Rats!: "Flushed Away"

We rejoin the summer Aardman retrospective with the company entering a new era, and a difficult moment. By this point, the Bristol-based animators had formed a partnership with American giants DreamWorks, whose executives presumably hoped to convert what had previously been an uncommonly successful cottage industry into an all-out hit factory. More specifically, they were looking for product for Q4 of 2006 that would match the success of DreamWorks' big Easter release Over the Hedge (budget: $80m, final take: $340m). Aardman and DreamWorks' previous collab, 2005's Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was essentially an extension of the Bristolians' short triumphs, with a built-in audience. (From a budget of $30m, it made $193m: everyone left the boardroom happy.) But Flushed Away proved a trickier sell. This time round, Aardman were starting from scratch; they were moving away from their specialist field of claymation into digimation; and they were determined to hang onto their signature Britishness at all costs. The story, engineered by co-director Sam Fell, Morph creator Peter Lord and sitcom legends Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais, was unusually attuned to class: it followed the progress of well-to-do Kensington house mouse Roddy St. James (voiced by Hugh Jackman) after he's flushed into the underworld of the London sewers. Beyond Jackman, the voice cast was a job lot of BAFTA's finest: Kate Winslet as the sort-of love interest, Ian McKellen - heard imitating Larry Grayson at one point - as underworld heavy The Toad, Bill Nighy as an albino hired thug, plus John Motson burbling about the England-Germany World Cup final going on in the background and - as the slobbish sewer rat who kickstarts the plot by booting Roddy down the khazi - TV's Shane Richie (yes, that Shane Richie), found at the point where he presumably felt Hollywood would surely come calling. It's all very 2006, then; so 2006, indeed, that the soundtrack not only features the Dandy Warhols' "Bohemian Like You" but Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl", the unofficial theme song of this era's mid-list family entertainments.

The result constitutes the one film in this retrospective that hasn't dated especially well, for multiple reasons. This was Aardman, the masters of clay, having to learn the ropes of digimation - then being framed as just as much an inevitability for the animation industry of 2006 as AI is being framed as the future of today. (In fact, animation subsequently developed in multiple directions, so nobody need feel too sad about uninstalling ChatGPT.) From its very first frames, Flushed Away looks horribly flat: we're watching recognisably Aardmanish characters capering in front of tentative, underdetailed, in some cases barely finished backdrops, with almost zero interaction between foreground and backgrounds. If it weren't for that distinctive character work, indeed, the film might resemble no more than those cheap Euro animations that get redubbed and repurposed as half-term screenfiller; even the inventive storytelling that Aardman were known for at this point seems to have been flushed away, replaced by the sight of a bunch of characters running around manically for 85 minutes. One or two titters remain, but this was all too clearly a halfway house for its makers, falling awkwardly between the aesthetic Aardman had been developing and nurturing with each careful thumbprint in the plasticine and the vulgar American product then running amok in the multiplexes. (I should note this was also the year of Disney's The Wild, Paramount's Barnyard and Sony's Open Season; it was not a golden age for animation.) There's lots more burping than Aardman would usually permit as a substitute for genuine wit, and twenty years later, any studio would struggle to get away with the line "my bum looks like the Japanese flag" (which has the ring of Seventies men Clement and LaFrenais) or a sequence in which an offscreen voice approximates the owner of a Chinese takeaway. (At the very least, they'd need a sensitive redub for the Asian market.) As it was, the film followed Roddy St. James down the toilet, barely recouping its excessive $149m budget internationally; there was no way of selling the movie outside the UK as anything other than an oddly parochial curio. (I mean, Shane Richie, for heaven's sake.) The partnership between the two studios dissolved shortly thereafter, but the Bristolians soon rallied. Next week's reissue: 2012's marvellous The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists!

Flushed Away returns to selected cinemas from Friday.

