Saw it this weekend. The dialogue is stilted and jarringly simplistic at times (and not in a way that British accents would have saved it), but overall this was unmistakably Nolan's take on the source material. If his goal was to "Make Odyssey, But IMAX" how can we fault this accomplished writer-director for his dream? 

I think it’s ok that the story has to become simpler for film. It’s ok that it’s a different telling of this story. I’m sorry it doesn’t include Emily’s favorite parts or take aways but while her translation might be great I’m sure her screenplay would be bogged down by detail and minutia that don’t fit in a move that’s already nearly 3 hours long. I got a lot of nuance and moral quandary from the film. I’ve not read the poem or any translation and I probably won’t either but I’m grateful I got to experience a take on this story. It’s wild that our society is ok with reinterpreting and telling the story of Batman over and over again but movies on greek literature have to be true to the source material and are judged as canonical reference points when they are just as made up.  

Read the whole thing. What a great find. This articulates so well what I felt in my gut about why the movie didn’t work, at least for me. 

Wilson summarized her article on Bluesky; an excerpt:

The film centers Odysseus's guilt over his war crimes, but never shows us the POV of his victims, and instead glorifies the perpetrator for feeling bad about himself. I found this unsatisfying ethically and worse, imaginatively, because Damon's character is given only one mood (Troubled).

At the risk of annoying people again: this, this was how I felt about the film, and I am glad that someone who is obviously far more knowledgeable about the material than me has put it so much better than I could.  I felt it was almost three hours of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But Nolan is not an idiot telling this tale, however badly:  getting that many people into cinemas almost justifies the movie on its own.  Frankly I would take almost any movie which keeps cinemas alive.

(As a note: there is a BBC audio version from a while ago, which is now available again unsurprisingly: it's three 90 minute episodes, so longer than the movie but easier than the poem.  But listening to it leaves a really strong impression of things Nolan left out for I think not good reasons.)

I've never read The Odyssey. I probably should. I've enjoyed Christopher Nolan's movies. I'll probably enjoy this one. 

I suppose this has been mentioned elsewhere, but it seems to me that Nolan's most remarkable achievement has been to make people talk about Homer and The Odyssey. 

I agree with much of what Joel, above, wrote. But what really bugs me is that Wilson misrepresents the Sea Peoples theory as "debunked". Not true, it is still accepted, but more complicated: It's that the invading peoples (who are even today mostly unidentified) were a catalyst building on problems civilizations already had. A quick search of Google Scholar will demonstrate that.

Nolan's use of "Sea Peoples" was clunky, but I could also accept that people in that time had very little true information and could easily mythologize fears and concepts. That is how I heard Nolan's discussion of Sea Peoples: As a fear of and name for unknown invaders, probably a very real concern in the Bronze Age.

I love the Odyssey and the Illiad. They are both wonderful in their own way in their own medium. Wilson needs to lighten up. Nolan's Odessy is a movie, with a movie's limitations. We should accept it as such.

I loved Wilson’s Odyssey translation, I also loved Nolan's film, and I also found myself nodding my head vigorously at Wilson’s critiques here.

Like, yes, Nolan's Odysseus is more "the smartest damaged man among a bunch of dumber damaged men" instead of the world's finest wit and tactician. The women throughout are greatly diminished compared to the source text or any number of other adaptations (think Circe). The theme of "maybe we should be kinder to your fellow man?" seems out of place when, as he must, Odysseus becomes John Wick and murders everyone who fucked with his dog. The food does look awful!!!

But the film is still rad as hell. Just off the top of my head:

• The marauding Greeks as America (or whichever failing empire you fancy) motif (shared earlier here) is great
• The instantly iconic "boooonnnnnnnnnng" of the strung bow
• The way the theater feels like it's going to collapse when the boys stab the Cyclops
• The way the entire audience got super squirmy when Circe is transforming the men into pigs. Who knew Nolan could do body horror, and so well?
• The way Nolan’s love of fractured, time-jumping storytelling is actually kinda tamed here and one with the source, which is told all out of order and story-within-story anyway. This was incredibly easy to follow (credit his editor, no doubt)
• Robert Pattinson. He steals this movie.
• Elliot Page is welcome on a giant screen again, and their casting alongside Nolan’s reinvention of the Sinon character does not seem to be an accident, as this excellent Flint Del Sol piece argues
• It's got John Leguizamo telling dudes not to mess with the man's dog! That's what he does in movies!

This is what I love most about Nolan as a filmmaker: he makes movies that swing big and are super fun to watch, but also if you apply much rigorous critical analysis to them they kinda fall apart.

But… but they're so fun to watch! And everyone goes to see them! And everyone wants to talk about them and pick them apart! Give me more. MORE! 

Nolan's films are just highbrow/literary enough to deserve these kinds of analyses, but not highbrow/literary enough to not have critical flaws.

At the same time, his films are about as highbrow/literary as you can get and be able to draw mass crowds at the box office.  I don't think going more highbrow would do anything other than getting rapidly diminishing returns in terms of audience.

In other words, Nolan is a gateway drug.

Zoe Sorrell on Threads:

I love it all tbh. I loved Nolan’s Odyssey. I loved Emily Wilson’s critique of Nolan’s Odyssey. I love the layperson’s glowing review of the film, the layperson’s dissection of how they loathed the film. I love when art provokes strong feelings and I love when we are moved to mine the deepest idiosyncrasies of humanity. I love that we would have done it different. I love that we wouldn’t have changed a thing. I love that art has given us a direct rhetorical highway between 2026 and 700 BCE.

Yes! All of that. And as Tim and others noted above, both Wilson and Nolan have people excited to go to theaters and pumped to explore & discuss ancient poetry. All good stuff.

I saw it. I liked it. I will see it again on the biggest screen I can find with the person I wanted to go with but wasn't able to. 

It's a big, big movie that isn't an action movie, that is nonetheless compelling for a lot of folks, and that leaves people room to think about its themes. I think lots of them will and that's a good thing.

Does it faithfully and thoroughly embody the depth and breadth of one of the most important and foundational texts in the western canon? Nope. But it's good enough as it is and I'm glad it was made.

I saw "The Odyssey" opening night and was just in awe of it as a summer blockbuster. I didn't get much deeper into thought about it. My friends and I that watched it together were simply taken with the scene of Samantha Morton as Circe (I felt she transformed the men so casually as to do it as just 'a task' or a 'thing to be done' and without hate, anger, or loudness... it was almost like a schoolteacher reigning the class in. Measured. Calm. Frightening as all "F!"). After reading Emily Watsons review I am enjoying how much more I am considering the film from all sides. I love that we are talking about, and debating, cinema, art, poetry, history, meaning, instead of the items that otherwise fill our newsfeeds. What a good feeling, and how much more interesting it is to spend time with. 

I haven’t seen the film yet but thoroughly enjoyed this take on it from Culture Study: https://www.patreon.com/CultureStudy/posts/middle-aged-matt-164995119?utm_id=4827c754-7270-4b75-8404-22c03a437cd6&utm_medium=email