A review of the summer blockbuster movie “The Odyssey”
A budget of $250 million, 50 boats, 5,000 extras, filming at 20 locations in Greece, Italy, Morocco, Scotland, Iceland and Malta. This was always going to be a massive movie.
After the huge success of “Oppenheimer”, so excited was I in anticipation of the next film – his 13th – from Christopher Nolan, co-writer and director of “The Odyssey”, that I decided to familiarise myself with Homer’s poem of some 2,700 years ago by reading a version of it – actually Stephen Fry’s excellent and accessible interpretation – before the movie’s release. I’m so glad I did because otherwise I would have struggled with the extensive cast of characters and Nolan’s trademark mixture of timelines.
In this enormously ambitious and expensive spectacle of 173 minutes, Nolan has done an excellent job summarising and interpreting this classic text, although the start is somewhat slow and purists will be upset by the omissions (such as the island of the Lotus Eaters) and the changes (especially in the final segment). Nolan famously avoids special effects, so Cyclops and Scylla could have been rendered more effectively and the representation of Hades is poor, but the Trojan Horse is striking, the sea scenes are exciting, and the fighting sequences are thrilling.
It is a starry cast: Matt Damon as the complicated Odysseus, hero of Troy and King of Ithaca; Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope who waits 20 years for his return; Tom Holland as their son Telemachus; Zendaya (Holland’s wife) as the goddess of war Athena; Charlize Theron as the deity Calypso who keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years; and Robert Pattinson as Antinous, the leading suitor of Penelope. Hathaway and Pattinson are particular impressive.
The cinematography by the Dutch Hoyte van Hoytem and the sound by the Swedish Ludwig Göransson – both regular collaborators with Nolan – are stunning, but the dialogue (by Nolan himself) does not offer any of the sort of memorable lines that we had in “Gladiator”, a even better film set in the classic period. Essentially, “The Odyssey” – indeed like Gladiator” and many other films, books, plays and poems – is about a hero’s struggles to return home. It is worth the journey.