{"id":403347,"date":"2026-07-18T09:11:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T09:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/403347\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T09:11:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T09:11:40","slug":"the-odyssey-review-oppenheimer-through-an-ancient-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/403347\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Odyssey’ review: ‘Oppenheimer’ through an ancient lens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tell me, Christopher Nolan<\/a>, when did it first rosy-fingered dawn on you that your favorite type of protagonist \u2014 a tormented sinner-hero \u2014 was a specialty of the ancient Greeks? Millennia before Matthew McConaughey\u2019s astronaut<\/a> sobbed over abandoning his family and Cillian Murphy\u2019s Robert Oppenheimer<\/a> gasped that he had become the destroyer of worlds, the Greeks spun cautionary legends about Odysseus, the Trojan War tactician who outsmarted his own plan to sail smoothly home.<\/p>\n

Nolan refuses to tremble before the canon. Grabbing mighty scissors, he cuts and rejiggers Homer and a bit of Virgil to transform these classical texts into his type of tale: one fixated on memory, self-identity, destructive genius and the slippage of time. As ever, it\u2019s light on sex, heavy on wine-dark angst.<\/p>\n

Once you endure its opening stretch \u2014 an expositional barrage with the pace of an obnoxious cop show \u2014 \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d ascends as a monument to movie craft with shuddering ships, rough-hewn landscapes and practical monsters who snatch and grab men at random from above like giant skill cranes. Unlike in most mythological tales, the white Corinthian columns have been swapped out for brutal stone architecture. The Parthenon won\u2019t be built for another 800 years; likewise, Athenian democracy is centuries away.<\/p>\n

Nolan has anchored his \u201cOdyssey\u201d at the fall of the Bronze Age, a once-great era toppled by wealth-hoarding, diminished trade and climate catastrophes. Fearful of invading marauders, humankind has turned distrustful and stingy, ignoring Zeus\u2019 command to show generosity toward the poor and foreign-born, a cornerstone of faith that would later be repurposed in the New Testament.<\/p>\n

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This Odysseus (Matt Damon<\/a>) is both witness to and wrecking ball of the collapse. Not only does he steal, slaughter and pillage while expecting to be treated with kindness, but he\u2019s also brainstormed the atomic bomb of his day: the Trojan horse, a deceitful invention planted into the sandy beaches of Troy that marks the decline of civilization like the Statue of Liberty in \u201cPlanet of the Apes.\u201d<\/a> Inside this claustrophobic wooden beast, Odysseus and his wild and bloodthirsty Greeks are crammed cheek-to-sandal so tightly that you can\u2019t imagine how they\u2019ll spring into action without first getting a massage. Outside and looking up at it, the pony seems to sneer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Odyssey\u201d is a saga with half a dozen detours and one destination, Ithaca, Odysseus\u2019 kingdom. While he\u2019s been fighting in Troy, his palace has been overrun by men who want to marry his faithful wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway<\/a>), and murder his helpless son, Telemachus (Tom Holland<\/a>). Robert Pattinson\u2019s<\/a> oily suitor woos Penelope like a \u201cBachelorette\u201d contestant: \u201cIt\u2019s time to live again,\u201d he urges her, certain that Penelope\u2019s vengeful husband won\u2019t come back. Forget that rose, dude, and run away.<\/p>\n

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Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland in the movie \u201cThe Odyssey.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Melinda Sue Gordon \/ Universal Pictures)<\/p>\n

After 20 years away \u2014 10 at war, 10 adrift \u2014 Odysseus is anxious to reclaim his kingdom. Or is he? Nolan floats a convincing psychological reason why this Odysseus subconsciously believes his duplicitous actions during the war deserve permanent exile from civilization. Although, as is the case with too much of Nolan\u2019s storytelling, he wrongly thinks it\u2019s more interesting to withhold Odysseus\u2019 traumatic hang-up until the ending. The Greeks never tried to confuse the audience in the pursuit of suspense. They delivered their plots arrow-straight to make the dread sting.<\/p>\n

Saddled with a silly black beard that eventually goes gray, Damon\u2019s Odysseus is stubborn, overconfident and sacrilegious, but doesn\u2019t bear that much resemblance to the conniving, hypocritical egotist of lore who fretted over his wife\u2019s fidelity while seducing not one but two enchantresses, Calypso and Circe. Today\u2019s viewers might demonize Odysseus\u2019 erotic exploits; instead, they\u2019ve been Damon-ized into something innately goodhearted.<\/p>\n

The chasteness of Nolan\u2019s version bugs me as it\u2019s insulting he doesn\u2019t trust audiences to grapple with this hero\u2019s moral complexity \u2014 and I\u2019m gut-sick that he\u2019s probably right. Plus, it leaves Charlize Theron\u2019s<\/a> Calypso nothing to do but limply listen to (and medicate) Odysseus like a bored therapist reaching for the lithium. I was hoping for more zest from a blond wearing actual fishnets that could catch sardines.<\/p>\n

