The Odyssey

I don't go into a Christopher Nolan film expecting to enjoy myself, but even with that low-expectation bar firmly set, I was stunned that Nolan could make a film this unbearably insipid and empty from The Odyssey. Nolan's directorial signatures are so specific and seem to be so much more important than whatever subject he's taking on that he's become a genre unto himself. His penchant is to tell every story in the same nonlinear manner, stringing together scene after scene devoid of their own internal dramatic structure. This tendency makes at least a third of each of his three-hour epics into little more than information dumps masquerading as pieces of some grand narrative puzzle that doesn't amount to much. Still, I assumed that his approach might suit this material better than most subjects. After all, Homer's Odyssey is the product of, and is essentially about, the oral tradition. So why not have scene after scene of characters talking about what we've just watched them do or are about to watch them do?

Unfortunately, Nolan's decision to write his screenplay in a kind of dull-witted contemporary American vernacular renders these copious scenes of necessary and unnecessary description as little more than challenges to his movie-star actors; a kind of contest to see which one can embarrass themselves the least while speaking his lines. When combined with Nolan's artless, hurried, herky-jerky approach to narrative structure, choppy editing, and a woefully unbalanced cast, the style of speech underlines the screenplay's ineptitude. The experience of watching The Odyssey becomes less like being on an epic journey through a world of gods and monsters, and more like watching a dim fifth-grader giving a book report on the CliffsNotes—"And then . . . this guy's mom . . . has been undoing the weaving she does every night. But her servant tells on her!"

Nolan may think that this writing and acting approach will appeal to the simple common folk in the audience. Or maybe he seeks to challenge the tradition of casting classically trained British thespians when adapting literary classics for the cinema. After all, the ancient Greeks didn't speak like Laurence Olivier any more than members of the Roman Empire conversed like Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinoff. But if Nolan's choice of dialect demonstrates anything, it's why the long-standing practice of writing and speaking in a somewhat formal manner when adapting classics of literature exists in the first place. Gravitas. It's simply not possible to take Tom Holland's Telemachus seriously when he refers to his long-absent father Odysseus as his "Dad." Forget how ridiculous the adorably petit twenty-nine-year-old Englishman looks in his Ithacan costume or in his attempts to play unplayable, overwrought, yet underwritten scenes with his "Mom," Anne Hathaway's Penelope. Seeing someone in that costume and that landscape talking about his mom and dad rather than his father and mother creates a ludicrous effect. I don't care how anachronistic both options are; one works (sometimes) and the other doesn't.

For Noland, gravitas and credibility are reserved for the size of the image and the authenticity of the practical locations. And sure, large-format cinematic processes are exciting and majestic when properly deployed, and shooting films in real places rather than the interchangeable CGI fantasy-scapes of the digital backlot is always worth the effort. But Noland's narrative and editorial style jump around so much that we rarely get to spend enough time in any particular shot or cinematic space for anything to feel grand. The Odyssey is the first movie to be filmed entirely in celluloid IMAX, but it's cut like a typical action film in ways that work counter to the large-scale presentation. Few shots last more than a couple of seconds, so rather than experiencing the subtle nuances available from the expanded frame and higher resolution, we just experience "a lot." And since Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema are so fixated on shooting in extremes of either very low light that focuses the eye on only one or two elements in a frame, or bright sunlit frames where everything is visible, we don't get to settle into any of the environments they spent so much time and effort to film in.

More than undercutting the visual aspects of the film, Noland's screenwriting and editorial style rob the story of its most important aspect: any sense of time. This is a story about a decades-long journey. It is about the passage of time and the effect those years have on the characters. It is about what Odysseus endures, not only while fighting armies and mythical creatures, but while waiting around for maddening amounts of time, as well as losing all sense of time when he's detained by the nymph Calypso on the island of Ogygia for seven years. But in Nolan's telling, we experience no distinctions in how the passage of time gets conveyed. Regardless of whether we're seeing Penelope and Telemachus ramble on about how long they've been waiting, or Odysseus and his men waiting around for inspiration, hiding inside the Trojan horse, sailing to an uncertain fate, or trapped by one of the mythical creatures, all the action unfolds without any sense of time. Therefore, each scene creates the impression of having equal weight, whether it's a tense, violent confrontation or one of the many info dumps that play like those wordy expository sections in the later Mission: Impossible movies—recapping what's happened in the last installment (only this movie isn't a sequel to Christopher Nolan's The Iliad. This bland and repetitive approach to storytelling is the cinematic equivalent of flipping through a picture book, only letting your eyes glimpse each image before it's replaced by the next page.

The Odyssey is an episodic story to begin with, but Nolan treats each stage of the journey as if he's simply checking off boxes. Each set piece is more underwhelming than the last. When Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cave by the Cyclops, in the film's first major set piece, we're not given any sense of how terrifying it must have been. Even though this filmmaker and his DP love dark lighting, we don't get to linger with the characters in the dark as they try to figure out how to escape. We have no sense of the cave or the monster. Is it hot? Does he smell bad? What's it like to have the body of your fallen comrade lying next to you all night after the Cyclops has bitten his head off? We just see Odysseus apply a solution. The pattern of encountering a problem and then quickly solving it continues with each major encounter, with no variance in the time it takes to find the solution or the difficulty involved in escaping.

