Nolan's Odyssey hugs the coastline

I walked into the theater last night braced for disappointment, which made no sense at all, since the press had rolled out the red carpet for The Odyssey, 94 percent favorable on 424 reviews^[1], written by people who know far more about movies than I do. Two hours and fifty-three minutes later I came out without hating it and without loving it either, stuck in that awkward middle where you hunt for words when a friend asks whether it was worth the ticket. I promised this write-up on my way out of La Bataille de Gaulle, so here it is, cooler than I hoped.

Troy eats the Odyssey

The movie spends long stretches on the Trojan War and the horse that ends it, so you sit waiting for Odysseus to leave the way you wait for a train the board says is delayed. That prologue deserved a film of its own, a proper Iliad, instead of eating into the voyage that gives the whole thing its title. And the voyage, when it finally comes, blows past. The Sirens go by in a gust, Scylla and Charybdis barely slower, and whole stretches of the poem simply vanish, starting with the Phaeacians, whose court takes Odysseus in and hears his story in Homer. Christopher Nolan hands their job to Calypso, who feeds him the lotus and later gives him his memory back, a swap the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, himself a translator of the poem, calls "a real loss"^[2]. I was worried I'd come off as a crank, and I find myself in good company.

Circe and the Cyclops redeem the trip

The stops along the way save a lot, and some of them are gorgeous. The Cyclops delivers, but Circe walks off with the movie, commanding from her first frame to her last, in a scene I won't describe, though spoiling a story that's twenty-eight centuries old would surely be forgiven. Samantha Morton has a great deal to do with that, as does a cast that borders on the absurd, with Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Zendaya as Athena, and Robert Pattinson leading the suitors^[3]. Not one weak link, not one scene chewed. The casting is never the problem; what the movie chooses to point the camera at is.

Ithaca goes on forever

The homecoming proves it. The final fight runs well past reason when you can call the winner in the first second, and it looks pale next to the monsters and magic of the voyage. One mortal shooting arrows at other mortals, after the Cyclops and Circe's spells, is dessert served lukewarm. We don't escape the Hollywood happy ending either, or the tidy split between the good guy and the villain, where Homer took care never to make his hero likable.

It needed a theme

The music let me down harder. Nolan asked Ludwig Göransson to drop the orchestra in favor of instruments people would have heard back then, lyre, aulos, bronze gongs, and Albanian polyphonic choirs^[4]. Lovely idea on paper, except nothing follows you out of the theater. Great movies come with a theme, the one that surfaces three days later while you're stuck in traffic, the way Hans Zimmer gave one to Gladiator and then to Interstellar, which I still consider a high-water mark and will get back to here. This score offers neither swell nor stillness, and the gap stings more when the source material was a poem meant to be sung.

Sorry, Nolan, I had no IMAX

That leaves the argument the movie's defenders lean on, and I have no screen to test it with. The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film^[3:1], and France has exactly one theater that can project it that way, the Pathé Odysseum in Montpellier, running the third such projector in continental Europe onto a screen 22.39 meters wide by 16.76 high, an image very nearly square^[5]. Whoever booked The Odyssey into the Odysseum earned their paycheck. Everywhere else the projection shaves the edges off, and Nolan seems to have planned for it, since his framing keeps what matters in the center and leaves the extras and the fine detail out at the margins, as the studio's own format comparison tool shows^[6]. So my screening stole none of the story from me. It just never delivered the punch Montpellier is promising.

The poem, I think, still has the edge on the adaptation, more epic and more lyrical than the fortune spent putting it on screen. I'll forget this movie soon enough, while La Bataille de Gaulle hasn't left me yet. I'd never have bet that a general in a kepi would stay with me longer than Odysseus, and I've loved mythology since I was a kid. Go figure.