The Odyssey

The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan films Homer as if cinema had just been invented

The Odyssey is less a faithful translation of Homer than a spectacular collision between Homer and Christopher Nolan's existing obsessions. The adaptation simplifies parts of its hero, loses some of the poem's nuance and occasionally becomes much heavier than its best sequences. Yet the staging, Matt Damon, the photography and the physical force given to myth create a spectacle that almost single-handedly justifies the biggest possible screen. Nolan did not shrink The Odyssey for modern cinema. He tried to make cinema large enough to contain it.