I read The Iliad and The Odyssey as a freshman in college. For an 18-year-old, they both had the potential to really drag on, like in 200 lines describing just one warrior's shield or in an entire chapter relying wholly on obscure references to classical mythology. But the truly epic nature of each text shone through nonetheless: man's desire to secure his legendary status for all time, butting up against his mortal shortcomings, personality flaws, distractions, and obstacles. Odysseus was a particularly complex character, whose disrespect towards the gods and weakness to temptations of the flesh together doomed his men and delayed his own return home by decades. He was made all the more interesting by the mystique surrounding his deeds; where had he really been for those years, and in whom did fault for his absence really lie? The same was true for Penelope, Telemachus, and even the suitors, who all existed within shades of moral gray that thrive in a kingless kingdom. 

Christopher Nolan sheds many of these questions — and the entire predilection towards ethical quandaries that made his most recent film, Oppenheimer (2023), so great — in his big-screen adaptation of Homer's epic. It's not a bad movie, with wide-eyed Grecian spectacle, crashing sounds and throbbing score, and some talented performances from a bottomless roster of actors. But it's not a great Odyssey. 

Nolan's screenplay does roughly follow the beats of Homer's poem. After a decade of war in Troy, Odysseus (Matt Damon) masterminds the winning ruse to use a hollow wooden horse to sneak into the city's walls and raze it. Victorious, he and several ships set out back home towards Ithaca, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son (Tom Holland) await him. But there's a reason the poem's title is now synonymous with "a super long and complicated journey" — the men are drugged by nymphs, trapped by a cyclops, slaughtered by giants, transformed into pigs by a witch, eaten by sea monsters, and drowned in the angry ocean. It takes Odysseus ten years to get back, during which time Penelope is forced to fend off lecherous and abusive suitors led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson) with only her wits, her son, and faithful slave Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) to protect her.

The blockbuster cast is mostly decent but isn't able to convey either the epicness or the humanity of the source text. Its most glaring shortcoming is in its lead. Three years ago, this publication wrote in its Oppenheimer review that only Damon was "seriously miscast," as his A-list reputation and middle-class forgettableness evoked a contemporary corporate exec more than a 1940s military man. Damon's just as much a straight-shooter in The Odyssey but it's even more problematic now, as his American everyman persona struggles to convey the emotional nuance and divine burden with which Odysseus is yoked. It's not all on him, of course, especially when he's forced to read a few real stinkers like (flatly to Calypso), "You told me not to eat this lotus flower," or (straight-faced to Penelope), "The breaking of Zeus’s law is spreading like cancer; our age of bronze is collapsing." But he also blunders through better parts of the script, such as in vulnerable moments with Circe and Athena.

Supporting actors certainly outshine Damon's meager Hugh Mann redux. Hathaway is the most memorable, as she shakes off the Nolan curse of underwritten female characters to play a truly torn Penelope, abandoned for decades to defend her husband's legacy, property, and only son. Holland as Telemachus and Jon Bernthal as Spartan king Menelaus are good too, both better than expected fresh off the heels of their lower-brow buddy-comedy dynamic in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Conservative ragebait casting choices Lupita Nyong'o as Helen and Elliot Page as Sinon are both serviceable (yet surely on screen shorter than the length of their coverage on Hannity), while feminine baddies Charlize Theron as Calypso and Samantha Morton as Circe are each enigmatic and threatening in their distinct womanly ways. 

If anything lives up to the scale of the original text, though, it's the cadre of monsters, which Nolan and his IMAX cameras portray in grandiose fashion. The Cyclops is strange and unhuman with his crooked eye, funky nose, and bone-rattling scream; Laestrygonians are perfectly chunky and brutish as they smash trees and corner puny soldiers in their forest; and carefully obscured glimpses of body horror on Circe's island evoke the awful pig transformations of Spirited Away. Only Charybdis, the big whirlpool monster, is slightly underwhelming, but its scale pays off moments later ensuring that we're properly terrified of its serpent-headed counterpart Scylla. Each of these monsters is a big-screen success of Nolan's vision combined with CGI, physical puppetry, stunt performers, and actors. Setpieces without monsters entirely are just cool, too, especially the stunning Trojan Horse sequence. 

But are any of these characters, monsters, or battles truly deserving of a Homeric epic? Are the divinely human struggles at the film's center the same ones that have propelled millennia of scholarship, interpretation, and audience awe? Several signs point to no. First, the near-total absence of gods makes this a plain and mortal tale rather than raising the lofty obstacles Homer's characters face. Zendaya's Athena is the one exception, but the actress doesn't have enough beneath the surface to really sell us on being the bright-eyed goddess of wisdom. This is a shame; prophet Tiresias (James Remar) is so terrifying, and carries such otherworldly heft as he claws his way from the earth, I would have loved to see what Nolan could have done with communicating and portraying other divinities. Plus, it could've taken a little pressure off Damon's shallow Odysseus. 

Speaking of Damon, another glaring shortcoming is his character's whitewashed personality dynamics. For example, in a scene where Odysseus' sailors (understandably) threaten mutiny, it's quickly forgotten when he saves them from a worse fate moments later, glossing over the very fair questioning of his leadership. Later, (spoilers) many of the suitors lay down their weapons so Odysseus doesn't have to commit the gruesome universal slaughter that he does in the poem (not to mention the slavegirls him and Telemachus hang to death, too). Without these flaws, we're left with a forgettably good-guy protagonist. Not to mention the heavy-handed symbolism that's littered throughout the film and further flattens Odysseus, such as the repeated clips of Damon watching the horse burn in Troy as an illustration of the end of Greece's empire. Or the poor writing that grossly oversimplifies Grecian ethics, like the Golden Rule shoehorned into "Zeus' law."

These choices detract from the heights The Odyssey could have reached, especially empowered by Ludwig Göransson's phenomenal score (bringing the same fiery kinetics to Trojan and Ithacan battles as he did to last year's Sinners) and Hoyte van Hoytema's sweeping cinematography crafting a realistic yet mythical Aegean. By holding his film to a higher standard than traditional swords-and-sandals fare, yet refusing to engage in what made Homer's poem so grand and timeless, Nolan's Odyssey just isn't epic enough.