An insane experience that I really loved, with a few things holding it back
First, a disclaimer that colors everything below: I'm judging this on a Nolan scale, not a normal-director scale. Slap any other name on this exact movie and I'm handing out a 5/5 without a second thought. But it's Nolan, and Nolan raised the bar himself, so he gets measured against it. On that scale: 4/5.
A story that's great, but never grabs you by the collar
Here's my big one. The story is simply too basic for a Nolan movie. Compelling enough that I was never once bored in 2 hours and 50 minutes, but I didn't leave the cinema mind-blown, and mind-blown is the whole reason I show up for this man. And honestly? I don't think that's on him. I think it's on the Odyssey itself. Think about Inception for a second. Inception didn't touch me on some deep human level, it got me on every level at once, and above all it made me feel like something had happened to me. You're not thinking during that movie, you're just experiencing it, and when you walk out you feel like Cobb on that plane, like you personally served twenty years in limbo. That is a movie. The Odyssey never does that to you. It's a great watch that leaves no dent, because Homer's story runs in one straight line from A to B, and even Nolan can only wring so much out of a straight line. So this isn't really a dunk on Nolan. It's a dunk on the Odyssey.
A feast for the eyes, crumbs for the ears
I cannot overstate how much music means to me, so here's where I get worked up. Let me be fair first: this is not a bad soundtrack. The Odysseus theme has this horn in it that hits genuinely hard, and in that moment you hear what could have been. But that's the problem. This is an epic. The most epic epic of all time. My eyes got a feast for nearly three hours and my ears got almost nothing, and that is so wrong it's unreal. Music is the ingredient that turns great into epic and epic into unforgettable. I watched this movie today, and if you played me the soundtrack right now, I would not recognize a note of it. People underestimate audio time and time again, and it kills me here more than anywhere, because a proper score is exactly what could have pushed The Odyssey to the next level.
And the frustrating part is that I know Nolan can do this. The man is famous for squeezing the absolute best out of everyone he touches, and he did it again with this whole cast, just not with his composer. Even Oppenheimer had a sick soundtrack. Inception and Interstellar live on another planet entirely. Meanwhile Harry Potter has a soundtrack a hundred times better than The Odyssey's, and that's a crime. An epic of this size should send you home humming something you'll carry for years. This one sends you home with silence, and that's the single biggest thing standing between this movie and greatness.
Everyone landed, even the ones that shouldn't have
The acting is superb. Damon carries the entire film as a weary, worn-down Odysseus, and Hathaway really got to me. The scene where a disguised Odysseus sits across from her and just talks almost had me tearing up. That stuff hits home for me. Pattinson I flat-out loved, really funny, especially towards the end. And truthfully, the whole supporting cast nails it. Which brings me to a very Nolan thing: on paper he's always had some questionable casting choices, names you'd never expect, and then he pulls a great performance out of every single one of them anyway. That's not a complaint, that's the compliment. Good script and good direction beat a safe cast every time, and he proves it once again.
Top tier of the industry, as usual
Visually it's exactly what you expect from Nolan, which is to say the absolute top of the industry, pushing what you can physically do with film. The Cyclops stretch especially grabbed me, so cool and so gripping. No comments, no notes. This is just Nolan showcasing why he's one of the best to ever do it. My one small nitpick sits in the action, which has never been his strongest area. The bow shooting got a bit lame for me. Yes, you can fire a bow like that, but enemies instantly dropping dead or flying backwards from a single arrow is a bit extreme. And yet I forgive it almost completely, because we're watching an epic, not some gritty film chasing hyper-realism. In this world, it's fine.
Two hours and fifty minutes that never once drag
Pacing deserves its own section, because this runtime is a huge ask and the movie earns every minute of it. It never drags. It moves along beautifully, stays intriguing the entire way through, and never sits in one place too long. The story is very linear and very easy to follow, and still I never once wanted to check the time. For a film this long, that alone is seriously impressive.
So where does that leave us
All in all, such a great watch, and a movie I genuinely feel has to exist. Putting an epic of this scale on a screen is a monumental challenge and Nolan absolutely nailed it. I don't think it's overrated either, it deserves every bit of the love it's getting. It's my Nolan scale that's being a little unfair to him, because I keep waiting for that walked-out-a-different-person feeling and this one stops just short of it. And even that says more about the Odyssey's story than about Nolan. Give this thing the soundtrack it deserved, and we're having a completely different conversation.
