Christopher Nolan’s latest builds upon his previous work, to go deeper and farther.
There were two gigantic surprises out of The Odyssey that caught me completely off guard.
One is how it is Christopher Nolan’s first unambiguous horror film. Nolan has always had a bit of a devious streak to his filmmaking, best on display in the sinister tone that permeates throughout The Dark Knight. But his adaptation of Homer’s ancient epic poem finds in it less grand adventure, and more perilous danger lurking around every corner. His interpretation of the journey does not relish in its strange contours, but portrays it as a thing to escape. Matt Damon’s version of Odysseus consistently faces into the actual maw of the unknown wide world. He longs to get home not primarily because of his duties that await him there, but due to the fact that if he wanders too far off track he will be killed.
The second surprise was the degree which The Odyssey is a companion film to Nolan’s last, Oppenheimer. In both the central, titular character is a war hero who questions the actual impact of their actions. They are both explicitly anti-war, and deal with the actual human cost of conflict, both external and internal. They operate through a prisms of disconnected timelines, revealed truth, and the impact those things have on the individual. While The Odyssey leans on both action and horror to carry it’s dramatic ambition, compared to Oppenheimer being mostly a procedural drama on the edge of war, they are films in dialogue with each other in the sense that clearly Nolan is fascinated with the actual toll that is paid in the midst of war.
They are both maybe the finest films Nolan has ever made.
That is high praise, and potentially hyperbolic with a hint of recency bias. But the most exciting thing about Oppenheimer was Nolan taking his playful bag of tricks he had mastered over the years towards a more adult drama. His use of non-linear rhythms, moody dialogue, expressionistic frames, all came to a head in a biopic about a conflicted weapons developer. And in Odyssey, he takes that exact same mastery of cinematic trickery towards one of the oldest existing narratives, and finds new contours for a modern audience. It’s a thrilling development for a master filmmaker who by all appearances is just hitting his stride.
For the uninitiated who didn’t pay attention in English class, The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus, the King of Ithaca and veteran of the Trojan War who attempts to return home after a decade of battle. But when his crew attempts to take a detour, they find themselves off course. Their actions, including Odysseus’ own, angers the gods to the point of forcing him further and further away from home, moving from horrific encounter with the unknown to the next.
Back home, things aren’t going as well either. Ithaca has been besieged by suitors, chief among them Robert Pattinson’s Antinous, who are waiting for Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) to accept that after 20 years, her husband is likely not coming back. Thus they party and waste away Ithaca’s resources, much to the annoyance of Odysseus’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland.)
Just like Homer’s poem, the narrative of Nolan’s Odyssey moves back and forth between recalling the adventures of Odysseus attempting to get home, and Telemachus attempting to hold off his mother’s remarrying. Part of Telemachus’ journey is trying to piece together a portrait of who Odysseus is, the legend of a father he never knew personally as he went off to war when Telemachus was still an infant.
For his part, Odysseus’s journey is not just across the sea but deep within his own soul. He questions his actual desires, his actual aims as he struggles to return home. What precisely is causing his self doubt is the classic Nolan mystery to be unraveled, but as is often the case, the payout is phenomenal.
The core cast of Damon, Holland and Hathaway hold the center of the film firmly. Hathaway in particular is stunning as Penelope, playing to her melodramatic instincts to elevate the mythological feeling of the scenario. She wildly swerves between deep mourning and defiant hope, and her scenes with Holland stand as some of the best character work of either’s career.
Equally game are the supporting cast. There are too many to highlight here, but John Leguizamo as the blind and salty servant Eumaeus and Samantha Morton as the elusive witch Circe are some personal favorite stand-outs. The reality is that the whole cast act as a rich tapestry that give depth to the core journey for Damon.
Nolan’s mastery of frame control is on full display here, with an eye towards the massive in scale. But the true magic of the story is how it utilizes the visually dynamic to underline the emotional depths it wishes to explore. That balance has sometimes eluded Nolan, but with his last two films he clearly has less to prove and is now digging deep under the surface. Shot entirely on 70MM film IMAX cameras, the film demands to be seen in as close to that format as you can find.
But the film isn’t reliant on that to fully appreciate it. Rather, it is the perfect ideal of a movie: an audio-visual spectacle that blends its physical form to a narrative that pushes you to an emotional place both ecstatic and vulnerable. It transports you into he shoes of Homer’s ill-fated journeyman, and intermixes the tragedy and triumph of the epic. The final result is a triumph, and the rare kind of object we simply don’t see anymore. It’s a miracle that it got made. It’s a great pleasure and privilege we are alive to see it.
