Odysseus is the clever, deceitful, loved and damned man of Greek legend. He is also J Robert Oppenheimer. Batman, too. He is Memento’s Leonard Shelby, and every other burdened, compromised hero who’s paced up and down the frames of Christopher Nolan’s work. As a filmmaker, Nolan has never tended towards the confessional. Yet his take on The Odyssey, one of history’s oldest extant stories, feels unusually intimate. What he plucks out of this 3,000-year-old epic condenses his most recognisable fixations – often, men’s desires to control time and fate – into the purest feeling of hope versus hopelessness. We fight hard for what we love, but what if it’s not enough? What if there’s no turning back from the path of destruction?
And the intimacy here is ironic considering the sheer size of this thing – The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on massive IMAX 70mm film cameras, meaning this is a blockbuster of literally unprecedented scale. It is also Nolan’s best work to date. It deserves to be the film that defines him.