The final countdown: "The Sacrifice"

In the beginning, Tarkovsky's films were somewhat glacial; they were composed of frozen blocks of imagery, refrigerated emotions and memories, which melted at a sometimes perilously slow drip to reveal the intended meaning. By 1986, the year of the Chernobyl explosion, Tarkovsky had decided to bow out in a blaze of glory. The world was on fire, he felt, and all but the smallest glimpse of hope for the future had been obscured by the smoke; nobody was doing anything much to prevent the planet from burning up and some people, indeed, were actively adding fuel to the flames. A man could go mad from watching that. Suffice to say, The Sacrifice presents as no less urgent forty years on - even if urgency isn't quite what the film itself is dealing in. Tarkovsky was in Sweden now, working with an international cast and crew (a young Claire Denis was among the casting assistants), not least Bergman's preferred cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and the director had seemingly metabolised Bergman's mastery of the theatrical and his awareness of the loudly ticking clock. (One of many possible pitches for The Sacrifice: what if Bergman filmed something that related directly to the ongoing Cold War?) In both its set-up and its country-house setting, the film is decidedly Bergmanesque: it opens with a conversation on a desolate shore that invokes Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, so we know things must be getting serious. Our protagonist for the evening is Alexander (Bergman regular Erland Josephson), a sometime actor and critic turned lecturer - the latter proves most significant - who's retired to this brooding stretch of the Baltic Coast with his wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), a mute son (Tommy Kjellqvist) and innumerable signifiers of bourgeois privilege. These will be disrupted, however, by the world beyond the family's front drive, which radio and television reports insist is gearing up for war of some kind; indeed, the final, fatal missiles may already be in the air. In muted colours, Tarkovsky and Nykvist watch as the sun goes permanently down on a world and a way of life; occasional black-and-white inserts, meanwhile, convey some idea of the world after the big bang, while also carrying this filmography back to where it all started. What if the Mirror was shattered? What if Ivan's Childhood had come to a premature end?

Darkly compelling though this premise is, it's largely just a framework for Tarkovsky to fill with what he was actually fretting about as the end of his life neared: a certain helplessness, a growing impotency, a sense he may have outlived civilised history. Like many of Bergman's final works, The Sacrifice is a film out of time; you'll struggle to square it with the fact it emerged in the same century as, say, Short Circuit, let alone the same month. Within a decade, the mantle of Great Arthouse Filmmaker would pass to a generation of Kieślowskis, Almodóvars and Von Triers, flashier, more ironic sensibilities, maestros with marketing degrees. Watching Tarkovsky's characters fussing around dusty maps or swapping old war stories, one is transported back to another era, another place, a moment when our filmmakers were actively encouraged to absorb the best of theatre, painting, literature. The Sacrifice would make an especially apt double-bill with another final film, John Huston's 1987 adaptation of Joyce's The Dead, not least as the latter might have been co-opted as an alternative title for that which Tarkovsky looks out on here. All of which, as the Alexanders of this world will recognise, is criticspeak alerting the reader to the fact The Sacrifice follows a long and winding road to arrive at its eventual destination: one of Tarkovsky's legacies is the consecration of a slower cinema, consciously pushing back against the myriad mindless accelerations of the modern world. The extra time on offer led this viewer to the jolting realisation that The Sacrifice adheres to more or less the same narrative line as Steve De Jarnatt's poppy L.A. story Miracle Mile, released two years later: guy learns that the end of the world is nigh, then has to figure out what to do with the time still available to him. Where De Jarnatt cast Anthony Edwards - Goose out of Top Gun, later Mark Greene from e.r. - as a workaday Everyman, Tarkovsky plumped for the altogether loftier Josephson to portray a man of learning, a stand-in for an ailing director, an artist in exile who, if he's lucky, has another couple of hours to communicate before he utters his final word. These characters will spend those hours mostly talking, which again opens the film up to charges of windiness - but then talking is all these folks can do in the circumstances: they try and reckon with a situation that is fundamentally out of their hands, or make peace with their fates, or offer up screams, last gasps and hail Marys. There are stretches of writing here that prove so honest and so raw it's almost as though we're sat at the bedside of the dying; and we're also now aware, as viewers of the time possibly wouldn't have been, that this was the last occasion Tarkovsky could talk to us (and to his son, referenced in the film's coda). Unlike the vibrant Miracle Mile, The Sacrifice is, almost needless to say, little to no fun to watch - or, rather, it's exactly as much fun as being sealed in a house with people who know they're not long for this world promises - but it does mean what it's saying, sincerely and absolutely, in a way so many modern films don't. Our movies haven't got smaller over these past four decades, but they have lost weight - the great, wrenching gravity of belief Tarkovsky expresses in every last frame here.

The Sacrifice is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via Prime Video and Curzon Home Cinema.

