Summer, 1946. The Cousteau family - Jacques, his wife Simone and their two children Philippe and Jean-Michel - live in their beautiful house by the Mediterranean sea. By day they dive, by night they watch the stars. It's paradise on earth. But Jacques is never content. He lives and breathes adventure and believes absolutely in the virtues of progress. With his invention, the aqualung, his recently acquired vessel the Calypso, and a crew of free-spirited adventurers he is ready to cross the world's oceans. Ten years later, back from the boarding school to which he was sent with Jean-Michel, Philippe finds his father greatly altered – an international celebrity with megalomaniac dreams of grafting gills to humans and creating underwater cities. Jacques cannot see it yet, but Philippe already understands that progress and pollution have begun to lay waste to the submarine world. Despite their mutual love and admiration, violent conflict between these two passionate men is inevitable. But on their greatest adventure together aboard the Calypso, in Antarctica, they will find each other - before tragedy strikes.
"An attractive if conventional biopic of French underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau."
Tom Dawson, Total Film
"Sunbeams illuminating tropical fish, sea lions shimmying through a kelp forest -- some of the underwater photography is gorgeous in Jérôme Salle's glossy French-language biopic of Jacques Cousteau."
Ed Potton, Times (UK)
"Jérôme Salle's big-budget biopic L'Odyssée is at its best when recreating Cousteau's oceanic adventures."
