The Odyssey: save your money from this overly hyped film

I can usually tell if I'm going to like a movie in the first five minutes. I went into Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey with optimism held high. But immediately there was something jarringly wrong. The characters spoke English! Yes, I know this is a tried and true Hollywood tradition dating back decades to movies like The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur and Cleopatra. But for some reason it didn't seem right here in such an obvious 3000 year old Greek myth. And partly it was who was speaking. In this case such recognizably box office boffo stars as Matt Damon (who otherwise does an admirable job as hero Odysseus) and Charlize Theron, who as a nymph looks like she's on a fashion set and can't be taken seriously at all. Yet I kept trying to find things admirable or absorbing about the film, partly I guess because of the overwhelming positive hype this picture has gotten in its one short week since release. But it never gathered traction. First, this is a movie heavily loaded with dialogue. Action film fans - who I suspect make up most of the audience - would have been numbed by all the weighted and grave conversations, about which I'd bet they couldn't care a flying fig about. And that's if they were decipherable because most were rather garbled. I really was expecting more action but it came few and far between. There were only a few mythical battles with monsters - the cyclops Polyphemus, the six-headed Scylla and giant soldiers who shred Odysseus' men and boats. Yes, the assault on Troy by Odysseus' Greeks - including of course the Trojan Horse - is dramatic but as dramatic or less than I've seen in a hundred other storming-the-gates type films. And really all these scenes are rather bloodless, both physically and emotionally. And, in between, the interminable dialogues among various characters, which may have put several members of the audience to sleep (the girl in front of me kept scrolling). This is a long film (172 minutes) and about half way through I gave up, my mind settling into a state of numbness and sort of on autopilot as the rest of the story unfolded. The best things about this film? Some of the ships and their grizzled rowers at sea fighting the elements and yes the dramatic encounters with the mythical terrors. The military costumes were good. But the film is overly long - thanks to the dialogue, Chris! - and could have been chopped by at least an hour. And I thought how it could have been improved by a more capable director (did I say that?). Less, less dialogue and more ambient sounds, creating surreal scenes and real psychological drama as the characters navigate through astonishing challenges, as befits a mythic journey.