Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is not merely the best film of the year. It is the film that Nolan has been building towards for his entire career — a work of such ambition, craft and emotional power that it redefines what the blockbuster cinema can be.
The film, which runs three hours and fifty-two minutes and was shot entirely on large-format film by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, follows Odysseus (Matt Damon) through the twenty-year journey that separates the fall of Troy from his return to Ithaca. Nolan structures the epic not as a linear journey but as a spiral, with each adventure — the Cyclops, Circe, the Underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis — revisiting the same question: what does it cost to survive, and is survival worth the price?
Damon's Odysseus is the performance of his career. He plays the hero not as a warrior — the fighting is done by the time the film begins — but as a man being slowly hollowed out by the things he has done and the things he has lost. The film's most devastating sequence is not one of its set-pieces but a quiet scene in which Odysseus, washed up on Calypso's island, tries and fails to describe his wife's face. He has been away so long that he can no longer remember it.
The technical achievements of the film are astonishing. The Cyclops, an animatronic creation that is part puppet and part performer, is the most convincing creature effect since Jurassic Park. The journey to the Underworld, rendered in black and white with hand-painted colour, is the most visually audacious sequence in any major studio film in decades. And the climax — Odysseus's revenge on the suitors — is staged with a precision and brutality that leaves the audience genuinely shaken.
The Odyssey is a film about what it means to go home and find that you no longer belong there. It is also, unmistakably, a film about the cost of obsession, and about the artist who sacrifices everything for the work. Nolan has made a film about himself without ever appearing in it, and the result is the most personal epic ever committed to celluloid.
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