Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Is Winning Over Critics, But Not Everyone Is Sold
Christopher Nolan has spent nearly three years building anticipation for his take on Homer’s ancient Greek epic, and ‘The Odyssey’ has finally arrived in theaters. The film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, the Greek king trying to make his way home to his wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, and son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, following the Trojan War. The ensemble also includes Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Elliot Page, Travis Scott and Charlize Theron. It also made history as the first feature film shot entirely with Imax 70mm cameras.
Long before the reviews landed, ‘The Odyssey’ was already generating noise online for reasons that had nothing to do with the movie itself. Online reactions to the film’s casting choices, including Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, grew heated in the weeks leading up to release. Nolan largely brushed the criticism aside, telling one outlet that conversations happening before people had actually seen the film were beside the point, since nobody arguing about it yet knew what the movie was.
Now that critics have actually watched it, the picture is mostly glowing, but it is not unanimous. Not every outlet walked away convinced, and the dissenting voices are worth paying attention to precisely because they stand out against such a strong overall consensus.
Time’s review is among the harshest, arguing the film never quite earns its scale. The outlet’s critic described Nolan’s vision as looking muddy and underwhelming even in Imax, and called the finished product an eye-glazing dud of a movie in its full review, according to Time. The same review also pointed to Nyong’o’s talents going largely unused across the runtime.
Other critics landed somewhere in the middle. Writing in The New Yorker, Richard Brody argued that stripping back divine intervention leaves the story exciting but missing the particular thrill that comes from reading Homer directly. Forbes and other outlets also flagged pacing problems, with scenes occasionally dragging longer than they needed to, and some reviewers felt the film’s themes around civilization eroding were left undercooked. Tom Holland’s performance became a particular sticking point too, with one review going as far as calling it one of the more miscast turns of the year, even as most other critics praised his work as some of his best.
Even with those complaints on record, ‘The Odyssey’ is still riding an unusually strong wave of praise. The film currently holds a 97 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest of Nolan’s career, and is tracking for a massive opening weekend. Metacritic has it sitting at 89. That leaves the negative and mixed reviews as outliers rather than a genuine trend, but they do puncture the narrative that this was a flawless, universally beloved epic.
Whether the muddy visuals and pacing complaints stick with audiences the way they did with a handful of critics remains to be seen once general moviegoers get their turn. Do you think ‘The Odyssey’ deserves the pushback from its toughest reviewers, or is Nolan’s latest epic simply too big to please absolutely everyone?
