Christopher Nolan has delivered a dazzling, mostly practical, old-school epic with The Odyssey. Will it ever be done again?
The Odyssey has been years in the making with feverish anticipation from Nolan-fans who have waited in bated breath for his Oppenheimer follow-up. 2026, during the buildup to his much vaunted summer release, has largely been swept up in online culture wars and contentious choices that have sent keyboards into a frenzy. If it wasn’t the maligned armour designs or casting choices, a vocal minority dismissed as woke diversity box-ticking exercises, it was the trailers revealing anachronistic American dialogue that some poured scorn on, even though it was out of context.
At one stage, just weeks ago, the doom mongers, or wishful naysayers, suggested this was going to be a bomb of epic proportions, in no small part down to a swathe of online ‘downvotes’ for the trailers that featured questionable lines or (rage-inducing) glimpses of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page. After the first couple of days at the box office, as well as the critical and fan consensus, which sit very heavily in the camp of this being great, the suggestion is that this’ll be a box office success with a huge following. Yes, after the somewhat underwhelming critical and commercial performance of Tenet, Nolan has come out swinging with two films that might not have screamed box office bait ordinarily, but in the case of Oppenheimer, proved to be a behemoth. The Odyssey looks well placed to do the same, and given how out of fashion the epic genre has been in modern cinema history, it is pretty impressive.
Whether the story being so famous and resonating with people is what’s drawing audiences to see The Odyssey, or whether it’s simply that a Nolan film now brings a level of anticipation that facilitates box office returns, it probably matters little. The fact is, they’re turning up, even in the face of a vociferous minority who take delight in telling all and sundry that they are actively shunning it. Much like people who announce they’re leaving a Facebook community group, we really don’t need (or want) to know that.
However, if you don’t like any form of diversity creeping into a film, there are some key reasons why you’re really missing out when it comes to seeing Chris Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. If you can’t stomach two minutes of Lupita Nyong’o or two minutes of Elliot Page in battle armour (even though Nolan actually finds a good logic and explains both within the context of the film he’s created), you are actually going to miss out on possibly the last old-fashioned, largely practical/handmade epic the cinema might produce.
The success of The Odyssey is a good thing and may well help convince people that large-scale spectacle can still be made the old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes way. You can create large sets, filled to the brim with extras. You can shoot in real exotic locations (or in Scotland). You can shoot in boats out on the water. Nolan is conjured up, in a way only Nolan does (some others come close, like his old buddy Denis Villeneuve). Look at the behind-the-scenes for almost every single big-scale blockbuster in recent times. You’re gonna see a mass of blue or green screens. You’re gonna see sparse plate shots with a load of CGI backdrops and mise-en-scene composited in. Sometimes it’s largely seamless. Most times it looks fake and creates an almost blurry artifice that lacks weight, authenticity, and texture. If you’re Nolan and you want hundreds of soldiers storming an ancient City, chances are there’s going to be hundreds of stunt actors in full costume storming a real location. It gives his films an Earthiness, grittiness, and weight that you so rarely see in modern blockbuster cinema. It’s incredibly rare now.
Something like Train Dreams was great because it also shot in real places and shot what was there without worrying about VFX-specific lights to ensure easy compositing. Plenty of filmmakers still manage to do this, but they’re doing it on a smaller scale. The Odyssey harks back to those big epics of the 50s and 60s, which had to create worlds and create scale by building elaborate sets, shooting in real places, and by actually shooting hundreds of extras rather than a handful of foreground people and using CGI to add the rest.
The film is a technical masterclass in fusing classical techniques with new technology and approaches. Nolan uses CGI almost begrudgingly. He probably considered an expedition to the ends of the Earth to try and find a real giant cyclops before reluctantly deciding he’d have to use CGI, but the difference is, he uses it sparingly. A Marvel adaptation of the text might feature a Cyclops scene that runs three times as long, with every shot of the monster lingering so we can get a really close look at their CGI handiwork. Nolan’s sequence, effectively terrifying, has this large creature dipping in and out of shadows, carefully rationing those money shots. The best comparison is how carefully rationed Spielberg’s CGI dinos were in the first Jurassic Park, compared to sequels where we spent a lot more time looking at their CGI form. The tech was still new when Spielberg’s first dinosaur film broke ground, so he had to fill in the gaps with an opening 40 minutes of mostly tense suggestion, or having animatronics for close-up shots. So, whether it’s a Cyclops or a sea monster, Nolan’s approach is similar and an antithesis to the weightless swooping, diving, whizz-banging excess of modern blockbuster CGI sequences. Weight, physics, and physicality are non-existent in those cases. Nolan uses plenty of CGI, of course, but he blends it in seamlessly, connecting it with all the practical elements he has and not bringing our attention to it. In the same way, filmmakers make careful use of matte paintings etc.
Nolan’s insistence on shooting on film is something that has actually become more in vogue again, despite the costs. We saw Ryan Coogler shoot on multiple formats and release the film with different versions with Sinners. Nolan has remained steadfast in his choice of film over digital. That said, the obsession with IMAX cameras is something I could take or leave. Largely because I haven’t visited one of the three screens available in the UK that can actually show The Odyssey in its full glory. Would I rather he shot in scope? Probably, but needless to say, Nolan still frames everything to work for the poor saps who can only watch it on a conventional cinema screen. Still, how long will the film stock fascination last again? Will the cost and (im)practicalities ultimately see the interest wane? Most general audiences don’t care. Those with an eye or a care for cinematography who love 35mm (or 16 or 70mm) still love celluloid as it offers textures and a vivid richness digital cannot easily match (unless you have a master DOP like Roger Deakins). Whilst we enjoy a potentially final, grounded event movie in the epic fantasy genre, we should also probably appreciate movies shot on film as a creative choice before it falls completely out of fashion.
Nolan has certainly shown an innate ability to jump between genres and do markedly different projects over the years. He does occasionally revisit adjacent films/genres. Tenet has plenty in common with Inception, for example, and Insomnia felt adjacent to Memento, not to mention helming an actual trilogy. Could he make another huge fantasy (or historical) epic? Perhaps, but I suspect Nolan may not double down or go as hard into this kind of genre again. Meanwhile, as we’ve seen with other epics on a large scale, with films like Gladiator 2 and The Last Duel (also with Matt Damon), the genre seems to be way out of relevance now. At least they are when they don’t have someone like Nolan attached.
What Nolan does next will be interesting. He could well take things a little easier and scale back, or continue a trend of alternating between genre pictures and historical films (like Dunkirk or Oppenheimer). He’ll still champion practical, in-camera solutions whenever possible. He’ll still shoot on film (and probably IMAX again) and bring to life cinematic worlds that are really there in camera. If The Odyssey ultimately ends up being the last of its ilk and scale in Hollywood, it’s a good way to end. One thing is for sure, they really don’t make films like this anymore. We’re in an age of production-line cinematic processes, perhaps stepping into an over-reliance on AI to replace the kind of meticulous artistry filmmakers like Nolan have long produced.
What did you think of The Odyssey? Will we ever see anything like it, or made like it, again? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Tom Jolliffe
