MOVIE REVIEW: In the Odyssey, Christopher Nolan Brings It All.

A man. A film. A failed boycott. A change in the wind.

Halfway through the Odyssey, I found myself slightly underwhelmed. The film seemed at first to advance at breakneck pace through familiar story beats before faltering on the barren shores of a sun-baked Mediterranean island. Christopher Nolan’s films had served as background material for my twenties, but I’m older now, and there is no longer testosterone in my veins. Maybe, I thought, this movie was not for me.

By the end, though, I knew that I would watch it again and again in all seasons of my life.

The acting performances are stunning, with notable turns by Anne Hathaway and Zendaya in particular. Matt Damon plays such a tortured, kinetic Odysseus that you forget, by the end, that he is Matt Damon. Tom Holland is well cast as Telemachus. Robert Pattinson, as one of Penelope’s many suitors, brings to mind a kind of serpentine Elon Musk.

The music, too, deserves notice. The composer working on the film recreated ancient instruments to build a soundscape both authentic to its era and that will, as many Nolan movie soundtracks have, redefine our own.

Like most Nolan films, the Odyssey explores themes of love and loyalty across distance and time, its structure is incomprehensible until it becomes inevitable, and it ends with the hero sailing into the proverbial sunset with Anne Hathaway. It feels like the perfected form of a story that Nolan first developed across Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, and its propulsive ending sounds uncannily similar to the latter of these projects. But most of the similarities end there.

Though Nolan’s Batman movies were beloved by a certain genre of punisher-tatted vigilante wannabe, his latest work has been subject to widespread calls for boycotts by right wing figures over its casting decisions, but its diversity feels more authentically Mediterranean than a cast made up of blonde men with blue eyes. Much has been made of Elliot Page’s role in the Odyssey, as has become traditional in some corners of our society whenever a trans person is involved with much of anything except pornography. In truth, his casting is both less pivotal than the fears of the trans-obsessed, and a masterclass in trans inclusion: Nolan needed an actor to play a character loyal to Odysseus, too young and small to have been dragged to war, and Page fit the bill. The bar in the age of political campaigns against they/them may be in the basement, but it’s refreshing to see it cleared either way. The world of the Ancient Greeks spanned continents and cultures - the poet Ovid described Scythian Priestesses who removed the male genitals they’d been born with, an invincible male hero who’d been born a woman, and a blind prophet whose lives as both made them uniquely equipped to serve as a judge of disputes about the sexes - and you feel that as you watch this film. Page, and Lupita Nyong’o’s chilling Helen, are simply part of the world. Their inclusion in the cast is both the modern right’s biggest fear, and a hopeful indicator of where our culture has already moved after the woke revolution and counterrevolution of the turbulent past decade.

While the story of Odysseus is now more than 3,000 years old, this is a movie with strong opinions about the state of the American Empire. It is one of the most visceral pieces of anti-war media I have ever seen, and it takes specific aim at the particular form of cultural rot best embodied by Donald Trump and his MAGA devotees. The antagonists in the film are gluttonous, undisciplined, delighted by the weakening of norms of courtesy, menacing towards women and comically cruel towards their lessers. Their comeuppance is as satisfying as their behavior is difficult to watch. When one particularly rancid specimen takes an arrow to the neck in a way that evokes modern parallels to one particularly high profile political assassination, the crowd in my screening applauded wildly. Sitting in a packed IMAX theater, I found myself yearning for a restoration of virtue as one of the cornerstones of a society that does not heap scorn on the poor, the frail, and the elderly - a society where even a newly-arrived beggar, made weak by time and fate but strong in will, could hope for an audience with the Queen.

All of this is to say that the Odyssey is, in a way I did not expect, a story about love. About how, having found the one person who can string your recurve bow, there is no second-best option, no going back, no moving on, nothing to do but to fill the yawning chasm of their absence as best you can, in a body with half of a heart. The romance between Odysseus and Penelope survives twenty years of longing because both of them know beyond a shadow of a doubt that their lover is the person who coaxes their best out of them. In the New Testament, written eight centuries after this story, the prodigal son returns home and is greeted with love without precondition on account of his blood. In the Odyssey, love is the role for which you continually audition (a thesis it happens to share with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders). Love is knowing that though your partner may weep with longing for the Sirens and spend seven years eating lotus flowers from the hand of Calypso, when they once again pass your threshold, wooden limbs and twine will yield to the strength of their hands alone, and the string will hum once more. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. Love always comes home.