I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between reviews and criticism. I’ve always said that I don’t write reviews – and I’ve not always been able to explain that. I’d maybe say that a review is about recommendations, while criticism is about how something works. You can write criticism about the same text forever, but you typically only write a review once. Criticism can be on some minor aspect of a text – it doesn’t pretend to completeness of vision. Sometimes criticism tells you almost nothing about the basic shape of the original text – like that one article about Resident Evil that only talks about the doors. A review gives you more of the whole package. It bundles everything up and says – in short, here’s what this is, and whether or not it’s worth seeing. Let’s review The Odyssey.

The Odyssey is the thirteenth film from Christopher Nolan, a man best known for films about dudes in suits. This sort of period piece is well outside of his normal wheelhouse. We might not even call it a period piece – there’s been some commotion in the lead-up to the film about historical inaccuracies, particularly around the armour. It’s true that The Odyssey is not depicting Ancient Greece in a realistic way. There are gods and monsters and Odysseus goes to the underworld: it’s a myth, an ancient myth retold to a modern audience. It’s updated to resonate with modern concerns, including in how it frames the motivations and emotions of different characters. The scene where Circe turns Odysseus’s men into pigs is framed as a woman’s reasonable self-defence against male home invaders, and Penelope laments the fact that she cannot hold the throne as a woman. There’s more voice given to the plight of women than in the original text – it’s filtered through our perspective looking back on the time. There was similar kerfuffle around Tom Holland, who plays Telemachus, calling Odysseus and Penelope Mum and Dad – people complained that it seemed too informal, too contemporary. In interview, Holland makes a quip about how, yeah, if the film was trying to be realistic they’d all be speaking Greek. The whole thing is translated for a modern sensibility.

There are really two competing impulses here. First, it seems like people want the film to be grandiose and formal – there’s an idea that an epic requires elevated style, as if everyone on the screen should impersonate Laurence Olivier. Similar criticisms have been levelled at Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey, which Nolan has cited in interviews about his film. Wilson’s translation is shockingly unvarnished:

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy”

It’s not bad writing, it’s just plain and direct – it’s not elevated. Compare it to the eighteenth century version by the poet William Cowper:

“Muse make the man thy theme, for shrewdness famed
And genius versatile, who far and wide
A Wand’rer, after Ilium overthrown,
Discover’d various cities, and the mind
And manners learn’d of men, in lands remote.”

That’s obviously elevated, even after accounting for the older style of language. Wilson is directly working against that type of translation, as she explains in her Translator’s Note: “The notion that Homeric epic must be rendered in grand, ornate, rhetorically elevated English has been with us since the time of Alexander Pope. It is past time, I believe, to reject this assumption.” This question about levels of formality intersects with questions of building a world that feels internally consistent. If things clash too much with the depicted period, it can pull you out of it. The 2018 film Robin Hood had armour that looked like flak jackets and a machine gun crossbow – it was a film set in a medieval period that used the visual grammar of the War on Terror. That’s not inherently a bad creative decision – plenty of stories contrast the War on Terror against the Crusades, like David Eldridge’s play Holy Warriors – but it doesn’t reinforce the integrity of the historical setting. It doesn’t make you feel like you’re in the time. I can see how for some people, ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ are a bridge too far – too much a reminder of Tom Holland’s contemporaneousness, his modernity. In practice, it didn’t bother me. I think the film gets the balance right. It updates the setting in a way that feels realistic enough – there’s enough internal consistency that you could believe in the world.

The film’s narrative structure is also reasonably sound. It’s a film about hospitality, about the rules governing the relationships between people, and how they’re broken. The instigating event is the Trojan War, where Odysseus betrays the rules of hospitality by leaving a gift that’s not a gift – the Trojan Horse. The Greeks pretend that they have abandoned the war, and leave the enormous wooden horse as a gift for the Trojans, as a mark of respect. Come nightfall, the men inside the horse slip out, open the gates, and Troy falls. This betrayal of the rules of hospitality echoes across the rest of the film, as Odysseus seeks to travel home and finds hospitality betrayed at every step. Polyphemus and the Laestrygonians butcher Odysseus’s men, failing to welcome strangers. Circe, Calypso, and the Sirens offer dangerous hospitality, inviting in guests who will never leave. In Ithica, Penelope is beset by suitors who abuse her hospitality, sitting around drinking and eating for years: the returning Odysseus is the unwelcome stranger, reversing the dynamic of guest and host. He enters in disguise, pretending to be a beggar, and is kicked and abused by the suitors. He then reveals himself as Odysseus, as not the stranger but the host, and slaughters the suitors who are guests in his home. These themes are competently handled but not invented for the film – they’re part of the original text. Emily Wilson discusses them in the introduction to her translation: “The Odyssey suggests that it was the responsibility of male householders to offer hospitality of this kind to any visitor, even uninvited guests, strangers, and homeless beggars. Those who travelled to an unfamiliar land used the norms and expectations of xenia to form bonds with people who might otherwise have treateed them as too ragged and dirty to deserve a welcome, or as too dangerous to accept into their home.” Wison also notes that the initial breach of hospitality in the poem is not Odysseus sneaking a poisoned gift into Troy, but Paris, prince of Troy, stealing Helen from her husband Menelaus, which started the war in the first place. That aspect is absent from the film, which frames the horrors Odysseus endures as punishment for his betrayal of the rules of hospitality.

