The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s enormous reimagining of Homer’s legendary tale, following Odysseus as he leaves Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War and then faces a brutal journey home filled with monsters, gods, betrayal, and psychological torment.
On paper, it has everything an epic action movie could possibly need, including Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong’o, and Nolan behind the camera. Unfortunately, all that talent cannot solve the movie’s biggest problem: it is painfully slow and increasingly difficult to watch until the end.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus, a Greek military commander whose experience in war slowly turns into something much darker as he struggles with loss, guilt, and survival. Damon gives the character a serious, exhausted presence, particularly as Odysseus returns from the battlefield and becomes trapped in a journey that seems to have no end.
Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, the wife waiting for him at home, while Tom Holland plays their son Telemachus, who begins his own search for his missing father. Robert Pattinson brings a threatening presence to Antinous, one of the suitors surrounding Penelope, while Benny Safdie plays Agamemnon and Jon Bernthal appears as Menelaus.
The movie also has an extraordinary collection of supporting performances, with Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Samantha Morton as Circe, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen and Clytemnestra, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus. This is precisely what makes the experience so frustrating.
There is an enormous amount of talent on screen, yet the movie rarely gives these performances enough momentum to overcome its sluggish storytelling. Scene after scene arrives with the weight of something important, but the pacing repeatedly drains the energy from it.
Nolan directs after films including Memento, The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, and Interstellar, and his obsession with scale is obvious here. The production is enormous, with massive landscapes, armies, ancient cities, ships, monsters, and elaborate battle sequences filling the screen. The Trojan Horse sequence demonstrates the kind of spectacle Nolan can create when the movie finally accelerates, while the encounters with the Cyclops, Laestrygonians, Circe, Calypso, and the Sirens provide opportunities for genuine adventure.
Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography gives the film a grand visual identity, particularly during the enormous landscapes and battle scenes. The camera captures the loneliness of the sea and the scale of the ancient world beautifully, while the action sequences have the physical weight expected from a Nolan production. The problem is that spectacular images cannot compensate for a story that takes far too long to move forward.
There are certainly impressive moments in The Odyssey, and anyone fascinated by Greek mythology, large-scale filmmaking, or Nolan’s visual ambition may find plenty to admire. For an action-movie audience, however, this is a difficult recommendation. Three hours is a long time to spend with a movie that repeatedly slows down just when it seems ready to take off.
The cast is excellent, the production is enormous, and the battles and monsters occasionally deliver the spectacle promised by the concept, but too much of that potential is buried under the pacing. The Odyssey may be an ambitious epic, but for me, it is simply too slow, and watching it all the way to the end feels more like an endurance test than an adventure.