Slingback: "Spider-Man: Brand New Day"

Turns out people like comic books more than they enjoy epic poems. Amid this patchiest of movie summers, we again spy Hollywood in a creative tailspin: having indulged Spielberg and Nolan - past and present saviours of the blockbuster form - with decidedly niche, varyingly cranky event movies, the suits now play a little safer with their money, coming full circle to all things Marvel. For the first time since lockdown, the graphic novel-slingers may well end up with the two biggest hits of the year - Avengers: Doomsday opens this Christmas - and the rest of us may be struck by a sense of deja vu, of old cinemagoing habits dying hard. Didn't we do this once before, quite recently, and didn't we determine then that - however much revenue it generated - it was far from healthy for the cinema long-term? In fairness, Sony have placed their bets on a self-improving franchise. Unlike the Sam Raimi and Marc Webb iterations of the Spider-Man universe, the variant launched by Jon Watts with 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming didn't run out of ideas after two instalments; many viewers, I suspect, would be inclined to pick 2021's No Way Home as the best of this latest bunch. The title of the latest film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, rather sunnily proposes a fresh start, and the executive expectation must have been that recent narrative developments (to preserve his secret identity, Peter Parker had the memories of those he loved wiped, in a manner that suggested the surprisingly enduring influence of the theatrical cut of 2004's The Butterfly Effect) will be mirrored by developments in the real world (chiefly, that we the audience will have forgotten all that nothingy late-period Marvel junk that snuck out either side of lockdown to lower the company's stock price). The movies are back (everything's making money, even the duff stuff), the audience looks to be back (even if only for the blessed relief air con provides from a world set ablaze), so this is where the powers-that-be start making us commit once more to a long-term corporate strategy. The question facing us here today remains the same: does Brand New Day really merit forking over your hard-earned cash?

This was the first item of Marvel product this viewer had sat down with since last summer's forgotten-because-forgettable The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which may explain why I found the opening reels hard work to say the least. While setting Spidey (Tom Holland) on the trail of latest big bad Scorpion (Michael Mando), this script has also to engineer meetings between our friendly neighbourhood superhero and various ongoing corporate concerns, including - deep breath - Jon Bernthal as the latest iteration of gun-toting hardnut The Punisher (they've met before, apparently, although the last time I saw the Punisher on screen, he was played by the late Ray Stevenson); Florence Pugh's Slavic hacker Black Widow, standard-bearer for the so-called New Avengers; Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner a.k.a. Hulk; some roaming ninja-type people presumably recruited to keep the Asian market happy; and another, recognisable name, who is not of this immediate world (but soon will be). We might be reassured that Marvel is no longer trading in footnotes and instead returning to large-scale scaffolding projects, busily forward planning. (You feel the execs were only a heartbeat away from adding an excitable exclamation mark to that title. Brand new day!) Yet while these things are notionally action movies - being films that occupy the same coveted place in the summer release schedules as Beverly Hills Cop and Con Air did back in the day - they still can't get round to that action until the contractors have set in place the half-dozen other stories that will be following Brand New Day down the pipe; that's why these movies now run closer to three hours than two. Brand New Day is an action movie that's also a romance (the Peter/MJ business), a live-action cartoon (whenever things go crash), science fiction with a dash of body horror (latest concerns: Peter Parker's cortisone levels, and a villain who teleports between victims like the killer in the Denzel Washington vehicle Fallen), a teaser trailer for coming attractions, and an account of a superhero's identity crisis that is also a record of a film (and studio)'s own identity crisis. Maybe the above is what "something for everyone" looks like in 2026, but Brand New Day struck these eyes as crazy cluttered, and in a way that didn't entirely guarantee getting one's money's worth: individual elements tend to tread on each other's toes, or otherwise obstruct or occlude one another. (A crisp five-pound record token to the first reader who can tell me, without looking anything up, where Scorpion, the catalyst of all the film's chaos, is by the end of the picture. Better Call Saul breakout Mando seethes effectively in the role, but the character seems to vanish amid the chicanery, discarded like an old toy deemed surplus to playtime requirements. Ooh, look at these shiny new X-Men dolls!)

