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THE ODYSSEY IS A HORROR MOVIE, ACTUALLY

BY  JACK KING

In a lot of ways, The Odyssey is pretty much what you expect it to be. Bigger than the Burj Khalifa, and just as impressive, attracting admiration like the biggest schlong in the sauna. In other words, it's a nearly-three-hour flex from Christopher Nolan, who has surely now secured his place on the Mount Rushmore of modern filmmakers. You might well call it the movie he was born to make. Like Nolan himself, the story - adapted from the ancient epic poem of the same name - is basically synonymous with "epic." It follows the arduous, decades-long journey home of Odysseus (Matt Damon) after the Trojan War, during which he and his men encounter no end of mythical, oft bizarrely sexy foes: sirens, witches, more giants than you'd find in the Norwegian starting 11. (More on them later.)

You get your gnarly swordfights. You get your massive wooden horse. Robert Pattinson gets gloriously freaky as a bronze-age fuckboi obsessed with trying to bone Odysseus' wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Damon, who I find to be strangely underappreciated as a leading man, puts in career-best work that'll surely see him taking his tux to the dry cleaners come March. All of that was probably to be expected. What I didn't anticipate is that much of The Odyssey would go full horror movie.

It all begins with the Cyclops. Long story short, Odysseus and his men are not long into their journey home when they decide to take shelter in a giant cave. What they do not realise, until it is too late for some of them, is that it is already occupied by a gigantic humanoid with one eye who, as it comes to pass, lives for two things: firstly, herding his cute little flock of sheep, and noshing on tiny human men like they're sentient Mars bars. Odysseus and gang are forced to hide in the shadows, trapped in the cave alongside their ravenous host. From start to finish, the sequence teems with sweat-inducing suspense; it makes for some of the scariest shit Nolan has put to camera, taken straight out of a classic monster movie.

I won't spoil anything else about that particular encounter. But later, the crew have the brilliant luck of bumping into even more man-eating giants in the middle of a gloomy forest, mist wafting around like dry ice at a metal concert; their number is once again decimated in a horrifying manner. (Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography is killer, really dialling up the "we're fucked, lads" dread.) In a later scene, Nolan launches into full-throated Cronenbergian body horror when a handful of Odysseus' soldiers are transformed into pigs, their skulls and snouts remoulded with hideous crackles and snaps. Make no mistake: these guys seriously go through it.

It's not the first example of Nolan diving into an eerie and gruesome genre space. The Scarecrow stuff in Batman Begins is overtly horror-coded, and The Prestige comes with its own sense of spooky, Gothic unease. (Not to mention Oppenheimer, which revolves around the greatest existential terror of them all). At its best, The Odyssey is less a classical drama than a creature feature made with the technical precision, dazzling craft and humungous budget Nolan always brings to the table. Otherwise, it's a very watchable fantasy blockbuster that feels destined to be the movie of the summer not called Spider-Man. And it might just give you nightmares.

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