What the reviewers say: The Odyssey
After soaring at the box office and selling out screenings, here’s what the critics have to say about Christopher Nolan’s big-budget reimagining of Homer’s epic
With staggering shots, immersive practical effects and an A-List cast, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has taken the box office by storm, earning £196m in its opening weekend. Nolan is being applauded for tackling the staple of Greek mythology with fierce ambition, bold feats of cinematography and his signature non-linear storytelling.
Reviewers are largely united in singing their praises, spotlighting the film’s gritty dissection of the unglamorous reality of war, and its focus on quiet moments of humanity despite its colossal, mythic scale.
In our four-star review, Emma Simmonds wrote: ‘Nolan pulls his punches a bit with the violence, which impacts on the horror and emotion, and although Damon makes a suitably grizzled, stubborn and ultimately sympathetic adventurer, another actor might have brought more depth and anguish to Odysseus’s plight. However, the execution is, for the most part, astonishing, combining sumptuous, immersive cinematography (it was shot entirely on IMAX cameras), gritty authenticity and awesome spectacle’. Read our full review. But what do other critics make of Nolan’s latest eye-wateringly expensive production?
The Guardian
5/5
‘This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish. It has gasp-inducing, Imax-sized landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who, incidentally, avoids the sea’s traditional cliched colour – and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums.’
(Words by Peter Bradshaw)
Read The Guardian’s full review.
Empire
5/5
‘It is filmmaking at a magnitude few modern directors could ever realistically imagine, demand, or execute. Yet what is most striking about this film is its quieter moments. The gods here are human-sized: the fury of Zeus and Poseidon is felt only in the elements, while Calypso (Charlize Theron) simply wants a companion, and Athena (Zendaya, doing much with little, in a role strikingly similar to the one she played in the first Dune) is seen only in flashes of an enigmatic half-dream — or perhaps as a trauma-response. Samantha Morton’s Circe, meanwhile, provides the closest Nolan has come to full-on horror, an astonishing sequence full of shocking fury and sadness at the baseness of men.’
(Words by John Nugent)
Read Empire’s full review.
Pitchfork
N/A
‘Christopher Nolan has been rightly praised, as a director, for his unparalleled commitment to practical effects and rightly criticised, as a screenwriter, for an attendantly labored approach to story. He’s made a handful of excellent movies despite his Achilles heel. But The Odyssey is the first time his devotion to the literal Real has been wielded so effectively.’
(Words by Paul A. Thompson)
Read Pitchfork’s full review.
NME
5/5
‘Always a master of structure, Nolan’s real coup here is cutting the poem up into bits and piecing it all back together again. Set in “a time of apparent magic”, the story’s most fantastic elements play out like fever dreams; mini movies told by a mad middle-aged man who might have been there or might just be struggling to accept his part in it all; a story as much about our own world as the ancient one.’
(Words by Paul Bradshaw)
Read NME’s full review.
Variety
N/A
If the language of Homer’s epic has been simplified and modernized in Nolan’s screenplay, the stakes and scale of its storytelling have suffered little corner-cutting: It’s so very big, in terms of mythological scope and human consequence, not to mention the sheer volume of incident stuffed into it, as to remind us why other, less intrepid filmmakers have stayed away. But if this “Odyssey” is consistently involving and frequently dazzling, it’s never exactly moving; it keeps the eyes and ears so lavishly occupied, while engaging the mind with its structural games of cat’s cradle, you almost don’t notice, or mind, that your heart isn’t quite in it.
(Words by Guy Lodge)
Read Variety’s full review.
Deadline
N/A
Pushing backward and forward in equal measure, Nolan’s admirably faithful adaptation is, compared to his other work, remarkably restrained — even Ludwig Göransson’s beguiling score is perfectly used as propulsion rather than distraction, as can sometimes be the case with Nolan’s reliance on sound design. It may be his most achingly humanistic film. Not since The Prestige has the auteur so foregrounded his many characters’ emotional journeys. Extraordinarily staged and brimming with profundity, The Odyssey is a thunderous, anti-war screed on the persistent damage of patriarchal arrogance
(Words by Gregory Nussen)
Read Deadline’s full review.
The Odyssey is in cinemas now.