On a purported budget of $250 million plus marketing, how could any director have got this literary epic so… wrong?  For starters, Matt Damon as Odysseus, the mythic warrior, is about as convincing as a suburban dad on a school run  – or a lost Labrador.
Unlike Homer’s epic, the film opens with the Trojan horse, which in this case, looks like a giant ornament that you might find stamped with “made in China.”. An implausible fall of Troy follows – no eye rolling please. From here, the  plot tracks  the King’s attempts to  get home to Ithaca. Along the way, he faces danger, monsters, angry gods, etc. While he is absent, his wife Penelope waits for him and deals with suitors who want to take his place along with her son, Telemachus.
The miscasting beggars belief, with Tom Holland playing Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, who shambles about doing nothing heroic; we see they left out the bit where he hangs twelve maidservants  — lest we lose sympathy for his character? Anne Hathaway as Penelope invokes more bewildered Pekinese than the sharp, scheming co-ruler she’s meant to embody. There’s Charlize Theron as Calypso, the enchantress sea nymph, who is plainly too old and too human for the part, and Lupita Nyong’o as the legendary “golden” Helen of Troy. Even Argos, Odysseus’s noble hunting hound, has been rebranded as a scruffy street-mutt.
This was an ambitious project, Homer’s twenty-four books boiled down to a single feature film. One would expect Christopher Nolan (The Dark Night, Inception, Oppenheimer, ) to reshape the narrative, but his screenplay is so dumbed down that even the Gods of Olympus would be embarrassed. Purists of the literary work will not be impressed. The quasi-spiritual themes of  nostos (deep longing for home), and xenia (hospitality) just aren’t conveyed effectively. (A superficiality that reflects our times?  Online shopping carts, doom-scrolling and gaming, keyboard warriors and influencing, endless selfies, popcorn munching and trollers, streaming-completists, whose only prior understanding of Homer is The Simpsons.)
Compare the simplicity of the 1960s Jason and the Argonauts: more tension, better storytelling, and who could forget the stop-motion skeleton sequence, made back when CGI didn’t exist?
Given the powers of modern CGI, the monsters and FX were underwhelmingly unimaginative. Take Cyclops, ( a derivative of Gollum and Dobby?) Was he supposed to be terrifying? My sympathies lay with him, after all, the Ithacans barged into his cave, not the other way round.
This flim-flam of mind-numbing cinematic drivel goes on for three hours. What a shame, imagine the great film it might have been? In essence, uninspiring – the very antithesis of the actual Odyssey.
My rating:  Not even the Sirens could lure me back!