Lisa Johnson Mandell’s The Odyssey review cries all hail to Christopher Nolan’s awe-inspiring epic! It could be the cinematic event of the decade.

Some time after I left my 70mm screening of The Odyssey, having spent the entire two hours and 52 minutes absolutely riveted to the screen without dozing off for even a second, I realized that this could well be the masterpiece Christopher Nolan was preparing for throughout his entire professional career.

Sparkling, creative gems from so many of his outstanding films have been packed into this overflowing treasure chest, most notably the moral consequences weighing on a man who has unleashed something monstrous into the world — the same theme that propelled Oppenheimer all the way to the Oscars.

Both films are about brilliant men who set catastrophic events in motion — one at Troy, one at Los Alamos — and then have to endure life inside the wreckage of their own brilliance.

Nolan clearly sees Odysseus and Oppenheimer as spiritual cousins: strategists whose genius for winning the war is precisely what dooms them once the war is over.

This is Nolan’s culmination film — the one where almost every cinematic lesson he’s ever deployed is on full display in this epic, one that’s big enough to contain them all.

A new take on Homer’s classic is not easy to pull off, given that it’s been told and retold at firesides and on stage and screen thousands of times. It’s been a musical, an animated series, a Kirk Douglas sword and sandals swashbuckler and an NBC miniseries with Armand Assante.

Even the Coen Brothers retold it in their fever dream O Brother, Where Art Thou? which is possibly my favorite film in their entire body of work.

As recently as a month ago, a minor bit in the Illumination monster-mash Minions & Monsters had a googly-eyed take on the Cyclops.

The Odyssey review — About that cast

As technically spectacular as the film is, it’s star studded ensemble cast, at the hand of John Papsidera, that provides the wildly beating heart.

Matt Damon as Odysseus reads, on paper, like an odd fit for the wiliest man in Greek mythology — Damon’s screen persona has always trended toward decency, not cunning.

But that’s exactly why it works. He plays Odysseus as a man to whom ruthless cunning does not come naturally, but he must talk himself into it in order to reach his goal of returning home, bringing as many of his men as is humanly or inhumanly possible with him. It may be the most difficult performance of Damon’s career, which works for a man trying to overcome his life’s most difficult obstacles.

Around him, an unlikely cast is assembled that bears no resemblance to those actors you’d have guessed, but is strongly weighted by those who can actually carry these roles. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is coiled patience resting on a steely blade. Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus has the battered and weary swagger of a man who won his war and lost his peace.

Mia Goth, as the treacherous handmaid Melantho, is innocence on the outside and feral menace on the inside, although she appears in but a handful of scenes. Charlize Theron’s Calypso is a little too contemporary for my taste, but she does manage to plays loneliness and possessiveness convincingly.

John Leguizamo almost steals the whole picture as the blind, devoted servant Eumaeus — his scenes are the emotional ballast the film needs. Robert Pattinson’s Antinous is oily, entitled menace—the exact opposite of Eumaeus.

Tom Holland’s Telemachus also errors on the side of a bit to contemporary — I cringed when I heard him call his mother Penelope “mom,” like a whiney teenager. But he does a fair job of growing a spine as we watch.

Holland’s new wife, Zendaya plays Athena as Odysseus’s haunting conscience, on of the few gods that consistently favors him. And Lupita Nyong’o, in dual roles as Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, gives sharp performances that prove the genius of her casting.

There was some pre-release grumbling about the ethnic makeup of this cast — most pointedly aimed at the lack of Greek actors and Nyong’o playing Helen. In essence, this is absurd. The Odyssey is not a documentary, and it isn’t sacred historical record either — it’s a fictional epic that’s been retold, reshaped, and recast by every culture that’s touched it for three millennia.

It features a one-eyed giant, spell casting harpies and a sorceress who turns sailors into livestock. Nobody demanded the Cyclops be historically accurate. The casting is, in a word, sublime and original.

There was one thing, however, that took me a scene or two to settle into: the American accents. We’ve been conditioned by decades of historical epics to expect the Mid-Atlantic accent — that placeless, faintly British theatrical accent, neither fully American nor fully English, that Old Hollywood invented to make anything set before 1900 sound appropriately grand, dahling.

Nolan tosses that convention overboard, and once you adjust, you realize it’s the right call. This isn’t a museum piece; it’s a story about ordinary human appetite, pain, grief, regret, devotion, loyalty and so much more. Nolan wants it to sound like it’s happening to humans, not to the actors playing them.

The Odyssey review — Moods and moments

Another aspect that took me a beat to accommodate: Ludwig Göransson’s score isn’t the swelling, hummable thing you might expect from an epic this size.  It’s spare, propulsive, slightly discordant, and more about dread than majesty.

I must admit it does its job of steering the emotion, though I still wanted more from some scenes, the sirens’ song specifically. A moment built entirely around the seduction of sound needed a melody I could still hear in my head when walking out of the theater. Instead, I got a narration, beautifully written and delivered, but just not fulfilling.

The Cyclops, however, superseded my expectations. He is legitimately, gloriously terrifying — practical effects and puppetry did what CGI monsters could never have accomplished.

And that Circe sequence! This performance could easily propel Samantha Morton to a supporting actress nod, as her character ecstatically massages Odysseus’s crew into snorting swine. It is one of the most quietly unsettling things I’ve ever seen on screen. Not gory. Just deeply, astoundingly wrong.

I’m not going to waste your time with a plot summery. You know what happens well enough by now, and if you don’t, far be it from me to spoil the surprises.

But I will encourage you to see this one on the big screen — IMAX 70mm is the probably the best way if you can find it and get a reasonably priced ticket. But if you can’t, standard IMAX or Dolby Cinema are your next best bets.

Even a regular multiplex screen will do — just don’t wait for it to shrink down to your living room. This might well be the cinematic event of the decade.

Rated R

2 Hours 52 Minutes

If this The Odyssey review inclines you to make the journey to your local cineplex, get times and tickets at Fandango.com.

Lisa Johnson Mandell’s The Odyssey review cries all hail to Christopher Nolan’s awe-inspiring epic! It could be the cinematic event of the decade.