Review of The Odyssey (d. Christopher Nolan, 2026)
To help pin down this state of the art-cum-state of the union, many have invoked a previous Nolan aphorism—of course uttered by a cop—that this is “not the version of the Odyssey we need, but the one we deserve.” It’s certainly the one he thinks we deserve, hence the striking narrative similarities here to Oppenheimer (2023), another long, strange guilt trip about Great Men and the end of the world. More interesting is his increasingly foregrounded self-implication in the violent dissolution of a Western status quo that holds certain notions of civility—or in this case, his reworking of xenia into something like “hospitality”—as its unifying principle. On this front, he’s onto something: Nolan’s neoliberal bona fides are not exactly in doubt. Nearly twenty years after touting the creation of privatized surveillance infrastructure as a sociological disinfectant in a Bush-era metropolis in The Dark Knight (2008), and following that up by depicting an Occupy Wall Street-esque midtown takeover as an act of destabilizing terror in The Dark Night Rises (2012), he’s now (partially) shot his swords-and-sandals extravaganza in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, the last colonized territory in Africa (your move, Óliver Laxe!).
To even things out, he’s cast a true rainbow coalition of American cinema’s best and brightest to populate his ancient Greece, even revealing something of a spine in the process. Casting Elliot Page as “the bravest man [Odysseus] ever knew” and Lupita Nyong’o as “the face that launched a thousand ships” is unambiguously pointed, and all the better for it, even if their characters remain on the periphery of Odysseus’s nostos. That the film has nonetheless become a culture war tetherball betrays how smoothly all of this is subsumed into the film’s intricately nested narratives. Perhaps that’s what truly confirms Nolan’s status as Hollywood’s Man in the (IMAX) Arena: his Odysseus might be tormented by his own complicity in world-burning atrocity, but his sustained box office appeal rests upon his unique ability to sand down the most alienating elements of even the most malleable of derived material to fit his own dour, middlebrow ambitions.
To be clear, this doesn’t have to be a slight: in even his least compelling films, Nolan’s slate grey color palette, thunderous soundscapes, and meticulous emphasis on combat logistics coalesce ostensible binaries to create sequences without much precedent (or, surprisingly, imitators), simultaneously sleek and concussive. Formally, his penchant for montage has called for constant cross-cutting between sequences of parallel action, a technique that too often overwhelms the banality of the characterizations but can also prove thrilling. Jennifer Lame’s dexterous work in Oppenheimer is inarguably the zenith of this approach, stylizing the race to build the atomic bomb as a collective death drive in relentless, downhill motion. Despite similar (albeit contrived) thematics and the bevy of imbricated plotlines within Homer’s original text that seemingly call out for comparable fluidity, Lame’s work here is far choppier, derailing any sense of conversational rhythm and many of the performances along with it. (Though perhaps only Iron Man himself could save Tom Holland from his performance as Telemachus here; if nothing else, he’s very convincing as a man out of his depth). I’d wager the blame rests less with Lame than Nolan’s decision to shoot exclusively on IMAX 70mm film, which constricts continuous shooting to around three minutes per magazine. Combined with the format’s shallow focus and Nolan’s typically indifferent mise-en-scène, which leaves much of the bottom and top quartiles of the frame not showing much of anything at all, I’d chalk up this experiment of unprecedented scale as a kind of failure, though Hoyte van Hoytema’s photography of roiling seas is typically handsome.
The bigger issue here—as it always is with Nolan—rests with his narrative instincts. More than enough ink has been spilt on his not-so-secret appetite for sentiment, if rarely melodrama, which is harder to situate within his grim, realist aesthetic. This is most floridly sated in Interstellar (2014), but just as noteworthy in Tenet’s (2020) temporal-pincer-bromance, in which the signature twist of a white-knuckle actioner inverts not just its two central character’s relationship but also the ending of Casablanca (1942). Umberto Eco memorably chalked up the enduring resonance of the latter to the unique sense that Hollywood’s most bulletproof cliches were “having a ball”; conversely, Nolan’s longstanding interest in the well-worn aspires to something like “an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world,” as per Robert Pattinson’s Neil. Forgive me, though, for finding just another expression of faith in the most hermetic mechanics of this filmmaker’s own artistry, a style that finds his preferred cliches—among them the burden of genius, the unbearable filial guilt of the careerist, even the satisfaction of a trick played to perfection—down in the dumps, haunted and strained. Tenet has recently become an object of auteurist resuscitation for how unabashedly it pursues Nolan’s core interests—the closest thing to termite art this white elephant has made in decades, maybe ever—but I confess I just can’t stomach any of it.
