The mega-film The Odyssey is a hair shy of a 100 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, due to just a few less-than-perfect reviews.
On Wednesday, the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, earned his highest-rated film on the platform ever. Nolan is known for helming the Batman trilogy and the Oscar darlings Oppenheimer and Interstellar. As of the time of publication, his upcoming adaptation of the Greek epic dropped from its earlier perfect rating to 98 percent fresh due to just three reviews.
The film has been widely praised by critics, including the Daily Beast’s own Nick Schager, who called it “spectacular.”
Variety’s critic declared that the star-studded film, which stars Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Tom Holland, and more, is “an astonishing achievement,” with “genuinely grand” performances.
In its review, The Independent praised Nolan for “showcasing visual trickery in a way you’ve never seen a few before,” while Time Out’s film critic called the film a “dizzying mix of craft and spectacle that’s built to last.” The Odyssey is “dense but accessible, packed with career-best work from the stacked cast,” they wrote.
But critic and box-office analyst Edward Douglas threw a wrench into the fountain of praise on Wednesday.
“I didn’t hate The Odyssey,” he wrote in his Substack, “but I just felt it had too many problems, both technical and as far as the storyteller.” He added, “I just expect better from a filmmaker on the caliber of Christopher Nolan.”
Other critics who thought the film fell short of a perfect score include Nick Newman of The Film Stage, who called the movie, the first to be filmed completely on IMAX cameras, “a 1.43:1 monument to itself.”
“Nolan has insisted his… pure-IMAX method maintains flexibility with primary lens choices (50 and 80) that conform to whatever they shoot. This is a tantalizing concept that does not bear fruit,” the critic wrote.
Simon Foster gave the film four out of five stars and wrote for Screen Space that the film doesn’t always connect “as a human story.”
The development comes after MAGA aimed its ire at the film over Nolan’s decision to cast Lupita Nyong’o, a Black Kenyan actress, as Helen of Troy, and trans actor Elliot Page as Sinon (though internet outrage ensued when he was rumored to have been cast as Achilles).
Tesla billionaire Elon Musk led the charge against Nolan and the film, amplifying posts on X calling Nyong’o’s casting “racist against the Greek people” and Page’s “one of the dumbest and twisted things I’ve ever heard.’
Nolan dismissed the rightwing outcry in an interview with The Telegraphon Friday, calling the comments “irrelevant.”
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