The internet has already decided that The Odyssey must suffer. The casting decisions caused a backlash, and the internet has set its course. Well, if the reviews have anything to do with it, the internet can potentially do one. The reviews continue to pour forth for Christopher Nolan’s latest, and they are staggeringly good.
As one Outposter so memorably put it last night, this movie has been “universally glazed” by the critical responses, and in the process set a high mark for even the levels achieved by Nolan.
197 reviews are in, and as of the time of writing this morning, it is at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It touched 100% earlier in the review roll-out. It is a similar story at the notoriously fussy Metacritic.
Remember, these are now mostly the professional reviewers. There were early reviews, too, and they were similarly enthusiastic, but “influencer” screenings have been skipped for this. To the summary pages!
“Technically, as you’d expect from this director, the movie is mightily impressive, for its scale, the graceful way it moves from one time period to another, and for the tactility of its imagery.”
Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com
“We live in an age starved of awe. It leaves quite a gap in the market for Christopher Nolan — long held to be the last giant in movies and uniquely able to spark that missing wonder. Now he has made The Odyssey. Maybe it was fate.”
Danny Leigh, The Financial Times
“The awesome power of “The Odyssey,” and the primary reason why Nolan’s ultra-grounded version of its story is as reinvigorating for Homer’s epic as Homer’s epic is for him, is rooted in a gambit worthy of the Trojan horse itself. A-”
David Ehrlich, Indiewire
“Nolan refuses to tremble before the canon. Grabbing mighty scissors, he cuts and rejiggers Homer and a bit of Virgil to transform the classical texts into his type of tale: one fixated on memory, self-identity, destructive genius and the slippage of time.”
Amy Nicholason, The LA Times
“His stunning and captivating “Odyssey” is the director in his David Lean era, eschewing the cerebral topics that tickled him in “Tenet,” “Inception” and to an extent “Oppenheimer,” and building his own “Lawrence of Arabia”.”
Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post
“There’s so much to feel here at a sensory level that the film gets away with its slightly aloof, soul-skirting chill; we leave it feeling that we’ve been to hell and back, and exhilaratingly so.”
Guy Lodge, Variety
“This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish.”
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
The Odyssey opens tomorrow.