Still, the whole doesn't fully collapse under the weight of all this folderol, and that may be down to incoming director Destin Daniel Cretton, one of a number of former indie tyros recruited as grist to the Marvel mill. Like Watts before him, Cretton seeks out valuable pockets of space for his actors, and really does appear invested in these characters as people rather than pieces to be shuffled around a board or screen. (They're not always so apparent during the flurries of falling masonry, but in the quieter scenes, traces of this director's sensitive, intimate breakthrough Short Term 12 persist.) There are even occasional flickers of a slightly more adult Spider-Man, if such a thing isn't a contradiction in terms. Holland spends much more time with his top off than he did in the Watts era, Frank Punisher (gay porn name, if ever there was) lets fly with half of the Oedipal expletive before Spidey silences him with a mouthful of web, and the narrative has one good, cruel trick up its sleeve in having Zendaya's Mary-Jane possessed by Scorpion at exactly the moment Peter believes she's come back to him of her own accord. The pity is that this possession lasts for all of five minutes before the franchise moves on to the next cameo, the next setpiece and thereby reverts to the series status quo. Raimi, operating under his own steam, might well have made something more of that development; Cretton can't, because these are now characters in a cosmic sitcom that doesn't allow for the overturning of applecarts. None of it remotely matters outside the next five-to-ten years of Marvel movies - it is, at the end of the day, all the escapism a line item on a corporate portfolio can provide - and though Cretton goes lighter than usual on the studio-issue filters, it looks much the same as before, all backlots and blue screens. (Though I enjoyed the scenes of real New York streetlife under the closing credits: a breath of fresh, naturalistic air, at the very last.) The staggering opening weekend takings would suggest the MCU is back on its feet again, but this is hardly a brand new day, merely a renewal of what this studio was attempting to sell us on a decade ago - a reminder of partway functional mega-entertainments, of a moment when these movies were spectacularly mid rather than egregiously awful. This summer continues to cry out for something original, punchy and expertly executed - for a movie that qualifies as a movie, rather than a cinematic timeshare scheme or a pretext for spending three hours in an air-conditioned room.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "Hunt for the Wilderpeople"

Director Taika Waititi’s clever-funny 2014 comedy What We Did in the Shadows was almost the model of a breakthrough indie: a lot of scenes around a well-dressed bedsit, a couple of night shoots for variation, enough wit and invention in the writing to paper over any cracks. From the opening helicopter swoop over rolling Kiwi countryside to the late entrance of a small tank battalion, it’s clear Hunt for the Wilderpeople has handed Waititi a bigger toybox: here’s another of 2016’s retro, outdoorsy, quasi-Spielbergian adventures, centred on a curious kid, his oddball guardians, and the woodland in which he ends up. 

The kid is Ricky (Julian Dennison), a well-fed, gangster rap-loving orphan released from care in the city to stay on the outer fringes with his new keepers: huggy “Auntie” Bella (Rima Te Wiata) who wears cat sweaters even while she enthusiastically guts wild boars, and “Uncle” Hector (Sam Neill), a terse sort whose idea of a fun night in involves sharpening his axe blades. After Bella drops dead one afternoon, and news filters through that the authorities are coming to reclaim him, Ricky flees to the hills, Hector close behind, an uptight child services inspector (Rachel House) pursuing them both. 

It’s a not unpromising set-up – masculinity left to fend for itself against Mother Nature – and I wished Waititi had made merry with his hapless hunter-gatherers in the same way Shadows did with wannabe outlaw vampires. Alas, that’s not the film we get. Adapted from Barry Crump’s novel, Wilderpeople boasts more structure than its sketchy predecessor, but it’s also a softer, more conventional experience: we quickly twig nothing awful is going to happen to Ricky and Hector in these woods (no Blair Witch, this), and that going bigger seems to have deprived Waititi of whatever edge he might once have had. 

I wonder whether the absence of head vamp Jemaine Clement from the writing credits isn’t a factor: we’re back in the tryingly quirky waters of Waititi’s 2007 debut Eagle vs. Shark here. Shadows had some of the obnoxious-flatmate comedy of The Young Ones in its DNA to keep matters lively, but Wilderpeople is the kind of lazily genial bonding expedition you’ll have seen (and nodded off through) countless times before: it even fends off the suspicion there might be something untoward in the Ricky-Hector relationship via the exact same double entendres School of Rock ventured over a decade ago. 

At least Neill’s having fun, retreating beneath Hector’s hat and beard, but it further dilutes the joke that – twisted ankle aside – the character is in fact an eminently capable protector. Much will depend on how charming you find the precocious young Dennison: the kid’s funny – mining droll pathos from Ricky’s U-turn on the best birthday he’s ever had (“it’s the only birthday I’ve ever had”) – but, boy, does he seem to know it, and Waititi’s hair-ruffling direction rarely undercuts that knowledge. By the time we’re being implored to mourn for Ricky’s dog, the comic spark’s been snuffed out by sentiment. 

