If you’re like me and a member of the “I read the Odyssey and got confused” club, and you’re worried that watching this film—before you’ve even fully grasped the story—will make things even more complicated due to Christopher Nolan’s famously fragmented and detail-packed storytelling style, you’re wrong. It turns out that the best way to understand something complex is to make it a little more complex. At least in the case of this film, it seems to work.
Nolan straps you into a three-hour-long, exhausting narrative with his signature split-second flashbacks and non-linear storytelling, turning it into a rollercoaster ride you surprisingly never want to get off. Of course, if you have at least some familiarity with the story like I do, you enjoy the experience even more. Those who know nothing about the subject might get a bit tired of the long dialogues at first. But I believe the film’s visual grandeur and the sense of curiosity it creates are powerful enough to drive them to research Homer’s epic and Greek mythology.
I say this as someone who, after watching Oppenheimer, was so captivated that I went and read the actual court transcripts. Nolan has a special talent for making almost any story he touches both highly watchable and captivating, both through his narrative style and his visual language. His ability to see the art in ordinary things in life and reconstruct them like an engineer is what makes him one of the most important directors of our time. The fact that people fill cinema halls in the early morning for the first screening of each new film is the greatest proof of that.
The film tells the story of Odysseus (Matt Damon) trying to return to his kingdom in Ithaca, to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) after the Trojan War ends. But the gods, especially Poseidon, are not exactly eager to help him. That’s why the journey home takes a full ten years.
Instead of telling this long adventure linearly, Nolan centers the story around the scenes where Odysseus recounts who he is and what he’s been through to Calypso (Charlize Theron). We watch all these events through constant flashbacks moving between past and present. It may seem messy at first glance, but I don’t see it as a flaw. On the contrary, this is exactly Nolan’s signature storytelling style that we’re used to.
During the journey, Odysseus clashes with the one-eyed Cyclops, his men are turned into pigs on the island of the sorceress Circe, he resists the deadly songs of the Sirens, his ship is torn apart between Scylla and Charybdis, he descends to the underworld, faces attacks from the Laestrygonian giants, and has to struggle against countless other disasters caused by the gods’ curse. Honestly, the famous saying comes to mind: “If we were to write all these things down, the books written probably wouldn’t fit in the world.” There really is an incredible amount happening in the film at the same time. You can find yourself in the middle of a completely different adventure before the impact of the scene where they escape the giant Cyclops has even left you.
Parallel to Odysseus’s journey, there’s another story unfolding in Ithaca. While Penelope has been waiting for her husband’s return for years, the palace is overflowing with suitors. Led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson), more than a hundred suitors want both to marry Penelope and seize the throne. Meanwhile, the now-grown Telemachus (Tom Holland) is searching for the father he hasn’t seen for years and finds himself caught between anger and helplessness.
Honestly, the two performances I really liked in the film belong to Pattinson and Holland. Pattinson creates an Antinous so hateable that you want to pick up a sword and fight him; Holland, on the other hand, successfully reflects the resentment and helplessness of a young man who grew up without a father.
However, I can’t say the same for the other acting performances in the film. Moreover, the problem isn’t with the actors’ talents. When you look at the cast, it’s almost entirely made up of names we’ve admired in previous performances. Despite that, the acting that emerges here feels surprisingly soulless. Especially in emotional scenes, the characters don’t feel like real living people but rather like actors just waiting to deliver their next line. In a story told on a mythological scale, the weight that the characters should carry is never truly felt.
Sadly, I must say this might be one of the weakest ensemble acting performances I’ve seen in a Christopher Nolan film. Everyone in the film is, at their core, truly great actors. That’s why I’m really struggling to explain the result. It’s as if they’re delivering the most soulless performances of their careers, almost like they’re trying to sabotage Nolan. I don’t know why. Maybe they really have been cursed by the Greek gods.
I wish they had gathered all the actors before shooting, like Mel Gibson did on the set of The Resurrection of the Christ, and prayed for protection from demons.
Despite all this, The Odyssey succeeds in being one of the most impressive cinematic experiences of the year for me. Nolan’s complex storytelling this time doesn’t push the audience away from the story but instead brings them a little closer to Homer’s epic. When you leave the theater, what stays in your mind isn’t just giants, monsters, and battles; you also understand better why this story written thousands of years ago is still being told. Maybe that’s exactly what a good adaptation should do.
