Starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Himesh Patel, Elliot Page, Mia Goth. 

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Universal Pictures – in Cinemas now

Odysseus, the largely incompetent King of Ithaca, gets lost on his way home from the Trojan War, and leads his men into a series of fantastical naval and military misadventures.   

Full disclosure: I have something of a ‘love/hate’ relationship with the movies of Christopher Nolan. Or perhaps that should be a ‘love/yawn’ relationship.

Back in 2000 I was blown away by Memento, which I have now seen at least ten times and remains in my top twenty movies to this day. ‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘this Nolan guy is going to conjure up decades of startling, mind boggling cinema!!’ I remained impressed by its follow up, Insomnia, perhaps because it proved such an effective remedy to its eponymous noun. However, I went on to yawn my way through Nolan’s Dark Knight movies, taking a brief detour to snooze through The Prestige. While I did wake up briefly for Dunkirk, I can only describe the 10 hours and 47 minutes consumed by Inception, Interstellar, Tenet and Oppenheimer as a kind of extended fugue state. Indeed, I was surprised, when Sir Chris received his knighthood, that it was for film making rather than services to narcolepsy.

So, as you might imagine, my expectations weren’t high for his latest three hour epic, The Odyssey. I briefly considered taking a sleeping bag and my favourite Oppenheimer onesie into the cinema. Indeed, as the movie kicked off – less ‘hitting the ground running’ than ‘hitting the ground mumbling largely unintelligible exposition’ – I regretted not getting myself a packet of BBQ Lotus Blossoms on the way in to help me get through the next 172 minutes.

Like most of the world, I have never actually read The Odyssey, but I’m familiar with the story. Nonetheless the lists of polysyllabic names mainly ending in ‘-us’, started to make my head swim. Poor old Spider-Man (Tom Holland as Telemachus) is looking for his ‘Dad’ (who popped out for a battle twenty years earlier and hasn’t been seen since), and not really getting on with his ‘Mom’, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), who herself has been besieged by lairy suitors ever since – primarily Robert Pattinson doing lots of sneering, in a budget Alan Rickman style but without the humour. Meanwhile, Jason Bourne is wandering along a beach having completely forgotten that he’s a great warrior. I’m guessing that casting Matt Damon as Odysseus is the ultimate in meta humour given the similarity between the two movies’ opening premises.

Half an hour in and still the exposition kept coming. I could feel myself losing the will for satire, even when the battle with the Cyclops came over more like a bad acid reboot of the BFG – and the next one with the Laestrygonians put me in mind of the more heavyweight Cybermen of recent years. But it was hard to engage because to be honest I didn’t really know why they were battling anyone in the first place. It all seemed rather random and episodic, albeit on a humungous scale.

But then, after about forty minutes, the movie finds its groove. It forgets about Spider-Man for a bit – which is good because frankly poor old Telemachus doesn’t have much to do except wander around classical civilisation asking folk if they’ve seen his Dad anywhere. Instead, Calypso (Charlize Theron) stops feeding Odysseus the amnesia-inducing Lotus blossoms (not BBQ flavour but obviously protein rich given how ripped Damon is after seven years of this exclusively vegetarian diet), so he can recount his story in a coherent fashion. Personally I’d have started the movie there and not bothered with the mind-numbing bluffers guide opening act.

Once the movie focusses on Odysseus’s Odyssey (the movie’s full of stuff like this, I mean Telemachus even has a mentor called, would you believe it, ‘Mentor’! What are the chances?!?) we have something to cling on to, and all the fighting starts to make sense. Although quite what Samantha Morton doing her full-on weirdo piggy witch thing as Cerce has to do with anything I’m not quite sure, although once again we were in bad acid reboot territory as we were obliquely reminded of her precog duties in Minority Report only with added age, mystique and cynicism.

As the movie lumbered to its surprisingly coherent climax, not only was I rooting for the good guys, but even Tom Holland had found something constructive to do with his time. There’s a more than decent political point to be made which could apply to Gaza or Iran or anyone on any side in any war who thinks such bloodshed will really be an answer to anything. And then, finally, an emotional resolution which was, actually, truly, genuinely quite… emotional.

Sir Chris had beaten me into submission, and at the end of three hours, I actually cared about the outcome. That’s an achievement.

Verdict: There’s plenty about The Odyssey that’s ridiculous (most of the dialogue for starters) but it’s epic cinema at its very best. So much so, that I’m going back a second time for the full IMAX experience. 9/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com