'The Odyssey' is a mostly dull slog through Christopher Nolan’s limited imagination

A larger than life, epic story feels rather small in this adaptation.

All images courtesy of Universal Studios

Well. This one’s for the boys. At everyone else’s expense, in a way only Nolan could bring.

The time is more than right for an adaptation of the classic Greek tale, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey aims to bring the ancient to the present, hailing from its obvious inspirations in the Hollywood heyday of epic dramas (with a spectacular cast to prove it) while firmly grounding it in our present moment. If that includes a kind of confusion as to what that moment means, it also speaks to the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of our times, and how the boys (the film bros) often respond.

Odysseus (Matt Damon, giving all the tortured soul vibes) has been away from his beloved kingdom Ithaca and his queen Penelope (a steely yet vulnerable Anne Hathaway) for a total of 20 years - ten spent fighting the Trojan War, and the other ten in a no less perilous battle to make his way home. As all hope for the return of the king has gradually faded, suitors have gathered (led by Robert Pattinson absolutely oozing lecherous sleaze), vying for widow and throne. It’s not the safest of situations for Odysseus’s son Telemachus (a blandly appealing Tom Holland) either, whose status as heir represents a serious obstacle for the ambitions of those lusting for his birthright.

It should be something of an extravaganza, but Nolan is known for keeping his cool even in his more emotional storylines. Still, the brooding despair in Damon’s eyes as he contemplates the horrors of the war he helped win, the brutality he witnesses in his present time, and a civilization crumbling from foes they’re barely able to name, let alone fight, is exactly the type of male angst which by now almost seems to exist for Nolan’s particular set of skills.

It also practically screams relevant, but the problem with attempting to be subversive is it requires a clear-eyed view of what you’re trying to subvert. Nolan wants his film to be about trauma and the evil that men do while still making Odysseus a badass hero, with a final showdown to prove it. He wants to disdain colonialism while mostly portraying the locals he and his men hope to trade peacefully with as inhuman monstrosities, with little motivation besides tearing our heroes apart.

Where Nolan misses the point entirely is his most notorious weakness: gender. He attempts to criticize male entitlement, but makes Samantha Morton’s Circe the aggressor when the soldiers encounter her and even take care to reassure that they mean her no harm before she transforms them into the pigs she claims is their real form (I’d love to see her work on Elon Musk). He casts an actress like Mia Goth as an enslaved woman and makes her nothing more than a complicit conniver. He tries to show Penelope as a ruler, but makes her another victim, not a wily foil to her husband.

And as it turns out, the bros had no reason to worry about Lupita Nyong’o’s casting, since she is a mere avatar for female pain in not one but two roles, as the much hyped Helen of Troy, now very repentant, with a famous face scarred from battle, but also as Clytemnestra, who is killed by her own son for daring to take her revenge on the husband who sacrificed their daughter. But the real awkwardness is saved for the movie’s first on-screen casualty, Elliot Page, who is killed off within minutes and has the honor of becoming another face of trauma for Odysseus. Hardly the effective stunt casting it’s clearly meant to be when trans actors are disposed of so readily.

Even goddesses are rather boring in Nolan’s world. While there’s little doubt that magic exists in this adaptation, and creatures like the Cyclops firmly fall on the side of reality, the gods remain mostly out of sight or weirdly down to earth. To witness Zendaya’s Athena, you’d barely guess that she is one of the only movie stars of our time, the kind of charismatic force that proclaims she was practically born to grace us with her presence on the big screen. Or maybe she’s still too young to preside over such a stately role. Even with the age gap, she still might’ve been better swapped out with Charlize Theron’s Calypso, who in this version is more of a hot caregiver, providing the grief-stricken Odysseus an isolated home and companionship to convalesce while he slowly recovers in mind and memory from the loss of his men.

After such men discover that the world isn’t made for them anymore, what are they to do? According to The Odyssey, it’s to “Give up the fight, give up control, and live.” I suppose it’s a more benevolent way for straight white men to react by viewing passivity as a form of salvation; basically to screw up the world and then run away. But how strange, and how crushingly disappointing, to see it in Nolan, a filmmaker who genuinely seems committed to not only filmmaking itself, but the communal experience of it. Fortunately others have better solutions, both in cinema and real life. Here’s hoping some of them end up getting half the hype and distribution Nolan does.

Grade: C+