The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan delivers a spectacle, hits a home run

A co-screenwriter on the film, Nolan has cited Emily Wilson’s adaptation of The Odyssey – the first by a woman, and often contested – as his inspiration. That is a hint of his intentions but, on screen, they are far from the entirety of the film.

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Instead, like the epic intends, you are swept up by the scale of Odysseus’s journey, and that of his men, the sea that tosses them around, the sky that rains down, the boat that creaks and breaks under them, the monsters that challenge them, the ravages that war wroughts, and the price that victory entails.

In Matt Damon, Nolan has the kind of beefy, grizzly, remorseful and noble action star that his Odyssey needs. He is believable both cutting down men and weeping over them, bonding and scheming, and growing old over 10 long years on the sea after winning the Trojan War. The epic’s Odysseus is not averse to lying and sleeping around for his ultimate goal, which is to reach home. Damon has shown he is capable of both nobility and playing shifty, sexy characters, and one wishes Nolan had trusted him with that.

Instead, Odysseus’s encounters in the film with both Calypso (Charlize Theron) and Circe (Samantha Morton) are entirely devoid of sex, and certainly of any suggestion that one reason our hero forgets his way is that he is having too much pleasure in the company of the two enchantresses.

The film instead lends a purpose to the actions of both Calypso and Circe which go beyond bedding Odysseus, with Morton absolutely stealing the show as a witch who turns his men into pigs because that is their “true nature”. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema lend the scenes with Circe a terrifying yet tragic quality that is mesmerising. Theron in contrast comes across as an angelically dressed therapist who could have stepped out of – or rather, stepped right into – the TV series The White Lotus. And that’s not just because she keeps making Odysseus eat lotus to keep his mind reassuringly numb.

Other women too get a Nolan rewrite, with Penelope (an efficient Anne Hathaway) giving a particularly savage sermon on how Ithaca’s throne is still considered “empty” though she has been in charge for 20 years since husband Odysseus left. And how now she must quiescently cede control to Telamachus (Tom Holland), because “all my knowledge and experience are nothing compared to the bristles on your face”.

Telemachus has nothing to say in return, and neither does Holland. His charm dulled down, the actor is bland even as the film mounts his journey to find whether father Odysseus is alive or not as a parallel to the latter’s.

Lupita Nyong’o does what she can do with the little screen time she has playing both Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra, who murders her husband Agamaemnon, after he has returned from the Trojan War. Despite all the brouhaha about Elliot Page’s casting, he has little to do either.

Robert Pattinson as Antinous, one of the dozens of suitors waiting to take Odysseus’s place and stalking Penelope, has to leer and play oily and slimy. And he does that well.

However, more than any other, this is above all a Nolan film; and while he does his tinkering with the spirit of Homer’s epic, he knows better than to tamper with the spectacle of it. Cyclops will seize your heart, the chaos of his cave as bleating sheep and frightened men are towered by the one-eyed monster conveying the frenzy of fright. Circe will make you think twice before accepting meals from a stranger. Poseidon (though present here only in various mentions of him) will weigh on you the next time you are at sea. And the horse conjured by Odysseus that ultimately won his side the Trojan War, standing half-submerged at sea in haunting loneliness before being hauled into the walls of Troy, will not be easily forgotten.

Few before now have considered the men who hid in that horse for days before the plan succeeded, and what it would have meant being packed in with nowhere to relieve themselves but where they lay. Nolan goes into that detail.

As also into the fact that the top of their armour grazing their necks meant warriors probably constantly pulled the same away – like actors in the film do. It may not be Homerian, but it’s a Nolan home run.