Consolations include the Kiwi scenery, and two legitimately funny cameos: from Waititi himself as a novice priest whose idea of a stirring funeral oration involves painfully convoluted parables, and from Rhys Darby as a hermit. Yet the latter’s livewire presence in the final reel only points up how flat and Chris Columbussy the surrounding scenes are. Where Shadows ploughed its own furrow through the bloodsucker genre, this follow-up stakes out an altogether conventional path and sticks rigidly to it – a taped audition for the studio big leagues, from a filmmaker who’s so far doodled his best work in the margins. 

(MovieMail, September 2016)

Hunt for the Wilderpeople returns to selected cinemas, to mark its tenth anniversary, this Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 17-19, 2026):

1 (1) The Odyssey (15) ***

2 (2) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

3 (3) Moana (PG)

4 (4) Minions & Monsters (U)

5 (new) Jana Nayagan (15)

6 (6) The Invite (15) ****

7 (7) Obsession (18) *

8 (5) Evil Dead Burn (18)

9 (9) Disclosure Day (12A) **

10 (8) Supergirl (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. David Byrne's American Utopia

2. The Sacrifice

3. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit [above]

4. A Matter of Loaf and Death

5. Spider-Man: Brand New Day

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12)

2 (1) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

3 (new) Disclosure Day (12) **

4 (8) Mortal Kombat II (15)

5 (3) Obsession (18) *

6 (24) Troy (15) **

7 (2) Backrooms (15)

8 (5) Michael (12)

9 (4) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12)

10 (9) The Furious (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. The Stranger

4. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

5. The Mastermind

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Meet Me in St. Louis (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.50pm)

2. On the Waterfront (Saturday, BBC Two, 9.15am)

3. Superman (Saturday, BBC Two, 5.40pm)

4. 28 Years Later (Friday, BBC One, 10.45pm)

5. Erin Brockovich (Sunday, Channel 4, 10.05pm)

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 17-19, 2026):

1 (new) The Odyssey (15) ***

2 (2) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

3 (1) Moana (PG)

4 (3) Minions & Monsters (U)

5 (4) Evil Dead Burn (18)

6 (5) The Invite (15) ****

7 (6) Obsession (18) *

8 (7) Supergirl (12A)

9 (8) Disclosure Day (12A) **

10 (9) Jackass: Best and Last (18)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. A Matter of Loaf and Death

2. Nostalgia

3. Chicken Run [above]

4. A Close Shave

5. The Odyssey

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (3) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

2 (new) Backrooms (15)

3 (2) Obsession (18) *

4 (1) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12)

5 (4) Michael (12)

6 (9) Lee Cronin's The Mummy (18)

7 (re) The Good Boy (15) ***

8 (8) Mortal Kombat II (15)

9 (new) The Furious (18) ****

10 (5) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

4. The Mastermind

5. The Good Boy

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Casablanca (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.50pm)

2. Gladiator (Saturday, BBC One, 10.20pm)

3. High Society (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.05pm)

4. Corpus Christi (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.45pm)

5. Stand By Me (Sunday, Channel 4, 12.15am)

Dude, where's my boat?: "The Odyssey"

This strangest of movie summers persists. A lot of middling-to-poor product, most of it making money; the studios' most satisfying spectacle proving to be a tight four-hander in a modestly sized apartment (The Invite). And now a film based on the unlikeliest of IP: a 3,000-year old poem. Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey is the first film of this particular type since Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf back in 2007, and that largely digitised affair was more interested in recreating its source material's images than it was in any of the words or ideas that lay behind them. Nolan, one of the film industry's bigger brains, has understood that part of his task here lies in making Homer's verse familiar to the audiences of 2026. So he anchors his odyssey in the real world rather than some CG uncanny valley, and uses actors rather than avatars; this will be a tale fashioned from stardust rather than pixels, a throwback to the epics of yore, drawing clean, straight navigation lines between Homer, Cecil B. DeMille and himself, and between Odysseus, Charlton Heston and Matt Damon. Nolan's Odyssey opens with a barrack-room barker (rapper Travis Scott) banging a big stick on a stone floor - roll up, roll up - and a tantalising, trailer-like preview of this saga's most familiar element (the Trojan horse, here half-buried on a distant shore, a memory being covered by the sands of time). Immediately, Nolan frames the text as a tale people have told, sometimes speaking of heroism, sometimes of cowardice, sometimes describing magic, sometimes invoking monsters. Scholars may niggle and nitpick, but these tales aren't ultimately so far removed from the standard business of the modern summer event movie. As Nolan's Penelope has it, defending her court's raucous, rowdy, popcorn-salty taste in entertainment: "All we know are travellers' tales."

