Christopher Nolan’s 'The Odyssey' divides critics: a bold epic or an overstuffed spectacle ahead of July 17 release
The director’s first solo screenplay since 1998 draws both praise for its ambition and criticism for excess, with Matt Damon as Odysseus and a cast including Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland.
Christopher Nolan returns to cinemas on 17 July with 'The Odyssey', his adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. The film is his first solo screenplay credit since his 1998 debut 'Following', and it arrives after the seven-Oscar success of 'Oppenheimer' (which exceeded $800 million worldwide). Spanish-language critics have delivered a split verdict: some see a daring, faithful translation of the ancient text into blockbuster language, while others find a film suffocated by its own emphasis and relentless action.
A director at his peak, taking his biggest swing
Nolan has made 13 feature films that blend authorial signature with commercial pull. Pau Gómez, author of 'La épica del tiempo', notes that Nolan grew up watching American blockbusters before their UK releases, seeing 'Star Wars' 12 times and deciding to become a director at age 12 or 13 after watching Ridley Scott’s 'Blade Runner' and 'Alien'. His regular collaborators remain: his wife Emma Thomas produces, his brother Jonathan Nolan co-writes on some projects, and his uncle John Nolan appears in small roles. For 'The Odyssey', however, Nolan writes alone, crediting Homer as the original author.
He says he saw 'Star Wars' 12 times and, after 'Blade Runner' or 'Alien', by Ridley Scott, he was convinced he wanted to be a director.
The weight of a classical text
Critics at El País note that Nolan’s approach always adds layers: texture, format, photography, music, editing. With 'The Odyssey', that instinct for emphasis becomes a danger. The review describes a film that is good, with exciting moments, but not extraordinary or indisputable. The decision to shoot in IMAX and 70mm creates a complication: barely a handful of cinemas worldwide can exhibit the film in its intended format. El País asks how the same close-up can work when one screen crops the forehead and another leaves air above it, or how a burning tower’s full height is visible only in the near-square IMAX 1.43:1 ratio but not in the panoramic 2.39:1 format.
Filming and exhibiting 'The Odyssey' with characteristics (IMAX and 70 millimetres) that barely a handful of cinemas in the entire world possess is, at the very least, strange.
High praise for a faithful and furious adaptation
Eldiario.es takes the opposite view, calling the film an impeccable and furious adaptation. The outlet traces Nolan’s path to this project: in 2004, after the success of 'Memento' and 'Insomnia', Hollywood offered him a Troy film. Wolfgang Petersen took that project instead, and Nolan rebooted Batman, reshaping superhero cinema. Now, after 'Oppenheimer' and a break with Warner over the pandemic release of 'Tenet', Nolan has used his leverage to adapt the mother of all stories. The review argues that at a time of franchises and lazy visual effects, Nolan returns to the essence of storytelling, insisting that the classics speak to the present.
Nolan has used his position of privilege to adapt a classic in a faithful way, but bringing it to the present and underlining something very important: the classics talk about us.
A pantagruelian feast that leaves some hungry
El Confidencial is less convinced, calling 'The Odyssey' a pantagruelian feast that is also insipid. The review notes that Nolan surrounds himself with the most popular faces in Hollywood, but the excess dissolves emotion. The film, nearly three hours long, plays like an accelerated trailer that narrates but never grows or moves the audience. Matt Damon’s Odysseus and Anne Hathaway’s Penelope appear alongside Tom Holland as Telemachus, but characters feel thin. The critic quotes Homer’s Zeus: men blame the gods for their own excess of sorrows, a line that echoes through Nolan’s action-packed first half.
It is to see how mortals incessantly blame the gods, attributing all their evils to us. And it is they themselves who bring, through their own follies, their excess of sorrows.
The nightmare and the solemn
20 minutos highlights the moments where Nolan leans into nightmare: the Cyclops’s cave, a Lovecraftian Scylla, and Samantha Morton’s Circe, described not as a femme fatale but as a herald of body horror. The review says Nolan, a conservative and rational director who wears a suit to set, is at his best when he keeps the terrors in shadow and avoids over-explaining. The friction between blockbuster spectacle and ancient oral tradition never fully resolves, but the contact is productive.