At least Samantha Morton\u2019s<\/a> body-horror spin on the witch Circe is terrific. To punish his men for barging into her hut, she digs her fingers inside their skin like clay, remolding them into the swine she claims they are. Her outrage is one of the best ideas in the movie. Likewise, Lupita Nyong\u2019o\u2019s <\/a>Helen is regal and formidable, but it\u2019s a mistake to double-cast her as Helen\u2019s twin sister, Clytemnestra. The whole reason thousands of men fought a war over the most beautiful woman alive is that there\u2019s only one of them \u2014 unless undermining that excuse is the point. (In an aside, we\u2019re told that Benny Safdie\u2019s<\/a> aloof Agamemnon, hiding under a try-hard scary helmet decorated with a golden spine, really waged it to break up Troy\u2019s trade routes.)<\/p>\n

Unlike in Homer or even \u201cClash of the Titans,\u201d which showed the gods as toga-clad twits toying with mortal lives like action figures, they have little, if anything, to do in this plot. In Homer\u2019s original verse, Athena is as fussy as a stage mother, showing up every few pages disguised as someone mortal to bless both Odysseus and Telemachus with live-action Photoshop filters that make them extra handsome. Here, Holland\u2019s Telemachus gambles Athena is hiding inside half the people he meets until his father chides, \u201cDon\u2019t look for gods in men, you\u2019ll just be disappointed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, Nolan balances religion on the spear tip of doubt. The angry sea god Poseidon is reduced to rumors; mighty Zeus withheld to a few well-timed thunderclaps. Even Athena, if that genuinely is whom Zendaya<\/a> is playing, isn\u2019t that helpful, mostly staring at Odysseus in mute dismay. It\u2019s possible to get to the end of \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d and conclude that Nolan doesn\u2019t believe in gods at all. To him, men must be proactive in their own demise. (I\u2019m half-convinced, the way I don\u2019t really swear by the zodiac but nevertheless stopped dating Libras.)<\/p>\n

Composer Ludwig G\u00f6ransson<\/a> scores the breath-holding assault on Troy to drums that pound faster and faster on our nerves, as does our alarm that Odysseus\u2019 troops aren\u2019t the good guys. Occasionally, G\u00f6ransson adds a lovely monotone layer of woodwinds or a keening chorus that sounds like the oldest song on Earth.<\/p>\n

Conversely, during the talky Ithaca sequences, when the movie is rightly paranoid of losing our attention, the more modern heist-thriller music is flat-out obnoxious, especially in a scene where Odysseus lays out his ruse to infiltrate his house to John Leguizamo\u2019s<\/a> trusty goatherd, the most lovable man ever introduced throwing a puppy off a cliff. (No, really \u2014 it\u2019s the movie\u2019s only outright joke.)<\/p>\n

Hoyte van Hoytema\u2019s<\/a> Imax-framed cinematography is assertive and present, rocking with the stormy waves and peering into the torch-lit darkness where the color palette is as starkly orange and black as an ancient Greek urn. Working with the special effects team, Van Hoytema cloaks the non-digital wizardry of the Cyclops and six-headed Scylla behind naturalistic camera movements and shadows so that, rather than drawing too much attention to themselves, the creatures just feel real. As gray and wrinkled as the bottom of a mummy\u2019s foot, the Cyclops\u2019 face is wonderfully askew, like he was stepped on by someone even bigger than him.<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s \u201cOdyssey\u201d engraves marvelous images onto the ancient oral poem. One of the most haunting shots is Odysseus sprinting out of Hades chased by an army of the dead who regret following him into battle. In turn, Nolan has sacrificed Odysseus himself to serve his own needs, scrapping the character\u2019s prickly personality to Trojan-horse a message about how empires collapse. <\/p>\n

Aghast at the ways of men, he\u2019s dug his own Circe-like fingers into Homer to manipulate the tale into a moralistic \u201cOppenheimer\u201d prequel. Even Odysseus seems to suspect as much. \u201cOur mistakes will again be forgotten,\u201d Odysseus predicts as the land he loves sails into the Dark Ages while he steers the helm. He\u2019s done unforgivable wrongs. But in that moment, he\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

‘The Odyssey’<\/p>\n

Rated: R, for violence and some language<\/p>\n

Running time: 2 hours, 52 minutes<\/p>\n

Playing: Opens Friday, July 17 in wide release<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tell me, Christopher Nolan, when did it first rosy-fingered dawn on you that your favorite type of protagonist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[161797,53853,144998,161799,14876,48,52,51,47,50,49,1555,161794,99368,65633,115851,161798,161795,161796,4863,2664],"class_list":["post-403347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ancient-greeks","tag-athena","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-faithful-wife","tag-god","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-man","tag-movie-craft","tag-odysseus","tag-odyssey","tag-oppenheimer","tag-penelope","tag-rejigger-homer","tag-telemachus","tag-troy","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}