<h2>Director: Christopher Nolan</h2>
<h2>Actors: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway</h2>
<h2>Rating: 4 stars</h2>
Is The Odyssey an OD &mdash; of the screen, and on the senses? No.
And that was my initial fear &mdash; stepping into the world&rsquo;s first film, fully shot on humungous IMAX, to captivate you before a heavily lit canvas, from floor to semi-sky ceiling, for frickin&rsquo; three hours flat!
Frankly, IMAX is just the Trojan horse to draw you in, hiding within it, Christopher Nolan&rsquo;s script, that keeps you there. How else do you explain that you never realise how time passes.
I watched the film, without an interval. Not once did my eyes &mdash; relentlessly following what happens next &mdash; waver from the characters, and the storyline, even for a sec.
And to think of it, the story is really this: The queen, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is waiting. And the triumphant king, Odysseus (<a href="https://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/hollywood-news/article/the-odyssey-matt-damon-wants-to-settle-20-year-old-debt-with-shekhar-kapur-23639318" target="_blank" rel="none noopener">Matt Damon</a>), sailing, walking, for ten years.
He&rsquo;s returning home, i.e. Ithaca, from his victory at the Trojan War. She has suitors to deal with. He has the fury of nature and monsters to navigate. You&rsquo;re riveted, still.
Except, that my fingers moved, on occasion, to my phone, blind-typing a couple of events/people that I&rsquo;d love to read about later. To be honest, there&rsquo;s one reason for it that may not be true for many others.
It&rsquo;s that, outside of randomly mugging up Greek Gods&rsquo; names + specialisations for quiz contests in school &mdash; I know, practically, nothing about Greek mythology.
Same with my co-viewer in the theatre. We&rsquo;d turn to each other, every once in a while, to exclaim, without words, &ldquo;What a story!&rdquo; Nolan&rsquo;s chosen well. He&rsquo;s matched technology with a time-tested text.
The Odyssey is based on Homer&rsquo;s roughly 3000-year-old classic by the same name. Everyone&rsquo;s heard of Homer (beyond The Simpsons, of course).
But if you haven&rsquo;t read him for curriculum, I suspect, he could intimidate you enough &mdash; like Nolan&rsquo;s time-twister, Tenet (2020) &mdash; to perennially push it for later! As with me.
The other thing about <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/search/christopher-nolan-articles" target="_blank" rel="none noopener">Nolan</a>, as a director, is that he&rsquo;s somehow managed to attract lay audiences &mdash; who aren&rsquo;t much into anything but Marvel-type mainstream entertainment &mdash; is that he makes them feel intelligent about loving his films.
The respect is theirs. Think of him as, say, Murakami, for non-readers, if you will.
You&rsquo;ll, of course, have questions like &mdash; did Nolan erase Indian soldiers from Dunkirk (2017), or how does the amnesic protagonist in Memento (2000) know that he suffers from short-term memory loss?
But, by and large, his flock loves to announce, they got it! That is, when they watch, say, Interstellar (2014), Inception (2010), The Prestige (2006).
The Odyssey, strangely, plays out quite the opposite way. In the sense that it&rsquo;s based on a poem &mdash; with such a wide assemblage of characters &mdash; that, I&rsquo;m told, isn&rsquo;t strictly linear, either. He wholly simplifies the epic for kindergarten, instead.
The dialogues in Americanese, hardly lyrical, are downright unpretentious to the point that Odysseus tells his army to exit, in 1200 BCE: &ldquo;10 years of this f***ing beach, let&rsquo;s go home!&rdquo; And yet, it&rsquo;s obviously nothing like the dumb fakery of Wolfgang Petersen&rsquo;s Troy (2004).
In fact, everything about this film feels like the opposite of fake. It&rsquo;s evidently human hard work, and creativity, as an antidote to clinical AI.
The depth of field on the screen makes you sense the vastness of the ocean beyond, while storms hit men in boats, both seemingly as real as they get.
I&rsquo;ve been to one of The Odyssey&rsquo;s locations, Ait Ben Haddao, in Morocco, soon after Nolan had shot there. It&rsquo;s a kasbah, just as the ancestors had left it behind, centuries ago. Ludwig Goransson&rsquo;s background score is similarly aged, and immersive, yet hardly Hollywood &mdash; <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/hollywood-news/article/hans-zimmer-slams-stupid-rule-of-oscars-for-disqualifying-dune-part-two-score-23497778" target="_blank" rel="none noopener">Hans Zimmer</a> could be ho-hum in Homer&rsquo;s world.
You start to fully inhabit and believe in this world &mdash; even the antagonists, like the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus the Cyclops (Bill Irwin), or Circe (Samantha Morton), who turns men into animals.
Wherein &lsquo;mayavi&rsquo;/mythical creatures seamlessly mix with humans. Contemporary literature calls this magic realism.
But hasn&rsquo;t it always been mythology, with such a common DNA, that you watch Odysseus kill a deer in the forest, that morphs into a human-form, or the elaborate &lsquo;swayamvar&rsquo; sequence, involving stringing of a bow &mdash; you switch straight to Ramayan!
At the core, however, if you peel off half a layer &mdash; The Odyssey is a film about cursed men, even if royalty, perennially engaged in pillage/plunder, and a civilisation that&rsquo;s dying, because it&rsquo;s stopped honouring the codes that kept it together. Which is? Firstly, to be kind to strangers.
Nolan&rsquo;s doing Zeus&rsquo;s work. Of course, I won&rsquo;t be able to tell, if it ties in with Homer&rsquo;s original intent. &nbsp;But those are thoughts, besides the images, that you leave the theatre with.
Somehow, not so much the actors. And what a heavy-duty cast this is, apart from Damon, Hathaway, <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/search/tom-holland-articles" target="_blank" rel="none noopener">Tom Holland</a> (Odysseus&rsquo;s son, Telemachus), Robert Pattinson (Penelope&rsquo;s arrogant suitor), Zendaya (Goddess Athena), Lupita Nyong&rsquo;o (Helen of Troy)&hellip; I&rsquo;m outta space!
Maybe, it&rsquo;s a good thing they don&rsquo;t get in the way of such compelling storytelling that it could revive Greek mythology as a religion!
Or, perhaps, it takes another viewing to register the performances alone. Yes, The Odyssey is ready to be re-watched &mdash; okay, not so soon. The senses need some rest.&nbsp;

Christopher Nolan`s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon, has such compelling storytelling that it could well revive  Greek mythology as a religion

The Odyssey movie review: Nothing short of Christopher Nolan’s best films

Rose Byrne, Jenna Ortega to co-star in sports drama Nasty, based on Olympic gymnastics team

Such compelling storytelling — it could revive Greek mythology as a religion!

The Odyssey movie review: No less than Nolan’s best

Director: Christopher Nolan

Actors: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway

Rating: 4 stars

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