REVIEW: The Odyssey - brilliant, gripping, shocking, poignant

It’s pretty much the same length as both the World Cup semi-finals back to back – but vastly more entertaining.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer three years ago was a rank bum-number – the cinematic thrill equivalent of sitting through successive council meetings.

His Odyssey, however, is absolutely breath-taking, huge in scale, huge in oomph and soaring with imagination brilliantly realised.

You have to concentrate a little overmuch to start with maybe, with an avalanche of names and flashbacks setting the scene just a little clumsily. You start to wish you’d done your homework beforehand.

But patience is soon enough rewarded with an epic which is equally patient, building its thrills gradually but surely towards a superb conclusion which caps everything you’ve just sat through.

The piece is essentially the tale of Odysseus (terrific from a Matt Damon with the weight of the ancient world on his shoulders) – and of his efforts to get back home after his victory at Troy, a victory secured with a dodgy wooden horse delivered in frustration after ten years’ camping on the beach.

You’ve got to worry about the Trojans. Did they really not wonder just what was inside the horse? Or did they just imagine it was stuffed with Quality Street?

Whatever. It’s the means whereby Odysseus secures his triumph. But that’s the easy part. Getting home is just one thing after another for the warrior, especially as his band of soldiers diminishes markedly in number with each new adventure along the way.

Their encounter with a sheep-keeping Cyclops is brilliantly done; so too is their encounter with Circe (Samantha Morton), alone in her hut and cooking up a rather beastly fate for them all.

All this we get in flashback as Odysseus, stranded on an island with Calypso (Charlize Theron) years later, surveys the wreckage of his mission while nibbling lotus flowers.

Interweaving the flashbacks, we’ve got his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) setting out to find the father he doesn’t know, intent on locating him dead or alive – all in the hope of saving his mother Penelope (Anne Hathaway) from the bevvy of suitors banging at her door. Antinous, gleefully played by Robert Pattinson, is wonderfully villainous.

And so the film builds and builds as we wait for father and son collide. A terrific movie rockets to the next level when they do – and stays there to the end, poignancy building too as we get an insight into the human cost of Odysseus’ victory at Troy – the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

As the credits roll after nearly three hours, you will find yourself reflecting that the result is an astonishing film, brilliant, gripping and shocking too, visually superb and yet emotionally riveting.