Christopher Nolan's last movie may have included modern politicians and his Dark Knight trilogy took some perhaps ill-advised stabs at political topics of the day, but his adaptation of The Odyssey is his most politically potent film.
Throughout the film, Nolan's script emphasizes hospitality to the stranger. "Zeus's Law," that hosts must treat guests as they would wish to be treated, is cited repeatedly. In one of the first scenes, a beggar arrives at the home of Odysseus (Matt Damon) in Ithaca and the characters' responses to his arrival act as a thesis statement for the movie.
The lord of the house has been missing for two decades and a swarm of suitors have taken up residence for the last three years as they vie to marry his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway). These suitors have grown comfortable and are cruel to the beggar, telling him to leave the warmth of the hall, that he cannot have any of the food or drink they're enjoying. Odysseus's son Telemachus (Tom Holland) stands against them and welcomes the man arguing that they must follow Zeus's Law.
Paralleling the weight given to Zeus's Law is the film's consideration of regret, grief, and what is owed to the dead. Throughout Odysseus's journey home, he is forced to let men die so that others may survive, decisions that haunt him and are questioned by the survivors. As the movie goes on, his grief expands beyond his own men to include the Trojans he harmed in war. His arc is coming to terms with and accepting responsibility for what he has done. And more importantly, moving forward to make things right.
Odysseus's greatest regret is his breaking of Zeus's Law by tricking the Trojan's with the use of the horse (I am going to assume, dear reader, that you are familiar with that story). This ties together the two most significant thematic threads and makes the messaging more complex and challenging than the simplicity of Zeus's Law.
Beyond imploring viewers to be kind and welcome immigrants, Nolan seems to be asking us to reckon with what horrors we have accepted to remain comfortable, to take stock of these things and to do what we can to make things right in the future. It's a surprisingly nuanced and emotionally impactful political argument for a major summer blockbuster.
The inclusion of a fairly hollow #feminism moment makes perfect sense for a summer blockbuster, though. In a conversation between Penelope and Telemachus, as he pushes his mother to let him take the throne, she scoffs that she has ruled Ithaca in his father's absence but cannot claim the throne because "all my knowledge and experience are nothing compared to the bristles on your face." It's actually quite a good line, it just feels like weak pandering in an adaptation of a nearly 3,000 year old story that's otherwise wholly uninterested in gender.
It's the worst of the film's sometimes awkward attempts at timeliness via timelessness. The language is almost jarring in how contemporary it is at first. Telemachus uses "mom" and "dad" as opposed to the expected period piece "mother" and "father," and even more surprising (for a Nolan movie as well) is the use of "fuck" in a few lines. It's a choice meant to bring this fantastical epic closer to our world and it largely succeeds, it just causes a brief remove.
That remove rears its heads in two other places as well, yet ironically one of them ultimately works to the film's advantage.
The first is the costuming and thankfully this is not a constant as it only applies to the Trojans' armor and the armor of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). The Trojans' helmets are a strange off-white, have markings like something Frank Miller would do in an attempt to make history look cooler, and don't seem to be made out of metal as the nearly flat faceplates flop a bit as the actors move. Agamenon's armor is worse; sharp angles of thick metal and a shiny navy blue sheen give the sense of cosplay with a budget.
On the flip side, the film's practical effects are sometimes noticeable, but add charm. When Odysseus and his men interact with a giant cyclops, there's an instance of slightly choppy wirework. During a transformation scene, Nolan deploys camera and editing tricks that have been in the special effects repertoire for over 100 years in conjunction with some remarkable makeup work. When the sailors come upon big cats, it's easy to see the compositing. Yet it all works because it somehow speaks to the magic of movies.
Unfortunately, and ironically given that The Odyssey is edited by Jennifer Lame who won an Oscar for her work on Oppenheimer, not all the noticeable editing in the movie is good. During combat scenes, there's so much cutting that it's hard to appreciate the well crafted choreography; albeit this lets up during the final small-scale fight. And during conversations, it sometimes goes beyond shot-reverse shot in strange attempts at visual dynamism.
Attempts which are also unnecessary as Nolan's go to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema offers beautiful images of characters, interiors, shores, and ships lit by fire, and the requisite stunning wide shots of the sea for a seafaring film. There's perhaps an overreliance on blue hued tableaus, though, as we're treated to at least seven over the course of the three hour runtime.
Other Nolan regular Ludwig Göransson returns to score the film and delivers his first miss. After doing the first just fine work of his career on The Mandalorian and Grogu, his work here is regularly distracting and not in a "wow this score is incredible" way. The use of a wide variety of percussive sounds is initially promising but Göransson quickly builds to cacophonies that don't lend the action on screen energy or tension and instead draw attention to the poor sonic choice.
The Odyssey has many flaws, but perhaps its greatest flaw is the pacing. It's undoubtedly difficult to adapt an episodic epic into a single feature film, and Nolan does succeed in drawing out this ancient story's themes for today and creating moments of brilliance for the screen. But he fails to turn the story into a coherent whole with narrative momentum. It's the odd film that leaves you both exhausted and wishing for more. It's a movie that inadvertently makes the case that this story shouldn't be adapted, despite its significant successes.
The film opens Friday, July 17, only in movie theaters, via Universal Pictures. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.