I went in with measured expectations — and the movie largely met them.
Christopher Nolan has become one of the most polarizing directors among very online moviegoers. His passionate fans are eager to declare every endeavor of his genius, while others are just as fast to dismiss his work as empty, pseudo-intellectual slop.
Perhaps fitting for an editor at National Review, I am a bit of a fusionist. That is, I loved some of his work (especially Memento and The Dark Knight trilogy) and felt others of his movies were overrated (the long confirmation hearing scenes in Oppenheimer bored me, for instance, while the weak story left me underinvested in Dunkirk).
Given this, I went into The Odyssey with measured expectations — and the movie largely met them. That is, it was an elevated action movie that is better than 90 percent of the reboots, sequels, and intellectual-property-milking exercises that get churned out by Hollywood. But also, the acting ranged from serviceable to terrible, while the dialogue bordered on embarrassing at times.
Among conservatives, there has been a lot of criticism of Nolan for supposedly woke casting choices, but I think those are overblown. Lupita Nyong’o is perfectly fine as Helen of Troy, and, as in the original poem, she barely appears in the story. The transgender artist formerly known as Ellen Page is a bit silly as a Greek soldier but is only in a few scenes, and the character is not exactly supposed to be a fearsome warrior anyway. As the goddess Athena, Zendaya comes off as if she belongs in a high school production of Homer. She is also only a fleeting presence (it had me wondering whether the original role involved more scenes, and Nolan realized she was awful and cut down her time on screen). It’s a shame, because in the poem, Athena is a crucial driver of the action, and limiting her character also demoted the role of gods in the movie. Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway were perfectly adequate in their respective roles as Odysseus and his wife, Penelope, but neither performance was especially memorable.
Having said all that, as a grand spectacle, the film succeeds. The great set-piece scenes involving the Trojan horse, the blinding of the Cyclops, the raising of the dead, weaving through Scylla and Charybdis, and all the other key parts of the sprawling epic are awesome.
There are plenty of Nolan trademarks in the film. Like Homer’s Odyssey itself, the story is told in a nonlinear way — which has become Nolan’s default way of structuring a narrative. Additionally, listening to Odysseus share his regrets about the destruction unleashed by the Trojan horse, he sounded a lot like Robert Oppenheimer lamenting having become a “destroyer of worlds” for helping create the atomic bomb.
I respect Nolan, warts and all, for consistently managing to make mainstream action movies that try to challenge the audience more than your typical blockbuster. It isn’t easy to make a billion-dollar movie filled with scenes of Jewish scientists arguing with each other, and, after decades of conservatives complaining about how the classics aren’t taught anymore, it’s not the worst thing that one of the greatest epics of them all is going to be a smash hit. While most will stop with the film, no doubt there will be people who will read Homer as a result of seeing the movie who otherwise would not have.
The bottom line is that if you’re expecting a truly faithful adaptation, and changes to the source material are going to really bother you, you should just read or reread Homer. But if you want to be entertained for a few hours by an action movie that won’t make you feel dumber for having seen it, you won’t be disappointed.