📝 Articles Day 6

‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan Crafts High-Minded if at Times Snoozy Spectacle Out of an Episodic Journey Led by a Brooding Matt Damon

Christopher Nolan’s passionate love affair with the Premium Large Format moviegoing experience peaks with The Odyssey, a gigantic undertaking that marks the first feature shot entirely with IMAX Film Cameras. The result is a meditative action movie both immense and intimate, albeit one whose flow is impeded by the inherently episodic nature of the nonlinear source material and some questionable casting choices. Still, audiences hungry for the kind of brawny all-star spectacle now largely confined to sci-fi and comic book tentpoles should turn out for this bold retelling of Homer’s epic poem.

It’s ironic, given the foundational influence of the text on modern Western storytelling, that there has never been an indisputably great screen version of Homer’s Odyssey, though Nolan, who also penned the adaptation, gets closer than some. The poem built the template for the Hero’s Journey, shaping literature’s approach to character, adventure and conflict in a narrative that encompasses mortals, gods and monsters, history and mythology, tests and triumphs. 

But it’s less surprising when you consider Homer’s disjointed structure, starting in medias res then folding in flashbacks while stringing together isolated encounters over a 10-year period, like stories within a story. 

Then there’s the protagonist, Odysseus — played here with introspective intensity by a commanding Matt Damon — whose internal transformation, from a hubristic warrior to a man humbled by trauma and loss, is as near to a continuous plotline as the movie gets. It’s hard to effectively dramatize someone piecing together memory fragments on a gradual path to moral, spiritual and existential awakening. 

Harder still when much of that process happens in a dream-like haze on an island beach, where the nymph Calypso (a distractingly contemporary Charlize Theron) is keeping Odysseus as her lover, feeding him lotus petals to ease the pain in his body and prevent him from remembering the loyal men he lost along the way — even if it’s ostensibly to spare him that psychological torture. These dull interludes stop the narrative dead in its tracks, recalling Sean Penn’s purgatorial wanderings in Malick’s The Tree of Life.

From hollywoodreporter.com