My roommate and I went to see Odyssey 2 days ago at our local Cinemark theater. Not in IMAX, unfortunately, as we had waited… checks notes… 2 months and 2 days before going to see it.

It’s hard to put into words how I feel about the film. There are many, many things that are good about it. In fact, I have few negatives now that I’ve had 2 days to stew on it.

But it also felt like I was watching art — or a technical marvel — rather than a movie.

I agree with the general sentiment online that the cinematography, set pieces, and acting were phenomenal. I truly believe there was not a single bad line, both in terms of delivery and scripting, in the whole thing. The only weak part would be the music, and that isn’t to say I didn’t like it, it just didn’t really leave a strong impression.

When the movie ended and the credits rolled, I kinda just leaned back in my seat and exhaled. 1, because I knew I had watched something pretty incredible. 2, because, man, you really feel the 3 hour runtime.

The Monsters

The monsters in Odyssey are insane. Not just for the technical marvel, though they do look amazing, but because they are genuinely unnerving.

I particularly liked Nolan’s interpretation of the cyclops.

I am unfamiliar with the source material, but my understanding is that the cyclops communicated with Odysseus in the original poem — hence the famous ruse of Odysseus calling himself “nobody”.

In Nolan’s film, instead, the cyclops is mostly mute and appears to act primitively. Despite directly looking at Odysseus’ men repeatedly it just… doesn’t care. It goes about its daily routine and, when it feels like it, grabs a man, ignores their screams of terror, and then eats ’em.

At first, the men conclude that the cyclops is unintelligent. When the cyclops later speaks for the first time, it being to cry softly in anguish from being stabbed in the eye, the men are surprised.

Odysseus put it succinctly:

[Polites] It can talk. Why didn’t it talk before?

[Odysseus] Do you talk to ants?

Then, there is Syclla.

There isn’t much to say other than holy shit.

Right after Odysseus and his men evade Charybdis and start to celebrate, out of nowhere, a man is grabbed by a grey… thing… and is taken. This then repeats until 6 men are lost. While I have included a still frame of the monster design, in the film, you get at most 3 to 6 seconds of screen time with the beast. The longest shot of it is when you see all the heads recede when its done taking victims.

The moment when the first man was taken made me jump. The film had a habit of doing that to me.

Circe

So, while I am unfamiliar with the source material directly, I was exposed to a majority of the major events of the poem due to EPIC: The Musical.

And so, once the film started to go through the various events that befall Odysseus, I was interested to see how Nolan would handle the encounter with Circe.

Odysseus being separated from his men because they effectively tell him to fuck off made narrative sense. They were done with his bullshit, just lost over half their men to the giants on the other side of the island, and so they wanted to handle things themselves.

Odysseus pouts, goes “fine fuck you too”, and decides to go hunt local game. The result is the film temporarily following 2 perspectives: his men slowly climbing the hill to the house while Odysseus finds and stalks a deer.

Nolan’s framing is particularly delicious during this sequence because, as the music slowly builds, it shows Odysseus getting closer and closer to killing his deer. Meanwhile, as he does so, the circumstances with Circe in the hut get progressively more suspicious, until eventually—

SNAP.

The trap closes. And just like in the poem, she turns them to pigs.

Dear fucking God, does she turn them into pigs.

Nolan does not shy away: you are shown, in increasingly longer glimpses, exactly what is happening to the men. You see her literally mold their skin, like she is working with clay pottery, into the pigs. It is unnerving as hell. My roommate is a horror junky and he said it even made him wince.

She does his to them one at a time. Because the men cannot stop eating her meat, they have to watch in terror as she turns each of them into pigs and slowly get closer to doing it to them. The men cry and whimper as they watch her do it.

When I first saw Circe, I was surprised she wasn’t one of the many A-list actors that had been cast. Or perhaps I am simply not a movie aficionado. Alas, Circe seemed… underwhelming in comparison to the rest of the cast.

Which I think was the perfect casting choice given what Circe was doing: pretending to be a helpless woman who had plenty of food to feed travelers.

The Sun God

Something that I think was handled satisfyingly is Odysseus’ reaction to his men eating one of the Sun God’s cows. It goes in the poem that Odysseus and his men come across an island with plenty of cattle. The men, starving, desire to cook the cows to eat.

However, the men know that the island belongs to Helios — the Greek god of the sun — and that it would incur his wrath to kill any one of the cows.

In EPIC: The Musical, Odysseus begs his mean desperately to not butcher one of the cows while they sing of being hungry. In Nolan’s Odyssey, Odysseus demands his men promise to not eat any of the cows if he is going to allow them to land on the island at all.

