‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Vast, Thrilling, Aloof Epic

More than 70 years have passed since Hollywood last attempted a straight-up adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey,” which is an unfathomable eternity considering both its standing as a foundational epic narrative — the hero’s journey to end, and begin, all hero’s journeys — and the industry’s tendency to recycle any halfway proven story material until it positively disintegrates. Is it the well-worn familiarity of the text that has protected it from complete cinematic exhaustion, or the great, daunting heft of it? Either way, making a full-tilt film of “The Odyssey” in the year 2026 is at once a job for the heedlessly adventurous and the staunchly traditionalist.

Enter Christopher Nolan, the man who has built a bazillion-dollar career on both those virtues. He’s a blockbuster merchant who makes ’em like they used to, but also not quite like anyone else has made ’em before — who has extracted a singular auteur reputation from genres, like the superhero movie or the prestige biopic, that don’t tend to favor an idiosyncratic approach. It’s to be expected, then, that Nolan’s take on Homer is thorough, robust and attentive both to scholarly detail and old-school moviemaking craft; it’s likewise no surprise that it’s been reshaped to fit the director’s predilection for trickily non-linear storytelling, its disordered timeline a feat of intricate weaving and unweaving to rival Penelope’s shroud, further complicating even the in medias res ploy of the text.

It is understating things to say the result is no small achievement. A genuinely grand, gutsy vision, “The Odyssey” thrills generously for the bulk of its near three-hour running time: Every few minutes, it seems, it throws at its audience another mighty setpiece that, in almost any other summer studio spectacle, would be a climactic standout. If the language of Homer’s epic has been simplified and modernized in Nolan’s screenplay, the stakes and scale…