Few film adaptations require more ambition than Homer’s “The Odyssey,” the quintessential epic. And perhaps no filmmaker has been more ambitious this millennium than Christopher Nolan, the man who told an entire story backward with “Memento,” conquered the superhero genre with his “Dark Knight” trilogy, and dominated the Oscars three years ago with “Oppenheimer.”

If anyone can handle a challenge as vast as “The Odyssey,” it’s Nolan. I can report that he indeed succeeds in the challenge … to a degree.

This being a Nolan movie, it should come as no surprise that it plays around a lot with chronology and time progression (see also: the competing one-hour/one-day/one-week/one-month storylines in “Dunkirk”). Basically, the movie splits its time between King Odysseus (Matt Damon) of Ithica taking 20 years to fight and then return from the Trojan War, and his family toward the end of that 20 years needing to do something about a vacant throne and the glut of scheming suitors squatting in the castle hoping........

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