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.
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