 watching “The Dark Knight Rises,” the idea of telling my younger self that our fave was on his third Batman movie delivering diminishing returns was depressing. I wondered if I had grown out of his work and if his staunchest critics were right that he was overrated. Then, on my fifth watch of the widely derided “Tenet” the year I turned 35, I understood what attracted me to his films in the first place.
I didn’t watch that strange and divisive sci-fi thriller over and over again to “get it,” but rather because after all those views I could stop thinking and analyzing and allow myself to simply feel the deeper emotional moments resonate. Half a decade later, I only had to see “The Odyssey” twice to internalize that again.
The first watch, I was only truly taken with Odysseus himself. Damon’s status as a versatile, journeyman movie star lends his performance as this towering figure in literature an easy shorthand, a necessity in a film otherwise stacked to the brim with supporting players and a complex story that, even shorn, demands a lengthy runtime. This strategy is suited particularly well for the top of the movie. Before we spend time with Odysseus proper, the opening act relies on stories and brief recollections of the man from his former servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo). In these scenes, Odysseus is flattened from the complexity of the source material into the kind of likable, enviable figure a summer blockbuster requires of its heroes. To borrow a cliche about what the average American man wants in a president, this is an Odysseus you want to grab a beer with.
Subsequent viewings had to overcome nearly as many distracting obstacles as Odysseus himself in the way of really feeling the movie’s story. There was so much emphasis placed on this being the first full feature filmed on IMAX film cameras that it was also easy to be distracted by the format of the film, or the discourse surrounding the format of the film.
And given the source material, the lack of focus on depicting the gods as anthropomorphized characters seemed glaring. Zendaya maintains a presence throughout as Athena, but the conclusion reveals a darker reading of the gods’ place in Nolan’s narrative.
He wasn’t drawn to “The Odyssey” because of an obsession with the pantheon or the supernatural underpinnings of that world, but rather because it brought with it the necessary opportunities to do on screen what few other filmmakers have the cache to do. It was a blank check chance to go all out, to showcase the most difficult sequences from the text like the fight with the cyclops (Bill Irwin) or the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton) turning his soldiers into pigs, and cast them as horror movie experiments. It was an avenue to throw down the gauntlet of practical effects and throwback techniques against the encroaching influence of AI generated slop and an overreliance on purely computer generated imagery.
Nolan is one of the only storytellers a studio will back with a budget this big, and he wants to show that there are more inventive and nourishing ways to capture the imagination on screen than we’re usually given in modern summer blockbusters.
On that second watch, I could see and feel this all more clearly. I wasn’t hung up on how little screentime performers like Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page wound up with, given the vexing discourse around their casting, when I could see how each of the many supporting players had specific notes to hit within the larger symphony. This time, I wasn’t trying to outthink the movie and telegraph for myself what the storytelling decisions meant or justify its significant changes in translation from even the interpretations Nolan name-checked in interviews.
I sat in the third row, center seat, just like cultural critic Susan Sontag always used to. And I escaped. I could finally see how much richer and immersive the large format visuals are, not for the big, flashy set pieces, but for the more intimate moments between the characters. Hathaway and Damon, their faces inches from one another, having it out over Odysseus leaving for a war he may never return from, their respective visages the size of a small building. In their eyes lay the passion and depth Nolan imbues all his works with that some folks are too busy turning the Rubik’s Cube to take note of.
But if you stay on that level, you miss the point. You’re meant to be wowed by the breadth of the world you’re visiting, to yearn along with Hathaway’s Penelope for the loving embrace of her husband, to mark the years and the trauma on Damon’s face, to understand Odysseus’ mythic journey.
Once you get home, yeah, you should be unpacking the metaphors. You should be engaging with what Nolan wants to tell you about the world as he sees it, perhaps musing on the ways this picture feels like a purposeful companion piece to his last, albeit one colored by a little more hope than Oppenheimer’s regrets.
But while you’re there? Revel in the spectacle. Surrender yourself to an enormous screen dwarfing whatever you’ve come to escape from. That’s Christopher Nolan’s gift. A brilliant and proven track record of making the space between an auditorium’s walls a shared endeavor to experience thrills and wonder and visceral emotions, but never sacrificing the “now” and its splendors to encourage the “later” when the rest of it has seeped into your bones and must be picked apart again and again.
“The Odyssey” is currently playing at The Charles, The Senator, and nearly every other movie theater in the area, but the AMC White Marsh 16 is the best bet for IMAX (digital only) or Dolby.