The Critical Flaw of ‘The Odyssey’

Christopher Nolan’s latest adaptation may be his most impressive yet, but its biggest pitfall was also its most avoidable

I’m not sure why we’ve collectively decided that this still frame of Agamemnon is the one that officially represents ‘The Odyssey.’ He’s in it for a grand total of like 45 seconds. But I refuse to go against the grain any more than this piece requires, damnit! / Universal Pictures

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It’s no fun to address a film without being able to speak to its faults. As much as I would have preferred for The Odyssey to warrant beginning-to-end gushing in this review, that would quickly grow dull for readers. To simply hop aboard the bandwagon and label it a masterpiece without covering its most obvious shortcoming would also be dishonest.

Prior to The Odyssey’s release, my social media feed was so overrun with praise of Nolan’s upcoming film that it was easy to conclude that it would be his magnum opus, if not one of the crowning cinematic achievements of the century. (I’m not here to deny that it’s spectacular.)

What it gets right it gets so astonishingly correct that it leaves almost no room for criticism. It creates an awe-inspiring sense of scope, its practical effects are second to none, and the sweeping landscapes effectively drive home what it is to be small beings in a world ruled by capricious gods. It strikes a delicate balance between taking those older beliefs seriously, yet not portraying them with such a strict adherence to the source material that it makes his adaptation feel hokey or inaccessible to modern audiences.

The acting is terrific, the plot is tight enough to make 3 hours breeze by, and the musical score perfectly accompanies Odysseus’ sweeping journey.

By nearly all accounts, Christopher Nolan went to breathtaking lengths to make audiences feel as though they’re alongside his protagonist and crew as they invade Troy, get lost at sea, and face off against everything from sword-wielding giants to witches, sirens, and a sheep-herding cyclops. And yet, I felt as though Nolan poked holes in his own work, not by failing to go the extra mile, but in going a mile too far. The story is so riddled with stars that it almost feels as though he didn’t believe the film could rest on its own laurels. It not only betrays a certain insecurity from Nolan, but distracts from the components that most distinguish the cinematic spectacle.

In the months leading up to The Odyssey, I paid no mind at all to the controversies that encircled the impending release. As ignoramouses railed against a movie they hadn’t seen, as social media commentators stirred up storms over each casting choice they deemed questionable, I stayed silent — trusting that Nolan would deliver as he almost always had in the past.

I’ve never been one to work myself up over the cultural misappropriations and misrepresentations that are inevitably bound to crop up in any story that depicts the ancient past. When history becomes obscured by legend, “historically accurate” loses its meaning.

I didn’t care that Odysseus would be played by Matt Damon, regardless of his decidedly un-Homeric appearance. I didn’t care that Tom Holland was cast as his son, Telemachus, despite their glaring void of shared physical attributes.

Just so long as directors aren’t tasking Timothée Chalamets to play Martin Luther King Jrs., I don’t see anything inherently problematic. I took no issue with any of the individual actors that Nolan brought aboard. It was only in looking over the final crew he assembled that cracks began to appear in his vessel.

By incorporating so many major Hollywood actors into The Odyssey, Nolan sabotages what he attempts to drive home. Listing each actor that made their way into the movie, it’s almost a miracle that the story lands so well — that it doesn’t crumble completely from the weight of all of its star power.

From Matt Damon and Robert Pattinson to Anne Hathaway, Hamesh Patel, and Mia Goth to Charlize Theron — both Tom Holland and Zendaya — to Travis Scott, Elliot Page, Lupita Nyong’o, John Leguizamo, Benny Safdie, and Jon Bernthal, The Odyssey is so brimming with familiar faces that it begins to sound almost like an SNL satire of itself. If the overall movie’s execution weren’t so close to flawless, if each actor didn’t embody their respective roles so well, the accumulation of casting decisions would ring as almost comical.

Among The Odyssey’s greatest achievements is how dutifully it smooths over the bumps that Nolan introduces into the picture. Never is an actor so out of place that it irreversibly breaks his hold over audiences’ attention. But the friction is so needless that it couldn’t help but raise questions for me. Each time Nolan’s siren song lost its charm, more than any out-of-place accent or anachronistic expression, it was because I found myself wondering some form of the question, “Wait, isn’t that the guy from The Walking Dead?”

Nolan has never been one to shy away from recruiting well-known actors. But at no point in The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Inception, Tenet, or Oppenheimer do the films feel so overloaded with A-listers that they disrupt. Set exclusively in worlds that are more reminiscent of life today, never did one of those stories insist on a new set of faces as resolutely as The Odyssey.

Where even Nolan’s foray into the superhero franchise was marked by grounded realism, The Odyssey catapults viewers into a world where mystical forces reign supreme. It’s impressive that Nolan pulls off the thematic leap as well as he does, and that it’s only in brief moments where the celebrity status of his cast causes his masterful illusion to thin.

A few recognizable leads would be both expected and welcome, but this is the first time I feel as though Nolan has distinctly crossed over the threshold where star power begins to feel obtrusive. Maybe he simply wanted to ensure that this film would live up to his lofty ambitions and garner all of the acclaim that he hoped it would, and maybe having enough Damons and Zendayas in the movie was the easiest way to guarantee that would happen.

But for a director who’s so famously resistant to using special effects, who travels the world to record at the most authentic locations possible, it’s ironic that he couldn’t go just a single step further and hire a slightly more convincing cast. Rather than going a step further, it would actually have required him to go a step less far. The Odyssey would have not only been more engrossing if he’d found equally talented unknowns to take on those roles, but it would have demanded a radically lower budget. The cast was every bit as much of a financial drain on the picture as the scenes that were unprecedented in their technical prowess.

If only Nolan had cheaped out and found a less recognizable cast of actors — and perhaps a more regionally appropriate one while he was at it — it would leave me with next to nothing to complain about. But in populating his ancient Greece with as many household names as an Avengers movie, Nolan not only dilutes the potency of the illusion on display, but does something that’s fundamentally at odds with his own cinematic principles.

Nolan’s religious focus on authenticity sees him regularly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible through practical effects alone, all in the name of immersing audiences in movies in a way that they never have been before. And yet, Tom Holland and John Leguizamo, however good their acting, have faces that can’t help but detract from the storied world Nolan goes to such painstaking lengths to build.

I’d hate for my singular objection to talk anyone out of seeing Nolan’s latest blockbuster. It was one of the best adventure movies I’ve ever seen and a film I’d wholeheartedly recommend seeking out and viewing on the biggest screen possible. It’s likely to stand as the most cinematically impressive spectacle I consume all year. But it’s both funny and a little frustrating that what kept The Odyssey from being a masterpiece isn’t any lack of mastery, but a display of it that’s so maximalist it occasionally borders on jarring.

Had the millions needed to feather Nolan’s Ancient Greece with Hollywood stars gone instead toward enhancing the level of realism, one can only imagine the final product we’d have on our hands today instead. I’m not disappointed because my probable movie of the year was imperfect, but because Nolan was so maddeningly close to realizing his sky-high aims. He shot for the moon but paid too much attention to the stars.