Genre: Period/Light Fantasy
Premise: After the fall of Troy, the legendary Greek king Odysseus must survive monsters, vengeful gods, and impossible temptations on a perilous voyage home to reclaim his kingdom and family.
About: Christopher Nolan’s latest is powerhouse at the box office, taking in 125 million dollars. This is a movie that, just a couple of weeks ago, was projected to hopefully make 80 million dollars. In a movie world where everyone is underperforming, Nolan is one of the few people who you can count on to overperform.
Writer: Homer & Christopher Nolan
Details: 2 hours and 45 minutes
By far, the coolest thing about The Odyssey is the fact that 2700 years ago, this guy wrote this story and it was so powerful and affected people so much, that 2700 years later someone is making a movie out of it.
Think about that for a second. To write something so impactful that 2700 years from now, somebody will make a movie about it. Or whatever the equivalent of a movie is in 4726. That’s pretty freaking awesome and shows the power of the written word.
Just imagine for a second Homer… staring at the blank page (or the blank air since I don’t think they had paper back then), just like you do every day. Mentally writing something down. Not liking it. Changing it. Being unsure. Figuring something out. There may have even been a moment where he said, “You know what? I don’t think this is very good. I’m not going to finish it.” But then he forged his way through the doubt and finished it anyway. And now people all over the world are going to see the visual adaptation of that story. It’s amazing when you really think about it.
The other big cool thing about this movie is Christopher Nolan. I love the fact that he’s still making movies the old fashioned way. Not just because that’s “how they used to do it.” But Nolan understands that when you record reality (as opposed to computer generated artificiality), the viewer’s suspension of disbelief is stronger. The audience feels like they’re seeing something that’s real.
And he’s just great at steering the ship. There were so many times during this movie where I would admire the composition of a shot. The lighting in a shot. The music in a scene. There were several times where I marveled at the costuming. I never think once about costumes but, in this movie I did. I loved certain performances, like John Leguizamo and Samantha Morton’s. And I loved the fact that when we were watching those people on a boat, they were all really on the boat. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Nolan taught them all how to properly row like they did 2000 years ago and the actors were all rowing the boat to locations themselves.
But you want to know something funny?
I was bored out of my mind watching this movie.
If you haven’t seen the movie or read the poem it was based on, Odysseus wins the Trojan War. Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, everyone assumes he’s dead. The timeline here is never explained in a clear way but, the main idea is that many years have passed and everyone assumes Odysseus is dead except for his wife, Penelope, and his young son, Telemachus.
The journey home for Odysseus is a greatest-hits album of Greek mythology. Odysseus outsmarts the Cyclops, escapes the Lotus-Eaters, survives the witch Circe, sails past the Sirens, outsmarts a whirlpool, gets drugged into a nonconsensual relationship, and even ventures into the underworld, where he reconnects with all of his fallen soldiers.
Odysseus is told by the dead that he shouldn’t show up in Ithaca as himself or they’ll kill him. So he disguises himself as a begger, where he eventually infiltrates the lunch room where the Ithacans spend 99% of their daily life, and engages them in a 1 vs. 100 battle. All so he can finally be with his wife and son.
How bored was I, you ask?
At one point I fell asleep.
Look. I just praised the fact that this story has lasted 2,700 years. But let’s be real. Any 2,700 year old story is going to have issues when you drop it into the modern day. Going off to war was a rite of passage back then. Everybody understood it. Today? The vast majority of us live in air conditioned homes and have food delivered straight to our door. Let me repeat that. We don’t even have the battle strength to get our own food!
So that whole aspect of the story was just a big fat “whatever” to me. I didn’t care. Nor did I care all that much about Odysseus getting home, which is kind of a problem since that’s the entire point of the movie.
For starters, I didn’t like his wife. She came off as a bitch. So I wasn’t exactly rooting for her to get her husband back. His son had never even met the guy. So I wasn’t all that invested in him getting his father back, either.
Then, as I was leaving the theater, I overheard someone say that Odysseus didn’t even want to get home. He wanted to stay away. And I thought, “You know what? He really didn’t seem like he wanted to get home.” Sure, he occasionally took a step in that direction. But the dude spent ten years hanging out on a beach before finally deciding to leave. That doesn’t exactly scream, “I can’t wait to get home.”
So then what’s the point of the movie? If the main character doesn’t really want to get home, what’s the engine driving the story? Is it just the inevitability of the writer needing to end the story and, therefore, forcing Odyssesus to return by his own (the writer’s) hand so that we can get to “The End?”
I know a lot of you will say, “You didn’t get it Carson.” Hand raised! I agree with you. I did not.
At one point, Odysseus is just chilling with this woman in a desert house that he borrowed from the Dune movie and he’s half-confused because he’s doping on drug flowers, and he’s not even sure why he’s there.
That’s when we learn this woman drugged him for seven years to forget to go home?? Come on. That doesn’t make sense at all. For starters, THEY’RE IN A DESERT!!!! THERE ARE NO FLOWERS!!! But let’s say that there’s a secret nearby flower garden. Even then! You’re saying you were able to keep him drugged every single second for seven straight years?????
Come on already.
It didn’t make sense, people. I need my stories to make sense.
2,700 years ago, stories didn’t have to make total sense. There wasn’t an internet logic-checking you. Heck, there weren’t even reviewers logic-checking you. You were one of the first stories. You could make up random rules and people just accepted them. But in 2026? No. We don’t just go with it anymore. And the Drug Woman sequence wasn’t the only example. There were a lot of moments like that.
I knew the movie was in trouble when we got to the Cyclops scene. I’d heard this set piece was incredible. I heard it was going to bring the house down. It wasn’t. It didn’t. It was… average. Which ended up being the theme of the movie. There was a shit-ton of average.
I didn’t even understand the rules of the Cyclops. He was already stumbling around like he was half blind. Then they actually blinded him and… he stumbled around like he was slightly more blind? It was all very murky and poorly constructed.
The pacing didn’t help either. Instead of playing the escape out in real time, everybody just goes to sleep right next to the Cyclops. You know, the giant thing who’s been murdering and eating you all day. I guess he doesn’t eat people after 8 p.m.?
There was a lot of clumsy, murky storytelling like that throughout the movie.
By the midpoint, I was dying. I was tapping my feet anxiously. I was rolling my eyes. Especially whenever we cut back to the wife and son. Who, by the way, spent 20 years hanging out in the lunch room. Did these people ever go outside????
I’d heard that the ending was amazing so I kept holding out hope for that.
It wasn’t.
It was like everything else in this story. Average.
I respect Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker. But I think he’s a terrible writer. That’s where he always sabotages his work. The cutting back and forth in time here was an attempt to make the story feel more sophisticated. In actuality, it just made things unnecessarily harder to follow.
The one truly good thing about this movie was learning that there was an actual dude named “Mentor” and that’s where the word “mentor” came from. That was honestly the only moment where my mind and body lit up and I felt something resembling excitement.
This movie is so boring guys. It is boring boring boring.
I do not recommend spending money on it.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the earliest lessons in storytelling is that the strength of your narrative engine is directly tied to how desperately your protagonist wants to achieve their goal. Whenever Odysseus is singularly focused on getting home, the story has urgency and momentum. Whenever that desire wavers, so does the narrative. The audience can only invest as much energy in a goal as the protagonist does.
