Okay so technically this isn’t a movie review.
But considering I spent one glorious, chaotic year of my life making Zeus and a Yaksha argue on trivia on this very blog, you’ll forgive me if I treat Christopher Nolan adapting The Odyssey as basically a family occasion.
Homer is family. Fight me.
I went in with the kind of suspicion only a mythology nerd can muster. You know the type — the one who reads the trailer captions and immediately goes “hmm, that’s not how the Cyclops scene works” before the popcorn’s even been paid for.
I had my Emily Wilson translation practically memorised (the “complicated man” opening line lives rent-free in my head), and I was fully prepared to spend two hours and fifty-five minutes drafting an angry Twitter thread in my head.
Reader, I did not draft the angry thread.
The good stuff:
Matt Damon’s Odysseus is not the swaggering hero-of-legend type.
He’s tired.
Bone tired, in a way that felt less like “man battles monsters” and more like “man battles the specific exhaustion of having survived things he can’t talk about.”
That’s very on-brand for Nolan, who apparently cannot make a film these days without someone quietly falling apart under enormous machinery (see: Oppenheimer, a man; also, occasionally, a bomb).
Anne Hathaway’s Penelope got more to chew on than most adaptations bother giving her, which — as someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of energy defending Penelope’s intelligence to people who think she just sat around weaving — I deeply appreciated.
Homer wrote her as the smartest person in Ithaca and it is genuinely rare for a film to remember that. And can we talk about the scale? I’m told they shot this on actual film, in actual IMAX, on an actual goat island, and honestly it shows.
The stuff I’m still chewing on:
It’s a downbeat film. Properly downbeat — less “hooray, adventure on the wine-dark sea” and more “what do we owe the people we left behind, and can any of it actually be repaid.”
Which, fair, that IS the Odyssey, but I did miss some of the wit.
Odysseus in the poem is a trickster, a man who lies as easily as he breathes, and there were stretches where the film seemed almost embarrassed by that side of him.
My man invented the Trojan Horse. Let him have some fun. Also — and I say this as someone with zero objectivity left after 2018-me wrote an entire mythology serial on this blog — three hours is a lot of hours.
Beautiful hours! But my back knows how long I sat there.
Would Chyavana approve?
If you’d told 2018-me, hunched over a laptop trying to make Zeus’s lightning bolt sound cool next to Thor’s hammer, that one day a $250 million IMAX epic would be doing basically the same thing I was doing for free on a WordPress blog — I’d have laughed and then immediately asked for the money.
Go see it. Bring tissues, bring patience, and maybe reread the Wilson translation on the way home, because you’ll want the version where Odysseus is allowed to be a little bit of a rascal too.
Rating: 4 out of 5 Symantak gems.
Docking one for making my favourite trickster a bit too broody, and because nothing — nothing — beats the original text.