The Odyssey: jaw-dropping action, dark magic and dolphin cameos – discuss with spoilers

The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan's Epic Returns to the Big Screen Wanderstayfinder.com – The Odyssey looks set to be the blockbuster hit of the summer

The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan’s Epic Returns to the Big Screen

Wanderstayfinder.com – The Odyssey looks set to be the blockbuster hit of the summer, with global opening weekend grosses of $264m, critical rave reviews including five stars from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, and reports of fans traversing continents to experience Christopher Nolan’s epic tale of gods and monsters in one of the few dozen screens worldwide with the capability to screen Imax in 70mm. It also has the potential to rule the box office for the coming weeks, with few other true blockbusters to be released this summer, with the exception of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (hence the cast’s humiliation ritual of a press tour). Read on for a spoiler-packed breakdown of the epic battles, narrative twists and out-of-nowhere cameos that bring richness to Nolan’s idiosyncratic vision of ancient life.

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity

After Oppenheimer won best picture at the 2024 Oscars, Nolan knew he had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to realize a decades-long dream of bringing Homer to the big screen. “OK, I’ve now got an opportunity to make a film I wouldn’t be able to make otherwise,” he recently told the Guardian. You can see every penny of The Odyssey’s reported $250m budget on screen.

The landscapes of Ithaca are breathtakingly beautiful, and there’s a creepy pall to our hero’s journey to the underworld that Nolan achieved by shooting on the black sands of Iceland’s beaches under the hazy light of the midnight sun. (Fun fact: Nolan also used Icelandic glaciers as the backdrop for the alien planet of Interstellar.) Nolan filmed in six countries to achieve the range of landscapes in the film, which also included Scotland, Greece, Italy and Malta, and, more controversially, Western Sahara. Controlled by Morocco, the region is often referred to as Africa’s last colony, with the UN classifying it as a non-decolonized territory.

“Audiences coming to see The Odyssey deserve better,” the artist and writer Mohamed Sleiman Labat wrote in an essay for the Guardian. “Those cinematic shots sold to them as the places and moments where historical epics took place were captured at the expense of the Sahrawi people’s suffering.”

The film’s epic scenes in the Mediterranean were filmed in the ocean, with Nolan eschewing CGI in favor of real roiling seas and Odysseus and his crew aboard the only functional Viking ship in the world (the delightfully named Draken Harald Hårfagre). A replica of the boat was built for scenes shot in a colossal water tank on the Universal lot.

Technical Innovation Behind The Odyssey

“There were these two jet engines, like 737 engines, blowing water on us,” Damon has said. “It was definitely about as hard as you can make water work in a controlled environment.” Nolan has been a champion of Imax for two decades: in 2008, The Dark Knight was the first major Hollywood film to use the cameras for its action sequences. The camera set-up has been used increasingly prominently in his films since then.

Nolan used half a dozen Imax cameras to shoot the film, all enclosed in soundproof “blimp” casing to mask their loud operational whirr. The team also worked with an LED company to create lighting rigs they called “pyrohedrons” (fire pyramids) to give the illusion that warm firelight was casting a glow over interior and night-time scenes. “I wanted the camera to see what the human eye would see,” Nolan told the New York Times.

In Homer’s epic poem, gods are “self-interested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences”, as classicist Emily Wilson put it in her translation. Yet Nolan’s vision of how gods, demi-gods and mortals interact is somewhat earthier than in Homer, with Zendaya’s Athena less of a fearsome divine force than a pal and a confidante to Odysseus. Charlize Theron is always a treat (even in her ropey Netflix fare), but Nolan’s interpretation of nymph Calypso may not feel strong enough for some viewers to work as a framing device for the bulk of the film.

In Homer, the nymph is a cruel enslaver who holds Odysseus captive on her island; Nolan sees the character as lonely and somewhat pitiable. It’s worth wondering what Theron would have done with a spikier version of the role – she excels as a cartoon villain. Like classicist Emily Hauser, who recently wrote for the Guardian about Nolan’s omissions, some viewers may also miss the Homeric princess Nausicaa.

While interacting with Odysseus, she sniffily pooh-poohs him as “an unpromising man” – her barbs would have added a little light relief to the picture. When Lupita Nyong’o was announced as Helen of Troy – the face that launched a thousand ships – rightwing commentators denounced the casting choice for predictably small-minded reasons. It is ironic that the character is afforded little screen time: when Tom Holland’s Telemachus goes to visit Helen and her husband, Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) in Sparta midway through the film, the famed beauty is near mute, with a grisly scar covering the left side of her face.