We saw the Odyssey: Nolan loses the plot on the way to Ithaca

Films cinemahollywoodTop News We saw the Odyssey: Nolan loses the plot on the way to Ithaca Ct 54129 Msg 2 1024x682 Relevant News We saw the Odyssey: Nolan loses the plot on the way to Ithaca 15 July 2026 ‘ICE Out: Justice for Lorenzo and Joan’ protest at Foley Square 15 July 2026 On this day: A failed military coup attempted to overthrow Turkish President Erdogan in 2016 15 July 2026 Yiorgos Savvinidis 15 July 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber This film review contains spoilers. How many spoilers can you really drop about a story nearly three thousand years old, a story everyone already knows by heart? Does Odysseus make it back to Ithaca? Does he mow down the freeloading suitors? And yet Christopher Nolan’s version takes so many liberties, poetic licence and all, that I might still ruin it for you if you keep reading. None of that would matter if the liberties were dramatically justified, if they added up to a coherent new reading. In my view, they don’t. Not to the standard you’d expect from a project costing hundreds of millions of dollars with a marquee director’s name stamped on it. Nolan himself made clear early on that faithful reproduction of the Odyssey wasn’t the point (it would have been impossible anyway, and arguably pointless), that this was always going to be a personal take. Fine. Accepted. But the sheer number of arbitrary choices isn’t really the problem here. Great adaptations have always taken liberties. What actually stings is that his choices don’t land on a fresh reading of the Homeric world, they flatten it into something simpler and shallower. Nor do they pull the viewer into some compelling alternative version of the epic. They just don’t work, either way. The clearest example is what he’s done to the entire narrative skeleton of the poem. The Lotus-Eaters vanish outright. The Phaeacians, arguably Homer’s single smartest dramatic device, are cut completely. Yet it’s precisely on their island that Odysseus’s great retrospective narrative gets built, the moment the hero washes up as an unknown stranger and has to reclaim his own voice and identity. Nolan shifts that entire function onto Ogygia instead. Calypso is made to double as both Nausicaa and a kind of Lotus-Eater, a repository for fragmented memories. It’s almost funny: he has her feed Odysseus lotus, systematically, apparently so an Anglo-Saxon audience finds it easier to swallow why the man stayed put with her for seven years. It’s a narratively convenient mash-up of separate episodes that guts the internal logic and architecture of the poem itself. Then, when Odysseus finally leaves Ogygia, the sea conveniently just… deposits him on Ithaca, skipping five or six entire books along the way. Other foundational episodes get the same treatment. The Nekyia is dispatched in a rush on a black, desolate beach, treated as little more than an obligatory plot checkpoint. Only the dead who serve the plot bother to show up. Among the casualties: the devastating reunion with his mother, whose death Odysseus didn’t even know about, and the famous exchange with Achilles. Both gone. The Cyclops episode is delivered almost mechanically, chasing spectacle over substance, stripped of the verbal duel that made the original confrontation unforgettable. Polyphemus is a clumsily rendered, visibly dim-witted monster with a single vertical eye. In place of Homer’s razor-sharp dialogue, we’re left with a handful of one-liners better suited to a modern blockbuster. In Homer, the resourceful Odysseus exists primarily through speech. He’s polymetis, endlessly cunning, but also a formidable rhetorician. He persuades, deceives, narrates, improvises on the spot. His defining trait is self-mastery and intelligence. His great scenes are all scenes of dialogue: with Polyphemus, Nausicaa, Alcinous, Eumaeus, Penelope, even the dead. Nolan strips all of that away. Matt Damon plays him as sullen, tight-lipped, permanently withdrawn, drowning in guilt, more like a shell-shocked Second World War veteran than the wiliest man in Greece. The most grating problem, though, is that the whole narrative thread suffers from an erratic, lurching pace. In places the film sprints, hurtling from episode to episode and book to book, while elsewhere it slams the brakes on entirely, making room for long stretches of hazy philosophising and pronouncements that rarely rise above cliché. Nolan also forces, rather clumsily, a connection between Homer and the modern decline of civilisations, as if a timeless epic somehow needed crutches to pull that off. The parallels he’s reaching for end up feeling stated rather than genuinely woven into the work. The film also tries to give the Sirens’ song an actual concrete form, framed as a description from the one man who heard it and lived: Odysseus, bound tight to the mast. It’s an ambitious choice, and a risky one. To my eye, it backfires completely. The power of that episode always lay in the fact that the song itself is never revealed. Its allure comes precisely from the mystery. As for the Trojan Horse: Menelaus’s account of the hours the Achaeans spent hiding inside it is one of those moments where chasing entirely unnecessary realism actively works against the myth. The film dwells on the suffocating, grim conditions inside the wooden horse, the exhaustion, even their bodily functions (yes, really), to the point where the whole enterprise starts to look faintly ridiculous. If the horse really was that unwieldy and stuffed full of men, it’s hard to believe the Trojans wouldn’t have clocked that something was off. Rather than making the ruse more believable, the scene undercuts its own credibility. The description reads more like a survival nightmare than a strategic triumph, and honestly, it reminded me more of the rude, rhyming Iliad parody we used to snigger at back in school than of Homer. Meanwhile, the much-discussed inclusive casting seems, unfortunately, to serve modern film-industry convention more than any genuine artistic vision. The problem isn’t Helen and Clytemnestra’s skin colour (or young Iphigenia’s, or Athena’s), nor is it Elliot Page playing Sinon rather than Achilles. The problem is that these choices come across as slightly forced, bolted-on, a bit self-conscious, and never seem to add any new interpretive layer that actually binds to the rest of the project. In the end, it stays purely skin-deep. You won’t be bored, mind. It’s hard to argue with the sheer technical polish of the production. The cinematography, the scale of the set pieces, the design of every location, the overall visual identity, all of it confirms Nolan remains one of the most significant filmmakers working today. The film’s visual world is clearly far more inspired than its narrative one. Is that enough to sweep you away? That’s for each viewer to decide. And maybe that’s where the real disappointment lies. This isn’t a mediocre director failing to live up to a masterpiece. This is an auteur who has trained us to turn the most tangled narrative puzzles into thrilling cinema, falling flat on his face, spectacularly. He made sense of the most cryptic scripts imaginable, Memento, Inception, Tenet, and then lost his footing completely on the Odyssey, a story everyone already knows, one Homer had practically served to him on a plate. The Homeric epic isn’t some untouchable totem, nor a sacred text forbidden from being reworked and blended with a bit of Virgil and a bit of Nolan. And there’s no argument more laughable than reaching for “historical accuracy” to defend an epic poem stuffed full of gods, monsters and supernatural episodes. But it is a literary structure so cleverly engineered that when you start pulling out the beams holding it up, it begins to creak. And unfortunately, in this much-talked-about film, some of those creaks are, at points, genuinely bone-chilling. 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