Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, Charlize Theron
Screenplay: Christopher Nolan
173 mins. Rated R for violence and some language.

I think it’s safe to say that a new Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) film is always cause for excitement, and especially considering this is new genre territory for Oscar-winning filmmaker (a fantasy film), I’ve had my eye on it since rumors first began circling a few years back, but I’ve also been a bit curious as to how Nolan would approach the fantasy elements. Well, Nolan’s take on the source material is completely authentic to the auteur director, a universal tale told in a way that only Christopher Nolan could tell it.

After ending a decade-long war in victory, Odysseus (Matt Damon, Oppenheimer) and his men have set sail for Ithaca, but the perilous journey home will take many years and cost many lives after it is perceived that Odysseus has angered the god Poseidon. At home in Ithaca, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway, The Devil Wears Prada) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland, Spider-Man: No Way Home) have seen their home beset upon by a multitude of suitors all claiming that Odysseus has perished and it’s time for Penelope to select a new spouse in order to defend the future of Ithaca from the arrival of new threats coming from the sea. On his journey, Odysseus must encounter and survive several mythical beings like the Cyclops Polyphemus and the alluring Sirens if he hopes to make it home and protect his family.

Simply put: The Odyssey is excellent. Christopher Nolan has taken the universal story and filtered through his aesthetic lens, crafting an experience that is wholly Nolan without sacrificing the strengths of Homer’s tale. The story is structured in much the same way as the epic poem, opening with Ithaca and the danger of the unrelenting suitors, spends time building the decades-long absence of Odysseus by introducing the people who remember him well, and Nolan highlights from the very beginning the musical nature of The Odyssey as a story passed down through time, allowing for each storyteller to embrace the elements that resonate with them. Odysseus is a legendary figure long before we are introduced to him in the film, and when we finally connect with him, he is a fractured man trying to recollect memories that have been lost to him.

Nolan’s screenplay makes a few notable additions to the story by relating much of Odysseus’s character journey to the traumatic time at war and his part in the ending of the war by way of Trojan Horse. We are parsed out bits and pieces of The Iliad and the Trojan War for context in this version of Odysseus and his trials, really exemplifying the notion that no one, be it Odysseus or Agamemnon or Menelaus, returns home from war unscathed. Nolan also decided to use a more modern type of dialogue and speech for his characters, something that was jarring for a moment at the start, but I got used to it pretty quickly and stopped thinking about it. I’m surprised at how this choice didn’t really bother me, and I believe it will make the heady material a lot more accessible to a wider audience.

I was very curious how Nolan would handle some of the fantasy elements given his relative realism take on his Batman trilogy and myself feeling like a lot of those elements were obscured in the trailers, but my concerns were quickly put to rest when the Cyclops Polyphemus appears and I got a better sense of Nolan’s approach, which is to give a layer of unreality to these magnificent moments while also placing them in a framework relatively similar to our own understanding of the universe. I believed that Nolan’s Cyclops could exist in our world so long ago, or the sirens, or his literal depiction of Hell (props to a terrific and creepy James Remar appearance here). One sequence, involving a witch (a standout Samantha Morton) and some horrific imagery seemingly pulled out of The Company of Wolves, really embraced the fantasy elements, and Nolan juggles the two extremes: reality and unreality, rather nicely.

Acting across the board is great, with special attention given to the deliciously slimy and pathetic Robert Pattinson as Antinous, the aforementioned Samantha Morton who makes the absolute most out of minimal screen time as Circe, and Lupita Nyong’o who is very good as Helen of Troy but shines as twin sister Clytemnestra with a flashback sequence that I can only describe as a jump scare that would make Val Lewton proud. I don’t think there’s a poor performance in the entire film. Most of these actors have worked with Nolan before and assembles quite a cast with his ambitious projects. The only performance that felt short-changed is perhaps Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road) as Calypso, who serves a lot of plot and story purposes but doesn’t get much else to do. That’s to be expected with a cast of this size and the dozens of characters weaving through.

In the coming days, there will be a lot of discussion online accusing The Odyssey of silly BS, including its handling of the material and some of the casting choices, but don’t listen to angry people who probably didn’t see the movie or walked in hoping to get angry about something. I can assure you that this is a thrilling adaptation of the one of the oldest and most famous stories, and Christopher Nolan makes it his own. That’s what I expect from a film like this. It’s a story that’s been told many times, and I’d much rather see an exciting director put their own stamp on the material. It’s impossible to note everything great about The Odyssey, as the more reactions I’ve heard from my peers have made me think, “Oh yeah, I forgot about the exciting and foreboding score” and “You’re right, the production design is so immersive.” Suffice to say that this is a movie we’ll be talking about for the rest of the year and likely many years to come. I’m already planning on how I’m going to sneak off to the theater to see this three-hour behemoth again. See The Odyssey on the biggest screen and don’t take twenty years trying to find your way home after.

4½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• For more Christopher Nolan: Batman Begins, Interstellar, Dunkirk