Movie Review: The Odyssey

If you have read my film review section on my website, you would have seen that I wrote movie reviews for the Plaquemine Post newspaper in 1991 while in college at LSU. I still love movies, but I have not written a film review since then.

So why not start with director Christopher Nolan’s ambitious big screen adaptation of the epic Greek poem attributed to Homer – The Odyssey. If you’re unfamiliar with Homer’s epic or haven’t followed the film’s development, here’s a brief overview: Odysseus, played to perfection by Matt Damon, is the flawed hero and king of Ithaca, and the story follows his long journey – almost 20 years – back home after a victorious battle in the Trojan War.

The film starts deliberately, setting up the premises in a manner for the audience to understand what is to follow. The first act centers mostly on Odysseus’s son, Telemachus (Tom Holland) and his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) as they grieve and long for their father and husband gone for almost two decades now.

Nolan is a master with the camera, and The Odyssey is no exception. It became the first film shot entirely in IMAX 70 mm film and what is presented on screen is astonishingly beautiful. The ship scenes with the raging seas are as real as anything you’ll ever see on the big screen. The scenery of the various islands Odysseus and his men visit and encounter strange inhabitants along their quest to return to Ithaca, is breathtaking.

Rather than recount the plot, I would rather focus on what I believe is the film’s central idea: a hero can be deeply flawed, make painful mistakes, and still inspire extraordinary loyalty. It is also about how the hero can even recognize these attributes and understand what he still must do and even why – but still questions it all. This is the part where Damon excels. The journey changes him. If he makes it home to Penelope and Telemachus, he will not be the same man who sailed for Troy nearly twenty years earlier.

That is true of all great journeys. We rarely return as the people who left.

This falls in line with some of the essays that I have written lately. We are all searching for something and will not have answers to most of the questions we have. However, the journey takes us down many roads and Odysseus traveled bravely and with determination. His goal was to make it home, but there were times when he questioned whether he would ever make it - or even whether he wanted to.

Nolan has assembled an extraordinary ensemble. Anne Hathaway brings quiet strength to Penelope, Tom Holland gives Telemachus surprising emotional depth, and Samantha Morton steals one of the film’s most memorable sequences as Circe.

After facing a sorceress, sirens, a cyclops, and the gods themselves, Odysseus returns home. The journey was long – extremely long – and plagued with death, but in the end, sacrifices were made both by Odysseus and his men - particularly, an excellent Elliot Page, playing Sinon, who sacrifices himself to convince the Trojans to accept the giant horse that snuck the Greek army into Troy. The scene where Sinon confronts Odysseus in the Underworld about his betrayal is central to Odysseus’s whole journey and the decisions he must make along the way.

In the end, The Odyssey is not simply a story about getting home. It is about becoming someone different because of the road you’ve traveled. Nolan understands that. Damon embodies it.

Perhaps that’s why Homer’s poem has endured for nearly three thousand years. The monsters change. The wars change. The names change. But every generation eventually discovers that the hardest journey isn’t across an ocean - it’s becoming the person we are meant to be. Christopher Nolan understands that timeless truth, and The Odyssey reminds us that the search for home is ultimately the search for ourselves.

Here is hoping we all find ourselves and home!

My Final Grade: A-