CMV: Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” isn’t very good

I went into this movie hoping that it would retell the story in a compelling, emotionally impactful way, and was pretty disappointed. The movie paces itself too briskly, granting almost no time for shots or characters to breathe before the next setpiece occurs. I understand that not everything can get the attention it deserves given the runtime, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of dimensionality everyone gets except for the titular character.

I understand that it’s a staple of Nolan’s filmography to aim for “high-concept” over ”high-impact“, but I believe that this caused the film to read more like a high production Wikipedia summary than anything else. Having the overall thesis statement of the film spelled out through a monologue doesn’t help either; it just revealed how clunkily assembled the narrative beats were. You couldn’t reliably extract meaning from the material otherwise.