Nolan’s Odyssey was okay. The first half is mostly exposition. The second half is where the thematic work starts. Near the end, we finally get the larger theme and that adds another layer to the earlier exposition scenes that were initially pretty one dimensional.
But the very, very end is so thematically preachy that I’m surprised Nolan included the dialogue in the final cut. It was like he had no faith in the audience about what to take away from the film so just had the characters say it out loud.
There’s a lot to appreciate. Though I suspect a great many will treat the film’s ambition as depth and praise it for depth it doesn’t actually possess.
The Structure of Nolan’s Odyssey
My big issue is the structure. The real-time story is frozen in place until the last 30-ish minutes of the movie. Everything leading up to that is just establishing situations and characters. So you have over 2 hours of table setting before anything can actually happen.
And, yeah, the backstory along the way has some cool scenes, but it’s still just backstory about why Odysseus is sitting with Calypso on her island. So while the Cyclops scene is great, you could cut it without losing much context. Same with the other hour worth of side quests involving Odysseus and his crew.
That won’t bother most people. They’ll enjoy the side quests because they’re interesting and impressive in their production value. Personally, I find scenes like that empty, even with the attempt to retroactively imbue them with some thematic depth.
In the original epic by Homer, the introduction of those tales is a lot more dynamic. Odysseus leaves Calypso and washes up in Phaeacia. There, the court honors their unknown guest with athletic games and a feast. Eventually, they ask Odysseus to tell them about himself. He stands up and then tells the whole court, in the middle of this feast, about the Cyclops, giants, Circe, hell, Scylla and Charybdis, as well as the Sun god’s cattle. Then it cuts back to him being like “That’s all!” and the whole court being like, “WTF?!!?!!?”
That’s so much more dynamic and interesting than what Nolan did with it. In the epic, those tales are also only 75 pages, 17.8% of the total page count. In the movie, they’re close to 50%.
Final Thoughts
On the whole, I liked Odyssey more than Oppenheimer. Tom Holland was better than I expected. Anne Hathaway gave the best performance and is an actually fully developed female character rather than just a babysitter for the male protagonist the way Ariadne and Kitty were. Robert Pattinson was awesome as well.
Also, the ending is a bit weird. It cuts out the final chapter of the original story, which deals with the fallout from the suitors. Not having that fallout makes the whole “everyone will get mad if something bad happens to the suitors” concern a bit hollow, especially given what happens to the suitors. Just because Telemachus isn’t the one that does it, doesn’t mean people won’t ask questions or be upset.
The Odyssey does offer a cool, unique experience. But in terms of medieval mythology films, I’d pick The Green Knight over it.