Nolan being Nolan, and not Spielberg, he doesn't want us too comfortable. We start the film playing catch-up: Odysseus (Damon) is already long gone into the theatre of war, leaving behind a wife (Anne Hathaway's Penelope) who's been auditioning a string of new lovers - the barrack room is, in effect, a backstage area, full of thrusting wannabes spearheaded by Robert Pattinson's scheming Antinous - and a son (Tom Holland's Telemachus) found in the course of becoming a man. This first hour is by far the film's shakiest, having visibly been much-reconfigured as Nolan searches for some decisive way in. Who's the most reliable narrator here? Where should that flashback go? Yet it establishes this world as a place of drama, one at least as familiar as, let's say, Game of Thrones, and the momentum picks up immeasurably once we're out on the sea with Damon's wearied, homesick, eternally put-upon Odysseus. Here, you soon realise, we're getting another lesson in the capacity of the movie camera (the IMAX camera, no less) to both show us the world and immerse us in its specifics, and in the possibilities of an expansive, well-funded cinema; this Odyssey is, at base, a lavishly illustrated compendium of travellers' tales. Lions! Cyclopses! Samantha Morton turning men into pigs (or, if you like, revealing our true nature) with her own bare hands! Largely dodging the nerdy dullness of the Dunes - though, I will confess, I was worried when Zendaya fluttered on in a headscarf as Athena - Nolan's Odyssey offers one damn thing and one screenfilling spectacle after another. "Another stop or two won't kill us," its Odysseus shrugs to his crew early on, thereby attempting to justify the hefty 175-minute running time and providing the famous last words of a man who popped out for milk and instead found himself spending years on the battlefield. No-one's getting home any time soon. But at least we're all in the same boat.

Nolan's major achievement is to have preserved his source's contours while also allowing for the broader allegorical readings that have emerged over the past three millennia. Hard not to see the film as self-reflexive in some way: the tale of a married director, obliged to travel great distances, become a leader of men and fight endless battles while longing to return to the marital bed. (As Nolan himself admitted during a recent promotional appearance, one motivating factor for finishing shooting ahead of schedule was that everyone was exhausted.) Equally, though, this is an Odyssey for anyone who's ever felt life start to get away from them or been knocked off-course by unexpected headwinds. The big screen - and the IMAX format, in particular - can be an apt forum for setting the smallness of men against the vastness of this world: you see it most clearly when Odysseus's men scrabble away from the Cyclops, not like a well-drilled platoon but kids who've loosed a catapult on a neighbour's XL Bully. Still, The Odyssey as a whole lacks Oppenheimer's rhetorical and dramatic force. That's partly down to authorial repetition (the costs of war: Nolan's been this way before) and partly a structural issue: the connections between these scenes and incidents can only ever be as strong as those between lines of poetry. Nolan can quicken the tempo here and there, but these three hours don't amount to much more than 'here's a bunch of bad stuff that befell this one guy'. (There's only one laugh here - at the end, when you realise Nolan has chosen to play out with a rap track - but the film does make you realise just how much Homer there was in Dude, Where's My Car?) Even here, though, Nolan is seen operating within the established parameters of multiplex fantasy-horror: this is an Odyssey with no blood, no sex, and more craft evident than magic or wildness. That dour rationalism left me antsy over the long haul: we wind up not a million miles away from a Clash of the Titans reboot grounded by a sixth-form philosophy student's dogged seriousness and general indifference to women. (Hathaway fashions a banquet from crumbs, but Lupita Nyong'o - cast symbolically as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra - gets two lots of nothing to work with, and Mia Goth has even less than that.) A big picture with caveats, then - possibly the best this curious summer has to give - but it is a big picture, one made by someone who's learnt how to keep these big pictures moving, and when and how to bring them home.

The Odyssey is now showing in cinemas nationwide.