I was coming so late to this particular party I was beginning to feel I might as well skip it altogether. I am glad I didn’t.
For reasons that remain not entirely clear to me, the social media algorithm had been feeding me The Odyssey pre-release news, and later reviews in English and Polish for several months. I was gobbling them up in the way not dissimilar to how the gluttonous Odysseus’s men were stuffing their faces with whatever Circe had served them. 

By the end of July I knew what every major film critic and every Facebook wanna be Homer expert thought about every actor, every special effect, every costume and every omission from the original text. 

I made a concerted effort to keep an open mind and it paid off. I loved it. 

I did have a decades old personal relationship with The Odyssey, ever since I first saw the TV series version of it in the early 1970s and had a genius idea to write a book based on the TV show. But anyway. 

In no particular order, here goes.

The Story. 

I was captivated by each part of it and how it unfolded. From the first adventure in the Cyclops’ cave to the stringing of the bow towards the end, I was frequently clutching the arm rests of my chair and sliding lower in my seat as the tense scenes played out. I allowed myself to be transported into this world of myths and magic and to get fully ‘invested’ (I hate this phrase). Chopping the timeline and revisiting a few scenes worked well for me. I often repeat myself when telling a story, so I had not issues seeing The Horse stuck in the sand more than once.

The film was 2 hours and 52 minutes long. I was not tempted to check the watch once. In fact, I wished it carried on a little longer. Unlike Christopher Nolan’s previous creation, Oppenheimer, 3 hours exactly, which felt torturously long. 

Matt Damon as Odysseus.

He was great. Deeply human, flawed, commanding, strong, angry, but also tender and vulnerable when he needed to be. His beard deserves a special mention, as it was his own throughout and it kept up with the choppy timeline, switching between short and black and long and grey, giving us heads up which point in the story we were at all times. 

The Horse. 

Beautiful departure from the more traditional version of it which used to place it on a square base with wheels. This one was bolting out of the sands outside Troy in the way that reminded me of the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand in the original Planet of the Apes. 

It is possible that I have watched too many movies. 

Tom Holland as Telemachus.

I loved what he did with the character. I had read opinions that he was too immature an actor to carry the role. I disagree; he was a young actor playing a young immature man, thrown into an overwhelming situation and he discharged the task perfectly. Am I biased? Perhaps. I am a big fan. 

Anne Hathaway as Penelope.

The weakest link for me. That does not mean she was bad, but she could have been better or perhaps she was slightly miscast or, I don’t know, she was just less perfect than this character could have been. 

Zendaya as Athena. 

I wanted to see more of her, I wanted to see her assume various human and animal forms, as per the original story, I wanted her to say more, to guide Odysseus and Telemachus more. It was not to be. Oh, well. 

The scene in which it looked like the bloodthirsty soldiers were about to kill her and then they decapitated her statue and her stone head rolled down the floor was one of my favourite images of the movie. 

Robert Pattison as Antinous (chief suitor).

He deserved all the praise the majority of reviews bestowed on him. He was devious, cruel, repeatedly sending the chills down the many spines in the audience. He was also charming with a perfectly pitched deceitful smile and the face reflecting his cold calculated nastiness. 

Samantha Morton as Circe.

She left me somewhat underwhelmed. Some reviews hinted at Oscar potential, I say she was okay, but not fantastic and also I feel her character was robbed of a significantly bigger importance in the original Homer story. I guess it’s a director’s prerogative to choose what to show and what to cut out  of the film, which was three hours long already. The story she was allowed to keep in the film, the turning of the men into pigs was done superbly. I was mesmerised from the moment the sailors’ eating manners slowly became foreboding. 

The music. By Ludwig Göransson. 

Beautifully complemented the story, ominous, powerful, always there, a

ways hitting just the right tone. I am largely musically illiterate, and hardly notice the music in some movies, but this time I did, and I savoured it.

Elliott Page as Sinon. 

Might have been confusing to Homer purists, as his character did not appear in the original Odyssey but only centuries later in Virgil’s The Aeneid, but his addition worked well and gave Odysseus another chance to reflect on the cruelty of war. 

Himesh Patel as Eurylochus. 

He was a long way from Albert Square. 

I loved his portrayal of Odysseus’s second in command, as somebody who often tried to temper his boss’s anger and pride with a little common sense. I knew he had to die but was hoping that maybe he won’t, he was such a likeable wise man. 

Zeus’ Law. 

This was mentioned so many times by so many characters it began to feel like an educational podcast on what it was and how important it was to the Greeks.

Charlize Theron as Calypso.

Lovely as always. Gorgeous and slender. Tender too. She made it totally understandable how Odysseus was persuaded to be kept captive by her for 7 years. Lotus flowers or not. 

The Sirens. 

I wanted to see more of them. I wanted to hear them sing. Instead, we had the unsettling piece of eery music.  Another ‘oh, well moment’. 

One Tiny Criticism. The very tiny raft.

The raft that Odysseus had built on Calypso island in a distinctively lackadaisical fashion was laughably inadequate to take him on the last leg of his journey. It was almost as if he didn’t care if it fell apart. Tom Hanks could teach him a lesson or two on how to construct a successful desert island getaway vessel.  

And Finally. 

A lot of people had got hot under the collar about the casting of a black actress, Lupita Nyong’o, as both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. Lupita is on screen for less than 10 minutes. It’s a little more than a cameo. Although Helen of Troy is crucial to the story of the Trojan War, she is not terribly relevant to this story. The passionate online debate about this particular casting decision seemed totally over the top. 
Lupita was not the only non-white actor in the film, but she was the only one who had attracted racist abuse, as suddenly all the Homer experts became well-versed in the original text and questioned whether this face would indeed have been successful in launching a thousand ships. Her husband commented to visiting Telemachus in the film that perhaps now she could only launch five hundred ships, before Helen slowly turned towards us to reveal half of her face horribly scarred in the aftermath of the war. She still looked gorgeous though, she was still Lupita Nyong’o.