What Critics Are Saying About The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated epic The Odyssey with Matt Damon is out, and both critics (96%) and moviegoers (97%) are giving the film high marks at Rotten Tomatoes. A sampling:

• "As a viewer who has often admired Nolan's movies more than I loved them, I might go so far as to name The Odyssey as my favorite of his films," writes Dana Stevens at Slate. The film "is a 27-century-old legend that plays like a thrilling Saturday-afternoon matinee—swordfights, sea monsters, sexy mermaids, cosmic vengeance—when it isn't reducing the viewer to tears with a brief dialogue exchange conducted in a whisper."

• "Nolan's gifts are excessively obvious, and even when his characters don't stir you, his filmmaking does," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "His Odyssey is a classic in every sense, a transporting affirmation of the art and a work of pure cinema." One quibble is that Damon seems "tamped down and notably devoid of charisma" as Odysseus.
• Nolan "wisely doesn't rewrite the greatest epic poem ever written," writes Bill Goodykoontz at the Arizona Republic. "But he has made a truly epic film and puts his own stamp on it. It's long and occasionally borders on the ponderous. But it moves."
• Not everyone is thrilled. The Economist calls the movie a "silly" adaptation. "Each generation remakes The Odyssey in its own image: you get the version you deserve," the review reads. "The clever, quarrelsome ancient Athenians took Homer and transformed him into clever, quarrelsome tragedy. The Modernists turned him into Modernist prose and poetry. The simplistic, visual modern world has taken Homer and turned him into social-media spats and an absurd Cyclops—and thus into a tragedy that is all our own."