FIRST REVIEWS ARE IN FOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S ODYSSEY:
Kyle Smith: ‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Aptly Epic Adventure.
Certainly “The Odyssey” is among the year’s best pictures. Yet I can’t call it one of Mr. Nolan’s best pictures; nor is it as satisfying as Peter Jackson’s“Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which constitutes perhaps its nearest contemporary equivalent. Its characters are not as sharply drawn, nor the confrontation with evil as urgent, as in Mr. Nolan’s Batman films; the emotions are not as deep as in “Interstellar” or “Dunkirk.” Its many action scenes, spirited as they are, sometimes feel rushed and squeezed in to keep the running time (just) under three hours; oddly enough, “The Odyssey” isn’t as propulsively exciting or as suspenseful as “Oppenheimer.”
Speaking of Oppenheimer, Sonny Bunch describes The Odyssey as “The concluding epic in Christopher Nolan’s Death Drive trilogy:”
In a way, both films are about men who ended the world; as I wrote in my reviewof Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb sees the world as both intact and consumed by nuclear fire simultaneously, existing in a sort of Schrödinger’s Annihilation. Humanity, in his view, is incapable of being trusted with the gift of nuclear fire. Odysseus, too, sees a civilization coming to ruin thanks to his works, sees chaos spreading to all corners of the known world as cherished norms are torn asunder. He sees the fall of one empire and the rise of another, knowing “our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” And Tenet is centered on the efforts of a dying Russian to reverse the flow of entropy at the behest of future dwellers convinced that the past’s destruction is the only way to ensure their own existence.
These films, like the bullets in Tenet, flow backward through time, from the near future to the recent past to ancient history. Yet we speed headlong toward our own destruction ever faster, the Freudian iteration of thanatos compelling us.
Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post writes: Christopher Nolan’s magical epic is mammoth and fantastic.
[Nolan’s] stunning and captivating “Odyssey” is the director in his David Lean era, eschewing the cerebral topics that tickled him in “Tenet,” “Inception” and, to an extent, “Oppenheimer,” and building his own “Lawrence of Arabia” with a transportive, sprawling and emotional adventure with visuals that will reduce even the most jaded movie buff into a giddy child.
Curiously though, Stephanie Zacharek, now with the left-leaning Time, but previously with the very leftist Village Voice isn’t impressed by Nolan’s film: The Odyssey Is Just Another Reason for Despair.
It doesn’t help that Nolan’s Odyssey—even when viewed, as he hopes audiences will see it, in IMAX—looks muddy and underwhelming. The Return was shot in Greece and Italy, and its landscapes are part of its vitality; cinematographer Marius Panduru made Ithaca look like a place worth coming home to. In Nolan’s Odyssey, shot by his frequent collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema in a host of locations including Italy, Greece, Morocco, Iceland, and Scotland, almost every landscape—a churning sea here, a set of cliffs there—just looks like business as usual, only bigger. There’s soil, but you don’t feel its texture; there’s sun, but you don’t feel its warmth. When Damon’s Odysseus is greeted by his ancient, dying dog Argos, who has waited patiently and poignantly for his return, Argos’s little tail wriggles mechanically as he takes his last breath. Odysseus expresses a flash of grief, and then it’s on to the next beat. There isn’t a minute to lose here, even in a runtime of nearly three hours.
There are other problems, among them Nolan’s failure to make use of Nyong’o’s gifts. The issue isn’t that her casting plays into any of the advance criticism the movie has received; it’s that it barely feels like a choice at all, representing not a burst of imagination but a failure of nerve. Nyong’o plays two roles here, that of Helen and of Clytemnestra, Helen’s twin sister. But there’s so much decorously, Homerically faithful story swirling around these two figures, glimpsed mostly in passing—and so many men around them, doing seriously manly stuff—that neither role registers. Through no fault of Nyong’o’s—who’s both accomplished and, though it should go without saying, uncommonly beautiful—these are almost blink-and-you-miss-them portrayals, the kind of thing a director can magnanimously hand out like candy. We’re supposed to applaud Nolan for bravery in casting, but the result comes off as tokenism, surely the opposite of what he intended.
Nolan’s stunt-casting has alienated both the hyper-online right and the left. A uniter, not a divider!