They do promise. And they maintain the promise, in Odysseus’ own words, for quite some time. But, because the Gods are cruel, they are stranded on the island due to a lack of wind. They are stranded long enough for their rations to deplete and hunger to overcome them.

As Eurylochus said:

[Eurylochus] Yes, you did [warn us]. And we decided that we’d rather drown than starve.

In EPIC, Odysseus is upset and purely panicking, as the wrath of Zeus comes quickly.

In Nolan’s Odyssey, Odysseus is disappointed.

[Odysseus] Did you think if you ate quietly the Sun God wouldn’t notice?

[Eurylochus] We thought you wouldn’t notice.

[Odysseus] I’m not the problem… I wanted you to live.

As someone who has held positions of leadership — albeit in digital spaces only — I sympathize with this tremendously. Sometimes, people just don’t listen, even if the instructions are simple.

And even though you know it isn’t your fault, sometimes, if you care about them, it still hurts.

[Athena] Tiresias told you. Circe told you. The Gods told you –

[Odysseus] You Gods don’t speak in ways we understand!

[Athena] Who doesn’t understand pain?! Or blood?! Or death?! When you watch your men die do you see chance? Or do you see consequence?

[Odysseus] I see consequence. I see my failure.

[Athena] What if their deaths aren’t your failing but theirs?

[Odysseus] I lead them. I led them here.

Eurylochus and his men got what they wanted. They had a filling final meal, and then they drowned.

The Bad

I could go on forever about the things I enjoyed.

Like how the ending flips the story on its head: that Odysseus refused to go back to Ithaca out of guilt for his plan to infiltrate the city of Troy; especially after seeing how his comrades sacked it. How, by his hand, he had desecrated the sacred law of xenia and brought, what he believed to be, the collapse of civilization.

At least for a time.

But I think it is time we discuss some of my nitpicks.

The Island of the Giants

Before the events with Circe, Odysseus and his men make landfall on an island with really thin trees. As they enter said forest they come across a humanoid looking child. The child screams, and then the soldiers as shown above appear.

They are considerably larger than any human man in Odysseus’ group and kill men with a single swing of their weapon. The armor is impenetrable to any attack Odysseus’ men can muster, and it seems like the trees themselves fuck with them.

The men run for their boats, but only Odysseus’ boat manages to escape. The remaining boats are destroyed by the giants and all the men are killed.

This sequence goes on for about 5 minutes from landfall to Odysseus’ men getting eyesight of Circe’s hut. There is no talking (of any consequence anyway). The men make landfall, they find the child, most die, and Odysseus barely escapes.

Now, I know it lasts 5 minutes because I double checked. Don’t ask me how. Point being: I checked because I was sure it had been much longer.

In the theater, in retrospect, it felt like this scene went on forever. While I won’t claim to be a better filmmaker than Christopher Nolan, it felt like Nolan needed a narrative reason for the men to die en-mass for the story to progress, and so chose to have the encounter with the giant men to make it happen.

The giant men are not explained. They are hardly brought up again.

It dragged. It was badass and filmed well. But it dragged.

Penelope & Odysseus

Near the very beginning of the film, before Odysseus is seen in the present day, a conversation between Penelope and Odysseus, taking place before the Trojan War, is shown.

The primary purpose of this scene is twofold: to give more exposition to the audience (given the complexity of the source material) and to setup Penelope’s wish that they abdicate. That way, when Odysseus remembers and brings it up in the finale, the audience knows that it has significant meaning to her.

I’m sorry, but, like, Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway have zero sexual or romantic chemistry

I don’t think sexual tension is needed, but, like, I am supposed to be sold the idea that these 2 are so much in love that Penelope denied dozens of suitors for decades for this man.

One of the 3 or 4 ocassions where I jumped in my seat while watching the film is when Penelope screams at Telemachus:

[Penelope] I WANT ODYSSEUS!

I dunno. It just felt… off.

I think the scene was acted well. I think Anne Hathaway realistically portrays a wife that wants to beg her husband not to go to war. I just don’t feel a spark between the actors.

Minor Nitpick: Injuries

So, those are both of my “major” complaints.

My last little nitpick is that it seemed to me the narrative was inconsistent as to whether certain wounds were survivable. Telemachus is impaled in the gut and seems pretty much fine several scenes later when he returns to the ground floor of Ithica’s palace, for example.

I can’t think of many other examples.

Verdict

The film in terms of execution, technical marvel, and mastery of filmmaking concepts?

10/10.

The film in terms of my personal enjoyment?

7/10.

Above average. Thought it was good. Unlikely to watch it again, but, I’m not typically a rewatcher anyway.

It was less “damn that was enjoyable” and more “I watched a master be a master in his craft” and, while I respect Christopher Nolan a shit ton for his abilities, it felt too esoteric for me to score much higher.