It might be said that Christopher Nolan’s true inhibition from proper-speaking Great Director status is spelled by his earliest films. Individual worth notwithstanding, they inspire admiration as a distinct set of small-scale, structurally innovative crime dramas aswim with a young filmmaker’s sheer force of will. (It’s likely that whatever you recall of Insomnia, which boasts Al Pacino and Martin Donovan hashing out plot info in great 2002 sheen, underrates it.) A turn towards gigantism started in The Dark Knight—granted, nobody’s idea of a bad career move—and never looked back, every title since expanding scale (The Dark Knight Rises) or scope (Interstellar) or length (Oppenheimer).
Wherever quirks abound (Tenet can seem nothing but quirks) the responsibility to a nine-figure budget remains. Nothing of late chafes like Carrie-Anne Moss’ invective from Memento, little rings so intriguingly imperfect as the first-timer turns in Following. Word that he (with more executive power than almost any filmmaker ever) would adapt The Odyssey (for which I do not think it’s necessary to provide a synopsis herein) puzzled. But let’s presuppose Christopher Nolan has a smarter strategy than me. What is the point of origin for innovation, distinction, the sui generis? His final product often entertains, rarely makes a hard ask in its 172 minutes, and doesn’t quite answer the question.
Once more, structure seems a motivating force. And as in The Prestige—Nolan’s greatest film, where his collisions of the practical and fantastical are best applied and a habit for obfuscation proves most essential—there’s an impressive, sometimes remarkable coherence in his quick flits between multiple timelines. While Odysseus’ stay on Calypso’s island barely registers for its seven years, a hard cut from day to night or switch in camera set-up can reorient time seamlessly; actors and monologues freighted with the weight of history could’ve been sidelined for elliptical edits inside of memories conveyed by dead men.
The Odyssey‘s A-list ensemble tends to play material at a morose even keel—stone faces, teary eyes, throaty whispers. Only certain outside-the-line colorings smuggle revelation. Most evident is Robert Pattinson’s take on the antagonistic Antinous as (keeping up with Nolan’s script by putting this in the parlance of our times) a crazy white boy whose stated inspiration (James Woods in Casino) was neither sensed in the moment nor shocking to learn ex post facto. The energy inflected by one spitting of wine or crookening of smile can’t help begging questions about his relative-to-Spider-Man sidelining, though I suppose that query at last stretches back to Homer, and we cannot consult him.
An episodic, peripatetic structure permits some delightful surprises—“Samantha Morton’s in this” perhaps paramount. As she speaks in a quiet, breathy deceit, her Circe’s mythical dimensions are literalized with proper form. Like a preceding sequence centered on Bill Irwin’s Cyclops—which does well for make-up and scale to disguise that the character is played by any human at all—or later, spirit-strewn visit to Hades, we’re subjected to full-tilt horror that has only lightly reared its head in Nolan’s prior work. In stretches when the epic begins to play as thoroughgoing, body-transformation effects equal to Cronenberg or An American Werewolf in London leave fine fingerprints.
But if everything is amazing, then nothing is; and if everything conveys the grandeur of IMAX 70mm, then little shall. An admirer of Nolan’s large-format photography, its capacity for the vivid and lifelike superseding much else in modern image capture, may find themselves asking if something has been struck from the recipe. Ideally, a widescreen image expanding full-frame at key moments—a spaceship launch, a Batmobile chase, an atomic bomb—punctuates excitement; The Odyssey is expanded from moment one, and for it is always punctuated. Nolan has insisted his and Hoyte van Hoytema’s pure-IMAX method maintains flexibility with primary lens choices (50 and 80) that conform to whatever they shoot. This is a tantalizing concept that does not bear fruit. When close-ups and landscapes are applied in equal size, a kind of visual enervation settles into The Odyssey’s three hours—no Trojan Horse for film exhibition, but a 1.43:1 monument to itself.
Still, an indebtedness to the natural world pervades. Acknowledging that nothing here touches the plain astonishment Franco Piavoli raised in his Odyssey adaptation Nostos: The Return—a film whose subtitle-free Greek is preferable to the already-over-analyzed “LET’S GO” or actors firing off touch-too-modern lines in the vein of “surely you’ve heard about us?”—it’s not as if I’ve been turned to stone. An ocean-lined, sunset-spotted image from a ship’s deck or stark Icelandic landscape acting for Hades are plainly appreciable; they offer more than most of The Odyssey‘s elaborate efforts to exemplify Homer’s myth surviving with us.
Maybe it is just nice to have any reprieve, be that on IMAX 70mm or DCP, from the world into which The Odyssey arrives. Even those who aren’t making the mistake of staying on a social network owned by a white-supremacist trillionaire have no doubt heard (then heard, then heard, then heard) troglodytic braying about “woke casting,” metallurgic inaccuracies, and their supposed desecration of our western canon. Such broadsides can put those with an operating mind or, say, no hatred for trans people on the achilles heel. The strange irony is that Nolan might’ve benefitted from actual desecration. He’s crafted the logical vision of a Hollywood-Homerian epic circa 2026—a film where Lupita Nyong’o boasts the looks and poise befitting Helen of Troy, where Elliot Page evokes pathos as a soldier consigned to the hell of war. If I’d never say to turn your brain off, I’ll at least advise you not to buy any sturm und drang: The Odyssey is never blasphemous, just occasionally galvanizing.
The Odyssey opens on Friday, July 17.