And there are horrors aplenty in The Odyssey – probably more than we’ve ever seen in a Christopher Nolan film. Circe’s transformation of the men into pigs is a shocking body-horror sequence that could have come out of The Substance. The cyclops Polyphemus is disgusting and weird, with this misshapen putty face. There’s a lot of blood: shades in the Underworld drag themselves out of the mud and drip gore down their faces. The sequence with the Laestrygonians is incredibly stressful – often Christopher Nolan films are criticised as sterile, but The Odyssey is something new. The combat is rowdy and incomplete. Earlier fight scenes in Nolan films are marked by clean, readable action: the hotel fight in Inception, for instance, is crisp and clear. It’s visually unusual, with the spinning set, but the geography is never obscured. You always know where people are and what they’re doing. Action in The Odyssey is often incomplete. It’s choppy, it lacks that clean sense of geography – sometimes because a clear read of the situation would show that it’s obviously silly. In the homecoming scene, where Odysseus reveals himself and fights the suitors, there are some fifty people in the room, and Odysseus kills most of them single-handed. You don’t see the big picture because it would be silly. You’d see most people running around doing nothing while Odysseus fights a manageable one or two opponents at a time. That unbelievable scenario is obscured with choppy, frenetic cuts.

The Odyssey clearly departs from Nolan’s usual style. He doesn’t normally depict blood on the screen. He doesn’t work in the swords and togas era. Normally he has a single major female character, but here there’s at least seven – Penelope, the house servant played by Mia Goth, Circe, Calypso, Helen and Clytemnestra, both played by Lupita Nyong’o, and Athena. It’s also a pre-existing story. He’s worked with established characters before, and told historical stories, but he doesn’t often adapt an existing fictional story in such a wholesale way. That’s only happened once, with 2002’s Insomnia. In places, I worry our pre-existing knowledge of The Odyssey works against the film. In the scene with Polyphemus’s lair, the cyclops eats a couple of men and then drops off to sleep. Odysseus’s men circle around the sleeping creature to kill it, and they’re about to strike, and Odysseus goes – ah, but wait! He realises that they’re trapped in the cave by a massive rock, which only the creature can move. That realisation is treated as a twist, but it’s also a key moment in the poem. We know that they won’t kill the cyclops, so building up to the attack and then the surprising pause – it’s not very surprising. It’s presented as a twist when it’s one of the most well-known events. It also seems like something that any of the crew could have figured out. They were all in the cave when the giant rock was rolled across the entrance. They all saw it happen. It’s honestly stranger that they go in for the kill without stopping to think about the implications. It doesn’t make Odysseus look crafty, and it doesn’t surprise or unsettle. It’s predictable and obvious, and ultimately mismanaged.

Overall I feel like The Odyssey is a lesser version of Oppenheimer, Nolan’s previous film. Like Oppenheimer, The Odyssey is a story told over decades, moving rapidly through a series of vignettes with a cast of thousands. Like Oppenheimer, it’s carried by a single man at the centre, with a couple of killer scenes reserved for his wife. The comparison also highlights, I think, some of the issues with The Odyssey. I don’t find Matt Damon as Odysseus compelling or expressive. If you set his performance against Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, the difference is stark. Cillian Murphy has a hurricane stillness. He drives Oppenheimer in a way that Matt Damon doesn’t drive The Odyssey. Anne Hathaway as Penelope is good but not as strong as Emily Blunt playing Katherine Oppenheimer. Robert Pattinson was better in Tenet, and the film condemns him for not going to war while also suggesting that the people who did go to war transgressed against the fundamental relationship between human beings. Antinous did nothing wrong. Charlize Theron seems to barely turn up for her scenes, although Eliot Page drops an absolute banger with all of his three minutes of screen time, and Benny Safdie, who plays Agamemnon, has crazy aura. I feel bad for pinning things on Matt Damon, but he’s the lead, and he trudges through the film.

The Odyssey is not a misfire – it’s not The Dark Knight Rises. Its problems aren’t structural. They’re more on that micro-level – problems of acting and editing, things you have to see to understand. If you’re not watching in IMAX, many of the shots feel too close, too intimate. Already confused action scenes become entirely claustrophobic. There are at least three scenes where Odysseus and his men flee back to their ships. By the third time, it’s a little passé. During the homecoming fight, a rogue suitor drops weapons into the banquet hall – swords, shields, and spears – and each time we see a shot of Robert Pattinson shouting out the name of whatever’s been dropped like he’s Ancient Greek Dora the Explorer. The superstructure is present – the script makes sense, there are obvious themes and a strong narrative, and it clips along incredibly well for a three-hour film – but it just doesn’t cohere. Little moments like the Polyphemus scene are mismanaged, given the wrong emphasis. When the Greeks are opening the gates of Troy, they’re discovered, and Trojan guards start running out and firing arrows – but they attack for too long without consequence. It feels dragged out. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. It’s fine?