Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, Mia Goth, John Leguizamo
I'm an unapologetic fan of disco music but even I have to admit that there aren't very many great disco albums. Disco is a singles genre; it's not prog rock. The average disco album tends to have two or three dancefloor bangers and a half dozen forgettable ballads to pad it out. A classic example is 'I Got the Melody' by Odyssey. The highlight is side one's 'The Roots Suite', an epic interpretation of Lamont Dozier's 'Going Back to My Roots'. Even if you're not a disco fan you know this dancefloor masterpiece. The rest of the album never reaches the same heights though, and aside from a few acts like Chic and The Bee Gees, this is the norm for disco albums.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a lot like Odyssey's 'I Got the Melody'. The equivalent of the Roots Suite here is the portion of the movie that follows Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men as they try to make their way back home following the sacking of the city of Troy. You don't need to have read Homer to be familiar with its various episodes, as they're practically ingrained in the minds of anyone who grew up in the western world. We all learned about Odysseus and his crew sneaking into Troy by hiding in a wooden horse in school, and we've all seen Ray Harryhausen's classic stop motion takes on the mythical monsters of Greek lore. In these scenes Nolan takes us back to those days listening intently to teachers or staring wide-eyed at a TV screen on a Sunday afternoon. Largely eschewing digital effects, Nolan puts the fantastical back into the fantasy genre.
But this core narrative is surrounded by forgettable ballads. Whenever Damon's Odysseus isn't on screen the film falls flat due to a combination of some poor casting choices and too many rushed scenes that don't allow us to get our heads around how the various characters relate to each other. As is his wont, Nolan juggles three distinct timelines here, but while that proved a genius move in Dunkirk, here it often feels random. If the projectionist had played the reels in the wrong order I probably would have gotten halfway through the movie before realising their error.
A key part of the story sees Odysseus tricked into spending eight years on an island with Calypso, a nymph who looks like 2004 Charlize Theron yet is somehow played by 2026 Charlize Theron. We frequently cut to this scenario, but we never get any sense of the relationship between Odysseus and Calypso, which boils down to that of Kathy bates and James Caan in Misery. The only reason we know Odysseus has been stuck here for eight years is because Calypso literally tells us this detail.
For a movie that is so often visually striking, The Odyssey is far too reliant on expository dialogue to juggle its subplots. There are too many scenes where a character delivers a "last time on The Odyssey" speech in an attempt to keep us up to speed, and you really don't want such a task to fall on actors as limited as Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal. Several moments are reminiscent of that famously awful scene at the end of Roger Corman's The Terror where Dick Miller tries to wrap up the plot in a speech that leaves the audience even more confused. The Terror was made on a budget that wouldn't cover one of Anne Hathaway's sandals here, but what's The Odyssey's excuse? Would it really shatter Nolan's fragile ego to admit he's a limited writer and hire someone who could fashion this tale into a more coherent story?
Some subplots and characters could easily be excised, like Telemachus (Holland) hanging out with Menelaus (Bernthal), a thread that adds nothing to the overall story. Others are under-developed and overly reliant on storytelling shortcuts. Robert Pattinson does a great job of making us hate Antinous, one of dozens of seedy "suitors" macking on Odysseus's wife Penelope (Hathaway) while he's away, but the character is paper thin. An unrecognisable John Leguizamo is great as the Yoda figure to Odysseus's Luke Skywalker, but we learn almost everything about his character through clunky dialogue. I had to turn to Wikipedia to get any idea of where Mia Goth and Logan Marshall Green's characters fit into all this.
Ignore the half-hearted ballads and focus on the disco bangers and you'll have a blast though. There was much scepticism around the casting of Damon but he proves an ideal choice for Odysseus. He really sells the weight carried on Odysseus's shoulders as he makes tough decisions to keep his men alive. Crucially, he convinces us that his character lives in a land and time of gods and monsters.
And oh those glorious monsters! The cyclops is a fantastic combination of animatronics and puppetry that laughs in the face of the past 30 years of bad CG. Rubbery Screaming Mad George-inspired make-up effects are deployed in an outlandish scene in which Odysseus's men are transformed into pigs by the witch Circe (Samantha Morton). Don't ask me how the giant Laestrygonians were rendered in-camera. Nolan may have taken the colour out of comic book movies with his dour take on Batman, but with The Odyssey he has returned the magic to the mythical.
The Odyssey is in UK/ROI cinemas from July 17th.
