‘A masterpiece in every way’: ‘The Odyssey’ gains almost universal acclaim as full reviews published | Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s $250 million IMAX blockbuster version of Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” looks set to be among the best films of the director’s career, and could be a front-runner for next year’s Oscar for best picture.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian was among the vast majority of critics who gave it five stars, describing it as a film “of exciting ambition, boldness, earnestness, generosity and flair. There are some broad moments of dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with strong embellishment.”

In The Independent, Clarice Loughrey said the film was “Nolan’s best work to date” and “deserves to be his defining film”, while Robbie Cullen of The Telegraph called it “a strange, terrifying and ground-breaking film machine – in some ways, the best of the year so far”.

Kevin Maher of The Times called the film “a masterpiece by any measure.” He added: “There is a clear yearning for primal storytelling and a need for art that can inform and instruct as well as entertain. Nolan has done that. This is a work of art.”

Meanwhile, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis said she could discern Nolan’s passion for cinema “in every frame of his monumental adaptation,” calling it “one of Nolan’s most thematic spectacles, formal playfulness, kinetic excitement, and unabashed showmanship.”

“Nolan asks us to dream bigger,” she added. “His Odyssey is a classic in every sense of the word, a moving affirmation of art and a work of pure cinema.”

Jay Lodge, chief critic of US industry magazine Variety, was almost entirely enthusiastic, writing that “The Odyssey” as “a truly great and courageous vision is generously exciting throughout the greater part of its nearly three-hour running time: every few minutes, it seems, it throws upon its audience another great piece which, in almost any other summer studio spectacle, would serve as a climactic climax.”

“The Odyssey is a true banquet, then, loud and mighty, film-A joy to the movies, it’s so over-the-top reckless and confident that it can throw off a good chunk of the star cast on lily-painted cameos.

He continued: “There is so much to be felt here on a sensory level that the film escapes its slightly insular coldness that surrounds the soul; we let it feel that.” We did “I’ve been to hell and back, exhilaratingly.”

Lodge’s muted criticism was echoed by his counterpart at The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney, who noted that scenes involving Matt Damon’s “Odysseus” and Charlize Theron’s Calypso talking on the beach were “dull interludes” that “stop the narrative dead in its tracks, recalling Sean Penn’s purgatorial wanderings in Malick’s “Tree of Life.”

Rooney also described the film as “structurally clumsy”, questioned the casting of Tom Holland as Damon’s son, and said that he “winced at such outdated language as Penelope telling her feisty suitors, ‘I’ve heard your party,’ or Telemachus referring to his father as ‘dad’.”

However, such anachronistic language did not bother classicist Mary Beard, who described it as “a fast, snappy, contemporary film, without the terrible epic language” and praised Nolan for providing what she felt would be for many people “a great introduction to Homer”.

Writing in The Times, Baird objected to its “one-dimensionality, single-mindedness, even”. [more] A “rigid description” of the leading man, with few of the “tricks” and tendency toward humor or flirtatiousness of the Homeric hero.

Bird also expressed her disappointment that at least two major characters were cut, and other agencies were removed, saying: “This is an epic without sex.

The Guardian classicist Emily Hauser also wrote of her dismay at some of Nolan’s deletions and edits, suggesting that the director’s decision to center a modern-day hero left little airtime for women or nuance.

“Nolan unapologetically turns Penelope into the executor of her enslaved woman, Milanto, and has Penelope actually push her into the carnage,” Hauser writes, adding that “what this odyssey gives us, in the form of a hero and an eloquent experience of epic cinema, is a man seeking redemption, solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for the fall of civilization. Make of that, in the current climate, what you will.”