The epic only Chrisopher Nolan could make

By Glen Weldon

Maybe you’re like me, reader — a cynic. A jaded filmgoer. Maybe you heard that Christopher Nolan would be adapting Homer’s epic saga of gods, monsters, reunions and retributions and thought: Him?

The guy whose aesthetic leans to the fixed, the grounded, the tactile, the particular? Who’s never been averse to a certain amount of cinematic sprawl and spectacle, sure, but who’s famously disinclined to the more emotive, expressionistic aspects of the human experience like wonder and awe — to giving oneself over to pure, ecstatic fantasy. (You know — the stuff we tend to think of, rightly or wrongly, as the domain of Spielberg.) I mean, this is the guy who turned the dang Batmobile into a brutalist doorstop, you know?

Maybe you heard he’d be making The Odyssey, and figured he’d turn into another Nolaneseque exercise in leaching the fun and color out of stuff. So all the wild, frenetic fancies of Homer’s poem, with its imperious, queeny, tantrum-throwing gods, gore-flecked cyclopses, cannibal warrior giants, sexy witches, even sexier nymphs, and sea monsters? And one of the most over-the-top, viscerally satisfying (and literally visceral) scenes of vengeance-exacting in the Western canon? He’d take them all out, and make a restrained, ascetic, human-centric version of the story.

Which couldn’t help but underwhelm, because real talk, reader: The Odyssey without its gods and monsters is basically the story of a deadbeat dad who goes out for a pack of smokes and keeps driving. It’s boring, it’s prosaic, it’s mundane. It’s classical antiquity Jerry Springer. You need the magic.

I’m happy, no, delighted to report that Nolan has brought the magic. The gods and monsters are on the call sheet, and they are bringing everything they need to — and they’re doing it with epic sweep and grandeur, on a big-time Hollywood budget. This movie is made to get butts in seats and (given its nearly three hour runtime) keep them there.

I should add: More monsters than gods, turns out. Nolan’s approach to Homer’s squabbling gaggle of divine characters, who in the poem keep elbowing their way into the story to kibbitz and hector and complicate, is classic Nolan — restrained and circumspect, both logical and psychological. It’s also, not for nothing, one of the smartest things about the film, and is too good to spoil here.

The net effect is odd, at times. It’s old-school, cheesetastic Saturday-afternoon swords-and-sandals cinema — the kind with Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons and scorpions. Yet it always feels like the thoroughly modern Hollywood tentpole action movie that it is. There’s also a bit of prestige (and The Prestige) chewiness, presented with a buttoned-up and very British sense of occasion. It’s a film for grown-ups, with kickass sea monsters. It’s a film where sirens entice men to their deaths not by making them horny, but by getting them to reckon with long-buried subconscious truths that would otherwise take years of therapy to process. (Real ones will also pick up, in scenes where armed soldiers flee from frightful monsters, on a certain and very deliberate Python-esque quality.)

And at its center is Matt Damon, who would seem wildly miscast for the role of Odysseus, if the filmmaker hadn’t entirely deconstructed and reassembled the character expressly to chime with the actor’s persona.

Odysseus, in the poem, exhibits one and only one singular trait: He is cunning. Over and over, in only slightly different ways, he uses his gift for gab to confound his enemies. He is a creature of rapacious intellect — of wit and cleverness and more than anything else, guile.

Damon is a fine actor, but he’s not your go-to guile guy. For solidness? Stolidness, even? For a certain kind of whitebread, got-your-back, stand-up-Joe quality, he’s Hollywood’s main exemplar. But for Homer’s Odysseus, you need a certain glint in the eye, a knowing wryness, that Damon simply does not possess. (Clooney, though? Clooney’s whole vibe is Odysseus with a Hollywood Hills zip code.)

Given that disconnect, Nolan has adapted his adaptation even further, turning Odysseus into a conventional Hollywood hero with an uber-conventional Hollywood narrative arc involving the processing of guilt and remorse. He does stupid, action-movie things that you can’t imagine Homer’s Odysseus doing, but Nolan’s Odysseus? Sure. Makes sense. You can see it. Which is how you know it’s working.

And here’s where we should maybe address the whole “actors using American accents” aspect, which was one of the many tiresome complaints that fired up the internet when the first trailers dropped.

Here’s the thing. You notice it, at first. It’s even distracting, at first.

Debbie Reynolds famously mocked Tony Curtis’ Bronx-inflected line delivery in period films: “Yondah lies da castle of my faddah!”

Well, this isn’t that, exactly. It’s almost exactly the opposite, in fact — it’s Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson doing that hard-r, very nasal American accent British actors do: “Yonderrrrr lies the castle of my daaad!” sort of thing. It takes you out of it, for the first few moments, but then you adjust, and you remember that the adoption of a British accent in films set in the real or imagined past is nothing but a hoary dramatic device with no reason for existing besides convention. (To Americans, it slathers on a gloss that makes the characters and events seem heightened, removed, pseudo-Shakesperean — but to Brits, everybody must just sound like some posh jerks they went to school with.)

The film looks and feels huge, expansive and satisfyingly weighty, but it never gets stuck in the kind of bloat and ponderousness that’s dogged past Nolan projects likeTenet; neither does the filmmaker overindulge in his habit of fracturing the story’s chronology to highlight interesting (to him) affinities amidst the resulting narrative rubble. Instead he’s telling a big story — arguably one of the very biggest — with what passes, as far as he’s concerned, for directness and simplicity.

It’s an enthralling, gratifyingly larger-than-life and richly satisfying moviegoing experience, timed to arrive precisely at a cultural moment when audiences — and movie theaters — are hungering for one.