The Odyssey Review

The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan's bid to make myth physical, and the bet lands. Shot on newly developed IMAX film cameras across real seas and coastlines, the film gives Homer's trials the texture of documentary: storms that swallow the frame, the Cyclops staged with practical scale rather than weightless pixels, and an Ithaca that feels lived-in enough to be worth twenty years of longing.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus as a weathered veteran whose cleverness has curdled into survivor's guilt, a man narrating his own legend and no longer sure he believes it, and the film's structure, trials refracted through memory and retelling, is Nolan's career-long obsession with time finding its oldest possible source material. Tom Holland gives Telemachus a coiled resentment that pays off in the reunion, and Anne Hathaway's Penelope holds the home front with very few scenes and total command.

The ensemble is enormous and a few gods-and-suitors turns amount to cameos, while the dialogue occasionally reaches for epic register and lands on solemn. But the siren sequence and the bow-stringing climax are staged with the confidence of a filmmaker at full power. Event cinema, in the oldest sense.