The Odyssey

(2026, Christopher Nolan)

I’m afraid I was underwhelmed by The Odyssey. Admittedly, I did not see it in IMAX or in 70mm format. For scheduling reasons, we had to see it in standard form, but at least we saw it in a theatre. We sat close to the screen to compensate!

It wasn’t the 3hr run-time that disappointed me. I was engaged to the very end (I even read all the credits), but I began shifting in my seat and looking at my watch at about the 2hr mark. This does not always happen to me in very long films. I’m often riveted (as in Oppenheimer, 2023, Nolan).

But I was waiting for some wonder. Yes, there was spectacle, but there was no jaw-dropping action. Yes, there was philosophy, but there were no gods. Yes, there were special effects, but there was nothing to astonish. The Trojan horse was bafflingly impractical: who wants a gift that scores of slaves have to drag up a beach? How efficient is it for the soldiers inside? Whose idea was it to ditch the wheels? I was looking forward to seeing the whirlpool, but I found myself comparing it to other whirlpools that I’ve seen on film, not the least the one in I Know Where I’m Going (1945, Powell and Pressburger). That Britain just after WW2 could delight me with a whirlpool, but Nolan in 2026 could not, speaks volumes.

I think there are two main problems with this film. The first is that Nolan has gone out of his way to take much of the myth out of Homer’s poem. Instead, things are humanised. Odysseus talks to Athena (a decidedly ungoddess-like Zendaya), but he makes up his own mind and is seemingly rational. He’s the master of his own fate and is hardly ever a mere plaything of the gods. He chooses to shoot the Cyclops in the oddly-oriented eye (why, BTW, did the eye need to be open to inflict the damage?). This obviously annoys Poseidon, the father of the Cyclops, The god understandably raises the ocean against them.Cyclops is played by an unrecognisable Bill Irwin, who is sadly rather wasted.

We don’t even get to hear or see close up the Sirens. How disappointing! We only get to hear from Odysseus what he made of what he heard of their song. His explanation  didn’t make much sense to me: it was just too meta. The clashing rocks don’t even clash. It’s enough to make you long for Ray Harryhausen and his “Dynamation” technique of stop-motion animation of miniature models. (I once had the privilege of meeting Mr Harryhausen and I was able to assure him that I was still afraid of the bronze Colossus!).

Another aspect of this humanisation lies in the casting. I’ve mentioned Zendaya as an unsatisfactory Athena. I was also underwhelmed by Lupita Nyong’o as the pair of Helen and Clytemnestra (why was Helen portrayed as disfigured? If it is intended as a metaphor for the ravages of war, it is rather clumsy. Or is it just to help us tell the sisters apart?). The worst piece of casting in my view was John Leguizamo, just unbelievable (in the worst sense) as the blind pig farmer. What was he doing in Ancient Greece? Not looking comfortable.

The exception to this showy, inappropriate casting is Samantha Morton as Circe. In her few scenes, she steals the movie with her mysterious and eerie presence. I loved the way she massaged Odysseus’s men into pigs, and then changed them back. She’s intriguing. If only Odysseus had spent a few years with her. Oh wait, he did! But the movie changes that part of the poem, and Odysseus is off to stay with Charlize Theron. She’s beautiful and mature in this film – but why did they make her a wellness practitioner rather than a seductress? This is just more rinsing out of the story’s mystery and mythology. And then, despite all this try-hard and even distracting casting, there seems to be not a single Greek in the cast. I could go on….

One pleasing result of Nolan’s attempt to “internationalise” The Odyssey is the use of locations. Odysseus’s journey around the Mediterranean turns, in the film, into a trip around the world. Nolan filmed in Greece, Morocco, Sicily (for the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis), Iceland (for Hades and Apollo’s island), Scotland, and Los Angeles (studio shots). This provides a sense of scale that is almost majestic.

However, my second major problem with the film is with the framing of many of the scenes. Some scenes are merely adequate, but others are deficient. The worst example is the set-piece battle in Odysseus’s Ithaca palace at the end. I found myself peering at the screen, trying to look inside and work out why heads were cut off at the top of the screen, and feet cut off to the foot. Is this an artistic choice? If so, it’s a strange one. It was as if the palace hall was a ship’s cabin. It seemed as if the actors were ducking their heads. Or was it something to do with the IMAX cameras that Nolan used, exclusively (for the first time in any movie)? Either way, it was puzzling, and annoying.

The one set-piece that really worked for me was the sacking of Troy. I began to see it as Gaza, and I found it very effective and quite moving in its senseless destruction.

In summary, The Odyssey seems to me to have been a wasted opportunity. Nolan is so intent on showing us that waging war is wrong, that he has missed too many other aspects of the poem – especially those that have made it live in our imaginations or so long.