The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan does what Christopher Nolan does best: make something so massive in scale that it feels like cinema is trying to swallow you whole.
The cast is ridiculous, and whatever they spent on salaries was worth it. Everyone brings their A-game. John Leguizamo absolutely broke me. His character's tragedy genuinely made me cry, and I was so happy to finally see him in a Nolan film. Anne Hathaway is acting her ass off, Tom Holland completely surprised me (I've only really known him from the Marvel movies), Himesh Patel continues to quietly elevate everything he's in, and poor Matt Damon spends the entire movie getting the absolute shit kicked out of him.
The technical craft is phenomenal. The sound design makes you feel every impact, Ludwig Göransson's score is deceptively simple but incredibly effective, and the production design is breathtaking. I honestly couldn't care less whether it's historically accurate because it looks incredible.
The set pieces are unbelievable. The Cyclops sequence is nightmare fuel, the witch sequence made me wish Nolan would just go make a full-blown horror movie, the Sirens scene is haunting, and the final battle where Odysseus takes on everyone is exactly the kind of epic spectacle you want from this story. Nolan only knows how to think on a colossal scale, and it shows.
That said, it isn't without its flaws.
Like most Nolan films, the dialogue mix occasionally feels like he's actively daring you to understand what people are saying. There are also a few repetitive story beats. The Laestrygonians sequence feels a little too much like a repeat of the Cyclops encounter: everyone runs for their lives, scrambles back to the boats, rinse and repeat.
Some of the dialogue early on is also a little clunky. It's not the American accents that bothered me; I got over that pretty quickly, but some of the line deliveries felt oddly cheesy. Thankfully, that issue mostly disappears as the film goes on.
Zendaya is an interesting thematic presence, but she's ultimately underused. She drifts in and out of the movie almost like a vision, which is funny considering she played a similarly ethereal figure in the first Dune.
Ironically, the film's greatest strength, its relentless epic scale, also creates its biggest weakness. The pacing sometimes suffers because the story has so much ground to cover. Major events arrive and are gone before they have much time to breathe. The whirlpool sequence is probably the clearest example of this.
Even so, The Odyssey is another reminder that nobody stages spectacle quite like Christopher Nolan. It's overwhelming, occasionally messy, emotionally resonant, and filled with images that will stick with me for a long time.