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I’m not a big Christopher Nolan fan, but Oppenheimer so blew me away, that, amid international hype and despite misgivings, I thought I’d better give The Odyssey a try.  My misgivings, it turned out, were on target.  How, I wondered, could a picaresque fantasy journey story, so familiar it infuses our very language—Greeks bearing gifts, Trojan horse, Achilles heel, siren song, etc.—be transformed into a credible film experience?  Answer: it couldn’t.  At least not on the level—ponderous, serious, profound—Nolan was aiming for.  Critics have argued over what was changed, what was left out, what was too “woke,” what should have been; I would argue the film should never have been at all.  Homer’s poetic imaginings, filled with metaphor, fancy, and a profound understanding of the human condition, does not lend itself to the realism of cinema, not even fantasy cinema (animation possibly). 

Nolan’s Odyssey, acting included, is repetitive, wooden, and, dare I say, boring?  Too many people, too many fight (and flight) scenes, too much armor clanging around, too many vast beaches; too little emotion and next to no character development, not that the script didn’t try to give Odysseus depth and touch our hearts, but these attempts came across more as clumsy academic exercises than successful storytelling.  The single truly moving scene in the film is the one in which Odysseus’s very old dog Argos recognizes him while he is still disguised as a beggar, at which point son Telemachus finally realizes who the beggar is.  That was it—three hours for a single bit of genuine pathos.  (And, of course, the dog dies.) 

I would love to think Cillian Murphy could have given us a better Odysseus, but, no, the sweep of the story is simply too vast.  Oppenheimer was brilliantly acted amid amazing effects, but the story was concentrated around a single character with a singular mission.  Homer’s Odyssey affords no such focus.