Find out how Christopher Nolan’s film based on the epic story is going down with critics…
The Guardian: “The result is a gigantic, shimmering mirage, a mysterious three-hour vision of crazy episodes that does not yield up wisdom or contentment, but only a grim resolution to continue with the fight, to make sense of ruined lives, to re-enter the scorched battlefield of loss.”
Empire: “It may be set in a mythical universe, but Nolan is again raging at the folly of a humanity we might recognise — on an enormous, IMAX-sized canvas. Nobody does it better.”
Roger Ebert.com: “Technically, as you’d expect from this director, the movie is mightily impressive, for its scale, the graceful way it moves from one time period to another, and for the tactility of its imagery. You can almost smell the sea, the congealing blood, the flowers. That metal horse clearly weighs a lot—and it looks as if the Trojans (and the actors portraying them) have to strain to transport it.”
The Standard: “With his increasingly haggard and bearded countenance, Damon is on career-topping form, oozing with all the torment, longing and self-doubt of Odysseus’s battle with fate. Surely another incoming Oscar…”
The Independent: “There are touches of ‘Oppenheimer’, ‘Memento’ and even his Batman movies in this enormous condensing of the British filmmaker’s fixations, brought to life by a cast of seemingly thousands – but it’s the women (among them Anne Hathaway and Samantha Morton) who steal the show.”
Variety: “There’s nary a dull moment in the director’s typically muscular, temporally complex interpretation, but despite a fine, bone-weary turn from Matt Damon as the wandering king of Ithaca, it’s more sensually than emotionally felt.”
NME: “Skipping around Odysseus’ mental crisis, the film’s towering set pieces are every bit as impressive as you’d expect from a director obsessed with using as many real multimillion-dollar props and special effects as possible. Beautifully shot with texture and detail – all on mammoth IMAX cameras – expect storms so powerful they make you feel seasick, at least two genuinely terrifying dips into horror and a full-on restaging of the siege of Troy. Swords are swung. Boats are rocked. Eyes are well and truly poked.”
Time Out: “Excitingly, The Odyssey gives us more than a glimpse of what a Nolan horror film might look like. One tactile descent into body horror goes full HP Lovecraft. Elsewhere, it evokes Vietnam War homecoming movies and Tarkovsky at his most hypnotic. Odysseus and his men carry deep trauma from the war. Home will only come after healing. For many, it won’t come at all. “
The Telegraph: “Christopher Nolan has turned one of the great legends of Western civilisation into a blockbuster for the ages. It’s the film of the year.”
Den of Geek: “What is most richly rewarding about The Odyssey, then, is how much the passion between Odysseus and Penelope propels the movie. We see them together in flashbacks and—three-thousand-year late spoiler warning—quite a bit in the third act, and both sides’ anguish over the break is evenly considered and agonized upon. Penelope is a monarch in all but name in a land that treats even its queens as property, something that is chillingly teased when young Telemachus learns the fates of both Helen of Troy and her twin sister Clytemnestra (each played with brief red-hot ferocity by Lupita Nyong’o).”