This film was, without a doubt, my most anticipated release of this year. I have been a fan of Nolan’s work for quite some time now, so I was necessarily following with great interest all the trailers, TV spots, 60 minute segments and interviews which Nolan and his crew were putting out in the months before this film hit theaters. And from all these various teasers, it seemed as though the film would be outstanding from a technical standpoint, but weak in its writing and story. Here is what I actually found when I went to see the film.

Now, I am not going to spend all that much time here rehashing the story of a 3,000 year old myth. Nolan did not fail to stick to the main plot points in the tale: After the Greeks win the war in Troy, Odysseus starts a journey back to his home in Ithaca, but runs into various monsters and enemies, which delays his homecoming. Meanwhile, his wife back in Ithaca has her home invaded by suitors who wish to marry her in Odysseus’ absence.

From a technical standpoint, The Odyssey was incredible. The animatronics and visual effects of the various monsters were outstanding. Circe’s transformation of the crew into pigs was appropriately disturbing and horrifying. The cinematography was overall solid (we’ll come back to that) and at times beautifully done.

And the score by Ludwig Goransson was absolutely fantastic – which, in fairness, is not much of a surprise. For anyone who is unfamiliar with his work, he is the composer behind two other Nolan films: Tenet and Oppenheimer, and he also scored Sinners, Black Panther and “The Mandalorian.”

But, all that praise aside, I did have three major issues with this film.

First of all, The Odyssey is flawed in its adaptation of Homer’s work. Now, I am admittedly not as bothered by Nolan’s failure to perfectly adapt Homer as the classicists of the world might be, so I am willing to overlook the fact that he might have missed many details. But there were moments from the original myth which stood out to me as a child and have stuck with me ever since, that I wish Nolan had worked harder to incorporate.

For instance, he very intentionally completely removed the trick which Odysseus plays on the cyclops, in which Odysseus informs the cyclops that his name is “Nobody”. This, in the original story, has a wonderful payoff. The cyclops, having been blinded, calls upon his fellow cyclopes to help him because “nobody is attacking him.”

Now, Nolan insisted that it would not have worked to include this moment, because no English translation can do justice to the Ancient Greek pun behind calling yourself “nobody.” That may be a very real translation issue, but I think it is also fair to say that almost nobody grew upon hearing or reading The Odyssey in the original language – I know I didn’t – but that moment remained iconic nonetheless.

So, he really should have kept it in.

Second of all, the dialogue in The Odyssey was at times jarringly modern. Now this was one of the biggest criticisms I had for the film before it was released, based on the trailers alone. And I will say, the modern dialogue ended up being less of an issue for the film than I thought it would be. Most of the worst moments were included in the trailer and in fact one of those moments was misrepresented due to how it was edited in the trailer.

The moment in which Odysseus yells “let’s go” as he leads his troops into battle was not in fact a moment in which he was leading troops into battle, but rather a moment in which he was ordering his men to flee. Still not the most eloquent dialogue ever written, but nowhere near as egregious as the trailer made it seem.

But in other moments of the film, the dialogue was still painfully modern. Perhaps the most jarring instance comes towards the beginning of the film, when Telemachus addresses Penelope as “mom”. I understand Nolan wanted to make the story more approachable for contemporary audiences, but I am not sure if even today a royal prince is addressing his mother the queen as “mom.”

Third and lastly, while the cinematography in The Odyssey was overall fantastic, it was at times surprisingly bad. There were several moments in which two characters were filmed in conversation in the same shot (as opposed to cutting back and forth between them.) Given the extremely shallow depth of field which IMAX lenses appear to allow for, the focus had to shift between each character in turn as they spoke.

The problem with this is that the camera operator often missed the mark and for one conversation in particular, between Odysseus and Athena, Odysseus spends almost the entire conversation out of focus. And even when they did manage to land the focus, it was often a distraction from the conversation that was taking place. At best, it reminded you that you were watching a film.

I understand that the reason that is given for this flaw has to do with the nature of the IMAX cameras they were working with and how razor thin the planes of focus are that the cinematographers have to operate within. But if that was an insurmountable obstacle, and not one which they could have fixed by reshooting – or I don’t know reframing the shot to actually cut between them – then perhaps Nolan should not have filmed the entire thing in IMAX.

But despite these criticisms, I do think that the strengths of the film did enough to compensate for these weaknesses. The monsters were fantastic and terrifying, Hades was appropriately eerie, the sacking of Troy was incredible and haunting, and there were moments in Odysseus’s homecoming that were incredibly moving.

All in all, I would say that Nolan managed to deliver on some of the hardest parts of this film, while struggling to deliver on what should have been the easiest.

It seems that the discourse surrounding this film has largely pushed everyone who saw it into one of two camps: those who think it is an absolute pile of garbage, and those who think it is a masterpiece of cinema and Nolan’s finest work to date. I am, unfortunately, forced to conclude that it is neither of those.

It is a solid film overall, with great entertainment value and some incredible moments of superb cinema – but some incredible moments of real weakness.