‘The Odyssey’ First Reactions Call It ‘As Epic as Movies Get’

Remember a week or two ago when there was a piece in The Hollywood Reporter boasting about how Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was going to “skip social media influencer screenings” and was instead “going straight to professional critics screenings”?

This article, which was shared widely online, was interpreted by many as a sign that Nolan was not playing the game utilized by most other filmmakers and Hollywood studios to flood the web with social media reactions from “fan-site bloggers and influencers” — whose opinions tend to skew far more positive — before reviews from more traditional critics appear — which are typically a bit more measured in their praise. (THR called the move “a show of strength” that could eventually be seen as “a confident flex.”)

Although some savvy readers have begun to catch on to this practice, those early reactions still filtered out to a lot of the moviegoing public anyway, like in pull-quote commercials. (Critic are raving about Minions and Monsters! It’s the best movie of the year says @ButtFlakes420 on X!)

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10 days later here are a whole bunch of Odyssey tweets. And I can say for certain that while some old school critics may have gotten into early screenings of The Odyssey, and one are two are represented in these tweets, most critics (myself included) won’t get to see it until next week.

So what did these people think of the film? Well, so far they think The Odyssey is “as epic as movies get” and “a grand and gripping rendition of Homer’s epic” with “grit,” “sensitivity,” and “heart” with a “last act [that] rewards the journey.”

There are not a ton of details in these tweets (there never are), but they are all pretty positive (as they usually are).