Christopher Nolan has never been one to shy away from ambition, but with The Odyssey, he has turned his gaze toward the oldest story in the Western canon and made it feel startlingly new. The three-hour epic, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film at a reported budget of $250 million, had its world premiere at London's Leicester Square on July 6, and the early verdict is emphatic: this is Nolan operating at the absolute peak of his powers.
The most immediate surprise is how dark the film goes. This is, by some margin, Nolan's darkest work. The horror of Greek mythology, the cyclops, the sirens, the underworld, is rendered with a visceral intensity that critics have called "genuinely unsettling." Andrew J. Salazar described it as featuring "spectacular and even terrifying set pieces that feel like Christopher Nolan fully embracing the horrors of Greek mythology." For a filmmaker previously associated with cerebral tension rather than primal dread, it marks a thrilling evolution.
But the performance dominating conversation is Robert Pattinson's. As Antinous, the conniving, manipulative suitor who attempts to seize Odysseus's throne, Pattinson delivers what multiple reviewers have called a scene-stealing turn. Simon Thompson called his work "outstanding" while critics have labelled the character "endlessly entertaining," a viper in the halls of Ithaca who gives the film its most magnetic villainy. Matt Damon anchors the whole enterprise with a performance that Anne Thompson of IndieWire believes could win Best Actor, bringing a weathered, lived-in gravity to Odysseus that makes the mythic feel painfully human.
Technically, the film is a landmark. The first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX cameras, with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema deploying lighter-weight rigs developed specifically for the production, The Odyssey renders its ancient world with a scale that critics are already comparing to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Erik Davis called it "Christopher Nolan's Ten Commandments, boasting a scope and scale that never intrudes on its intimacy." The $250 million budget is visible in every frame, from the full-scale Trojan Horse dragged from the Aegean surf to sprawling battle sequences across multiple continents.
The London premiere itself was a cultural event, drawing the full ensemble, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong'o, and John Leguizamo, onto a blue carpet flanked by a replica wooden horse. John Leguizamo told press that working with Nolan felt like "doing the best work of my life." Classical historian Tom Holland (no relation to the actor) called it "by some way the best cinematic adaptation of a Greek myth I have ever seen."
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw offered perhaps the most evocative description: "a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion and a loss of innocence witnessed by the dead." Not every review was unqualified praise, with IndieWire's David Ehrlich noting it is "too clunky to be S-tier Nolan, but the last act rewards the journey." Even so, the Oscar machinery is already in motion. Anne Thompson has pegged it as the Best Picture contender to beat. The Odyssey arrives in theaters worldwide on July 17.
