Since his last two films, 2023’s Oppenheimer and 2020’s Tenet, were more temporal whirligigs than particularly satisfying movies, Christopher Nolan’s latest project, an adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek text The Odyssey, comes as a relief. Like his extraordinarily popular Dark Knight trilogy and his formally ambitious blockbuster thrillers Inception (2010) and Dunkirk (2017), it finds the writer-director again incarnating the characteristics that had turned him into a celebrity director in the first place: His ability to produce populist entertainment with a bigger-than-lifeness grounded by its Spielberg-esque human touch.

Making a film with the crowd-pleasing spirit (though not quite style) of the swords-and-sandals surge that hit Hollywood post-The Ten Commandments (1956), Nolan presents a good argument for why The Odyssey has remained durable. It slots in smoothly, too, with his long-standing attraction to stories about the destructiveness of man’s pursuit of greatness. A sinewy Matt Damon is his PTSD-addled, exhausted Odysseus; Nolan’s softened vision of the character is greatly dependent on Damon’s well-established good-guy-trying-to-do-right movie-star image. A pricey cast — Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Zendaya, John Leguizamo, Lupita Nyong’o, and Samantha Morton being the heaviest hitters — fills out an ensemble of existentially frustrated royalty, sniveling opportunists, and fleshly obstacles. 

Read the full review at South Sound.

Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures