“The Odyssey” film review: Nolan awakens the myth

Hello, Muse, do you hear me? Now I could use your help, like you once helped Homer and Christopher Nolan recently too. Hello Hello? All right, then not. Maybe she’s busy elsewhere, assisting the writers of an upcoming Marvel or DC epic. You have to do everything alone and without higher inspiration.

Huge budget and huge format

Nolan doesn’t really offer anything new, because he tells a story that has been known for around 3,000 years and has been filmed several times over the last century – for example in 1954 with Kirk Douglas (“The Voyages of Ulysses”) or as recently as 2024 with Ralph Fiennes (“Return to Ithaca”). But at least no director has ever gone to such lengths to bring these mythical characters to life. Of course, with a material like this you can’t save on costs and that’s why “The Odyssey” with a budget of around 250 million US dollars is considered Nolan’s most complex and expensive film project to date.

The factory offers a mix of innovation and tried and tested. It was the first blockbuster to be shot entirely with 70mm IMAX film cameras. At the same time, Nolan continued working with two tried and tested partners: his favorite cameraman, Hoyte van Hoytema, worked in Morocco, Western Sahara, southern Italy, Greece, Scotland, Iceland and Ireland. Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson once again composed the soundtrack after “Tenet” and “Oppenheimer”.

Huge stars

The Trojan War was finally ended by the fateful wooden horse and the city was reduced to rubble and ashes. After these grueling years of war, the Greek heroes are tired and want to return home as quickly as possible, but according to Homer, the resentful gods have something against that and send Odysseus and his companions on long-term wanderings. Matt Damon in the lead role has to cunningly navigate his way through various death, love or magic traps, while the number of his companions is increasingly decimated.

But there are also big problems in his homeland of Ithaca: his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is besieged by an intrusive group of suitors, of whom the unscrupulous Antinous (Robert Pattinson) particularly stands out. His son Telemachus (Tom Holland) is helpless in the face of this goings-on and even has to fear for his life.

Wherever you look, a star is staring back at us: Lupita Nyong’o can appear in a double role as the tragic Helen of Troy and her avenging half-sister Clytemnestra. Zendaya, as the warning goddess Athena, repeatedly addresses words to Odysseus, and Charlize Theron, as the island ruler Calypso, does not want to let the stranded hero move on for a full seven years.

Huge skills

Particularly noteworthy is the artful structure, whose nested narrative structure returns to certain core scenes in many flashbacks in order to gain new sides from them, which only gradually reveals their full meaning. The powerful images often reach an almost delirious strength.

Nolan stays true to the episodes of the original epic and continues to amaze us with his directing skills. We are confronted with a hairless horror creature in the one-eyed sheep farmer and man-eater Polyphemus, who also looks like a pitiful giant baby. The scene in which the warriors are transformed into pigs under the hands of the sorceress Circe is particularly impressive, but a storm on the high seas that ultimately leads to a shipwreck has never been seen before in this wave-hard impetus. And when Homer simply writes that Odysseus finally causes a terrible bloodbath among the annoying suitors in his house, almost single-handedly, Nolan really shows what an effort such a massacre entails.

Huge guilt and huge praise

At the same time, the director develops an almost psychological intuition when it comes to explaining why Odysseus takes so many years to return home. In fact, in this reading, the man from Ithaca is his own enemy and is delaying his return because his advice to build the Trojan horse has brought upon himself a kind of primal guilt that he must now atone for. How this happens and what solution Odysseus proposes after reuniting with Penelope is the decisive step through which Nolan finally leaves Homer behind.

By the way, it is rather questionable whether Homer himself would have enjoyed this film, since according to unanimous tradition he was supposed to have been blind. For us people of the early 21st century, Nolan has revived an ancient myth in an inimitable way.

5 out of 5 taut bowstrings