This bathos is undoubtedly an affect owed to Nolan’s defining obsession with nonlinear storytelling, in which the chronology of multiple densely-plotted narratives are tangled before the dénouement clarifies any lingering confusion (or at least most). I remain unconvinced—even in Memento (2000), still his most-satisfying steel trap—that this has ever yielded an especially enlightening critique, let alone transcendence, of Hollywood narrative conventions. This is a structuralist to the bone, one duly compelled by a certain sense of Prestige: the carefully calibrated snap of revelation that redeems schematic obfuscation (as per Christopher Priest’s novel, which Nolan adapted into one of his more durable dramas in 2006) and subsequently dignifies the sensibilities of a bourgeois audience. In theory, such an approach could be well-suited to Homer’s proto-picaresque. Here, however, we’re lent a polytropos-less Odysseus reduced to the most hackneyed traits of a Nolan protagonist. The issue here is not one of fidelity—an illusory ideal, which even Emily Wilson’s much-maligned review of the film grasps whilst chewing on sour, wine-dark grapes—but of more basal instincts that Nolan’s bloodless architecture refuses to support.
Forget the most obvious counterargument, as pertinent here as it was in Oppenheimer, that its protagonist’s shame for the violence wrought by his good intentions is betrayed by the rendering of the same in IMAX grandeur; these bad boys don’t rake in billions for their aversion to spectacle. A bigger issue here is freighting this shame with the full weight of the Trojan Horse, which is depicted here as a xenia-rupturing “trick” that damns the Bronze Age to catastrophe. How can Nolan justify cutting straight from Odysseus’s beachfront epiphany to the horse—here lent a matte finish to help it blend in to its natural habitat at Universal CityWalk—buried in the sand, fully-constructed, and primed for subterfuge? Presumably the same way he excises the cunning “Nobody” wordplay that foils Polyphemus, deliberately eliding the fearsome intellect that might make us identify with his ruthlessness. Instead, Nolan lends his Odysseus a sanctimonious preoccupation (observable even in flashbacks that crucially predate the Trojan War) on the ethical differences between a “fight” and a “hunt,” the former regrettable for its brutal tolls but licit, the latter indefensible in any context. “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire,” Odysseus sobs upon returning to his beloved Penelope, interwoven with a flashback of the sacking that springs two interlocking revelations: that Zendaya’s Athena is more likely a paternalistic manifestation of Odysseus’ guilty conscience; and that he and his men, raping and pillaging across the Mediterranean, are themselves the dreaded Sea People threatening to destroy the world as they know it. Together, they forever confirm and condemn Odysseus as a hunter.
Credit where credit’s due: these are brazen diversions from the source text that gesture towards more challenging ideas about self-deception in the building of empire. Yet they ring faint and hollow, drowned out by the lyre-like chime of Odysseus’ plucked bow that signals his rightful return and the inevitable massacre of the suitors. The lugubriousness of Nolan’s enterprise here is built upon condemning the outcomes of this sort of “hunting” while simplifying—or even downright avoiding—the psychology that both illuminates it and causes it in the first place. The more perverse pleasures that animate the will to power—the possibility that the thrill of violence transcends centrist pieties—have no place in his Ithaca. Frankly, this is only a problem for Nolan’s own self-conception as an artist; no one should come to a film with a $250 million budget expecting a sustained examination of our insatiable appetite for destruction (Jordan Peele got pretty close with 2022’s Nope, but at only a quarter of the budget). The fatal flaw, then, is the lack of more conventional pleasures, not so much levity as a lust for life, a relish in the wondrous interpretative range that Homer has inspired for centuries. This is where the classicist’s strike back and deserve the last word. Wilson’s review includes its share of baffling mischaracterizations, but describing the language of this script as “relentlessly expository, humourless and flat” is not one of them. She’s right that the dialogue is both stylistically inconsistent—bracingly colloquial, then highfalutin, sometimes from the same character over the course of the same conversation—and then ugly in either register, proving the latest and most galling example of Nolan’s long-infamous tin ear. In an era in which reading is on the decline, and an appreciation for the felicitous phrase is in short supply, perhaps this really is an Odyssey for our times.