Christopher Nolan is once again doing his Christopher Nolan-thing: giving us an epic movie on a grand scale. Something he’s done time and again, with films like Interstellar, Inception, and Dunkirk. And what better story than one of the grandest: Homer’s Odyssey. So what can Nolan, a man obsessed with perfection and accuracy, do with such a subject? Gives us a movie that needs to be seen on the biggest screen available.
No spoilers here, and you either know the story of Odyssey (or, at least, bits and pieces of it) or you don’t. The movie is 3 hours long, detailing Odysseus’s years-long journey home after the Trojan War, where he was a hero for coming up with the idea for the Trojan Horse. Along the way he battles cyclops, giants, sirens, maelstroms, and even the gods themselves, but through it all, he is determined to return to his love, his wife Penelope, and their son Telemachus. Telemachus has grown up without a father, and is bitter over the suitors who come to his home daily to woo Penelope in hopes of marrying her for a shot at the throne, in Odysseus’s absence. No one really believes Odysseus will return, except for his family and one trusted servant.
Nolan spent gobs of money to develop new techniques to make this film, and did the majority of it “the old fashioned way.” You won’t find buildings-tall green screens and layers of CGI. There’s tons of natural action scenes with real (not computer-generated) armies fighting to the death. All of the actors have been very forthcoming with how hard this movie was to make, but to a person they agree that there comes satisfaction with having made something that will speak to people, because it has themes that are as meaningful today as they were 2800 years ago. This is a movie that you can watch again and again, and probably catch something you missed each time. Brilliantly done with an absolute all-star cast top to bottom (even some of the bit-part extras are recognizable faces!). I don’t know how Nolan is going to top this one. Maybe he’ll surprise us and make a small indie film next? ★★★★★
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