Christopher Nolan nearly made a Greek epic two decades ago. He was set to direct Troy in 2004 before ceding the project back to Wolfgang Petersen and finding himself offered Batman instead. What followed was one of the most remarkable directorial careers of the century. Arriving now with The Odyssey, his first film since Oppenheimer, Nolan has finally made the ancient epic he was always circling, and the wait has been worth every year.
The film opens not with Odysseus but with his legend. Matt Damon’s weathered king is present in the famous Trojan horse sequence — barely glimpsed, coiled in wood and darkness — but the Odysseus we actually come to know emerges through the stories told about him in Ithaca: a man so defined by myth that the truth of him has become almost impossible to locate. It is a typically Nolan-ish conceit, this gap between reality and reputation, and it lends the film a philosophical weight that sits underneath its more spectacular ambitions without ever threatening to capsize them.
Damon carries the picture with a bone-weary authority that ranks among the finest performances of his career. He is not a hero, exactly — or at least not the uncomplicated kind. He is a man who has been away too long, who has survived things that have changed him in ways Penelope and Telemachus will have to learn to accommodate. His year of growing a real beard, his physical reduction for the role — all of it feeds into a performance that feels genuinely inhabited rather than merely impersonated.
Around him the ensemble is exceptional without exception. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is the film’s quiet revelation: Nolan gives her considerably more agency than Homer does, and Hathaway makes every scene in Ithaca feel like a chess game played under extreme duress. The silver ring she twists in her fingers whenever Pattinson’s silkily malevolent Antinous gets too close is never mentioned in dialogue, one of dozens of small decisions that accumulate into something rich. Tom Holland brings a restless, searching energy to Telemachus — a young man who has spent his entire life living in the shadow of a father who was barely there to cast one. Zendaya as Athena has an otherworldly stillness; Charlize Theron as Calypso a terrible, aching tenderness; Samantha Morton as Circe something closer to gleeful malice.
Shot entirely on IMAX 70mm by Hoyte van Hoytema — reportedly the first time the format has been used for every dialogue sequence as well as spectacle — The Odyssey is frequently breathtaking to look at. The practical galleys on the actual waters of the Greek archipelago give the film’s seagoing passages a tactile reality that no amount of CGI could replicate. Ludwig Göransson’s score, as with Oppenheimer, refuses easy grandeur, sitting low in the mix until it rises suddenly and alarmingly when the film demands it.
What surprises most, in a career not short of surprises, is how emotionally open the film is. Nolan has sometimes been criticised for keeping feeling at arm’s length, for preferring the architectural satisfactions of structure and concept to the messier business of the heart. The Odyssey disarms that criticism almost entirely. This is, at its core, a story about a man trying to get home to the people who love him, and the film never allows you to forget it even through cyclopes, sirens and the black shores of the underworld. When father and son finally stand in the same room, the accumulated weight of the film’s nearly three hours arrives all at once.
It is Nolan’s crowning achievement, and one of the finest films of the decade so far.