The biggest example of how the storytelling undercuts the story is the chapter in which Odysseus's soldiers separate from him after landing on the island of Aeaea and encounter the witch Goddess Circe. All the elements are in place to make this one of the film's standout sequences. Samantha Morton gives a good performance as Circe, and the practical special effects employed to show how she traps the men are effectively creepy. But again, Noland and editor Jennifer Lame don't allow the sequence to breathe in ways that would make it truly unsettling. The sense the men feel when they enter Circe's house that something is "not right" is conveyed with all the subtlety of an open caption in the lower-thirds of the screen that reads, "there is a sense of foreboding." We're never placed inside the frightening perspective of one of these scared and famished soldiers as they dive into the food she offers, even while picking up on the idea that it's probably not a great idea to eat it. And Noland overloads Circe's monologue as she captures the men with repetitive, on-the-nose dialogue, where a few choice words and some whistle-while-you-work-style humming would have gotten the point across so much more effectively.

Then, as soon as Circe has rendered the soldiers' fate, Odysseus shows up and, with the snap of his fingers (almost literally), he is able to undo it all. Odysseus is far more wise, magical, and powerful than any of the gods or mythical creatures seen or alluded to in this film. Sure, each encounter costs Odysseus some men, but since they are as insignificant as stormtroopers in aStar Wars film, the losses feel inconsequential. As much as Nolan relies solely on characters talking to convey the passage of time, he relies exclusively on dialogue to convey the weight of responsibility that hangs over his protagonist. We never get to feel the weight of the events presented. The movie just breezes from one encounter to another, always cutting back to the characters in Ithaca as if intentionally robbing us of contemplation or the sensation of time passing. No other reasons exist to cut back to the Ithacan characters so frequently, other than the actors' star power, since almost nothing develops with any of them over the course of the film—at least nothing that justifies spending so much screentime with those waiting around in Ithaca.

Nolan boils Homer's epic down to a story of essentially five characters: Odysseus, Telemachus, Penelope, Odysseus's blind servant Eumaeus (embarrassingly played by John Leguizamo), and Odysseus's second-in-command Eurylochus (played as a one-note-wonder by Himesh Patel). Everyone else is a glorified cameo. Some fare far better than others. Charlize Theron as Calypso and Robert Pattinson as Penelope's principal suitor Antinous succeed at registering as some kind of human entity. Others, like Jon Bernthal as King Menelaus and Benny Safdie as King Agamemnon, come across as character templates rather than actual characters. And some, such as Lupita Nyong'o in a "duel role," register far, far more as a name on the movie's poster than they do in the movie.

It's stunning that a director with a three-hour runtime and his pick of the most talented actors working today can boil a text this rich with characters down to something so sparse, banal, and two-dimensional. The same goes for the sets. With all the effort spent on shooting in practical locations,Troy is represented by two open-air courtyards. While Ithaca is depicted as little more than the dark dining hall where the suitors have been waiting around having the same feast and the same conversations for over a decade. Nolan does not seem to believe that when one adapts the written word for live action, they should find a way to make things feel credible in the fictional world they create.

Even in our meta-obsessed contemporary cinematic culture, in which a director's intentions seem to count far more than what they actually achieve on screen, and these choices are discussed and debated a full year before anyone's actually seen the movie, I have never seen a film so much more about itself than its subject. The love and respect afforded to Christopher Nolan boggles my mind. I just cannot fathom the extent to which these bad-to-mediocre pictures are embraced. The Odyssey represents the apex of my confounded amazement. While it's not as bad as Nolan's unwatchable Tenet, few people were out there talking about Tenet as a masterpiece, and even without COVID-19, I doubt Tenet would have set box office records in its first week of release.

Is there anything positive I can say about The Odyssey? The film's main saving grace is that Matt Damon is able to pull off the approach to the characterization and dialogue Nolan insists upon. Playing Odysseus as a kind of jacked combination of Will Hunting and Dr. Mark Watney somehow never caused me to roll my eyes. And while I think much of what Damon is required to do in this picture is impossible to make fully credible, he is able to pull it off better than I would have expected. Unfortunately, his relative success just makes nearly every other actor seem all the more awkward and embarrassing. Similarly, this is Nolan's first major IMAX epic to be mixed in such a way that you can understand every line of dialogue. Of course, it is also the film of his in which clean, decipherable dialogue is the least desirable.

Finally, The Odyssey gave me new appreciation for Oppenheimer. Even though I disliked Nolan's previous picture, I still thought it was interesting enough to see it three times in three of its theatrically released formats. There is no way in Hades' underworld that I will ever watch this movie again.