The Odyssey

A sprawling beast of a film, at times tough as old leather, this latest retelling of the Odyssey demands real stamina from its audience. It is a brooding chunk of cinema with stretches that unquestionably drag, yet something curious happens along the way: even though every twist of this mythic tale has been etched into collective memory for millennia, you still find yourself watching the screen to see how it unfolds.

To call the narrative cohesive would be generous. The storytelling meanders, frequently appearing disjointed, tangled, and lacking the disciplined architecture of a classical tragedy. But as the narrative dust settles, its subconscious design begins to emerge. Beneath its mythic veneer, the film operates as an unmistakable allegory for the contemporary geopolitical exhaustion of the United States.

What unfolds reads less like ancient epic and more like a thinly veiled, subliminal apology for decades of pointless foreign military campaigns. Odysseus is framed as the weary, battered avatar of imperial overreach, a warrior broken, traumatized, and internally shattered by wars he himself waged on distant shores. His brutal campaigns are reframed not as imperial hubris, but as a tragic, inevitable destiny that inflicted the deepest wounds upon the aggressor itself. It turns Homeric myth into a psychological whitewash for modern western interventionism: undeniably clunky, ideologically questionable, and ultimately a mediocre effort that is all too easy to forget.