Renowned among mankind for all manner of subtlety

THE ODYSSEY

2026

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Spoilers: effectively inapplicable, though perhaps high, if this is your first exposure to any modern retelling of the Greek Epic Cycle

I forget who I heard it from—or if I heard it from anyone, though I'm pretty certain I must be stealing it—but our last movie star isn't an actor, but a director; that is, "Christopher Nolan" is somewhere close to literally the only name in all cinema that will still sell a ticket to any given normal moron all by itself, something demonstrated beyond all doubt already when for no other reason (even its amalgamation with Barbie would never have happened without that "directed by Christropher Nolan" credit), about seventy million people went to go see a movie about a physicist's politics.  But it has been amply demonstrated again, and if "Greek mythological adaptation" has a larger natural audience, that's been borne out with an even bigger box office, one it began accumulating over a year ago when it was already selling tickets, and one still growing rapidly even as we speak, five weeks after its release still bringing in audiences of sufficient size that that's how long it took me to see it, for when we'd find weekday morning screenings nevertheless packed to the rafters, I was on the verge of crediting those bozo conspiracy theories about Nolan buying out screenings for his own film.  But no, the people were real.  And that, therefore, is the answer to the question, "Why The Odyssey?" in regards to the blockbusting success of a dour, symbolic, three-hour motion picture: Homer was what Nolan was into that week when he decided to make it, though the attraction to this filmmaker is plain given the affinities that the theme of homecoming has in his filmography (he's done it before in, at least, Inception and Interstellar; meanwhile, the last frames of his Odyssey replicate in fairly close detail The Dark Knight Rises for whatever reason).  As for "why Nolan?", there's the reason I would prefer, and, to some degree, is the case—that he and his collaborators are enormously good at what they do, and what they do (making larger-than-life movies about subject matters that interest them out of a combination of old-fashioned and experimental technique) is not at all usual anymore in the realm of nine figure budgets—and then there's my other theory, which is that he has successfully branded himself as just about the only person out there making big, entertaining event movies that also make people feel intellectually challenged, though when his audience overlaps as much as it necessarily does with Mario sequels, CGI remakes of CGI cartoons, and Marvel XXXVIII, I do mean this as a bit of a double entendre.  In either case, The Odyssey (also written solo by the man) has its turns where it just radiates what I certainly hope is only Nolan's contempt for that audience, insofar as, being a Nolan fan myself, I do prefer to think of him as reasonably smart.

Nolan's Odyssey—which is much that you would hope for in a larger-than-life movie well-made, to get that out there—comes off incompletely smart in some respects, and also intellectually grasping and desperate in others.  The fundamental thing is that it feels like Nolan just never quite fully decided what approach his version of Odysseus's cursed voyage was going to take, with the movie ranging across more-or-less the full gamut of all possible period piece modes.  Sometimes, it's an immersive experience of the past upon its own savage terms, like an Eggers (take the plunging darkness that exists beyond any fire in cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema's ever-moonless nights; or just consider that one of the very first things that Nolan shows us is somebody chucking puppies off a Goddamn cliff).  At other times, it's a pageant to illustrate a story still resounding with residual cultural importance, desiring to explain and celebrate that importance to a receptive audience, like a DeMille (for example, Nolan's screenplay, like Homer but even moreso, never comes close to shutting the fuck up about the divinely-framed rules of hospitality, and however counterbalanced they are by such highly natural expositions as "my twin sister, Clytemnestra," there are other stretches where Nolan's Odyssey obviously expects you to have a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology in your head; or we could discuss some of those famous casting decisions, but since, as a society, we cannot, let's merely say they pertain to this setting no less than a Russian-Buryat and an Anglo-Scot in ancient Egypt).  And sometimes it's an out-and-out fantasia (Ellen Mirojnik's "Antiquity and the Bronze Age are the same and we don't really care about fidelity to either" costumes seem aimed at taking this out of any identifiable place or time altogether), so when people decide to compare it to Jackson's Lord of the Rings, a film series adapting novels that don't even take place on our Earth, I can't say that isn't valid, and it's maybe the most sensible of approaches, considering that by far the most famous episodes of the Odyssey, that are inevitably going to be the bread and butter of a blockbuster treatment of that story, amount to a fantasy adventure involving gods and monsters and polities and places* that never existed, all things largely to the side of any "period piece" besides a "mists of history" flavoring.  And for all that these approaches can coexist and to some degree must coexist in Nolan's Odyssey, it's the last one that I think must've rankled him, Nolan being a filmmaker who will pursue very ridiculous sci-fi conceits, but seems to need at least the assertion of rationalism.  It sums up Nolan's indecisive discomfiture that the very first frame of his Odyssey is a title card that snidely reads "IN A TIME OF APPARENT MAGIC," as if this were some materialist take—it's more like "Nolan originally intended a materialist take, then he realized that was nuts, but nonetheless remained attached to making the suggestion"—and yet by the forty-or-so minute mark, here's your fucking Cyclops, which is not by any means the most "apparent" of all the magic in this Odyssey.  So what that means here, more-or-less, is that the gods aren't real and religion is put in its place as a thing to be doubted most severely by a hero who, inter alia, slits sheep's throats to conjure the dead.

And ultimately what it's going for is something else.  But in some regards it's more faithful to the text of the poem than some adaptations, or at least I don't think most of them are this keen on the Telemachy phase of it, which I suspect shocks any reader new to the Odyssey who is likely to ask "when does anything fun happen?" as they march through a long preface without any Odysseus in it.  So while Nolan tamps down on how repetitively tedious the mutual admiration society scenes of Telemachus's (Tom Holland's) mostly-pointless tour of Achaea get, there's still a fair amount of visiting, notably Telemachus's reception in the house of Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and his reclaimed bride Helen (Lupita Nyong'o), that certainly does not ask you to read between any lines in regards to how much they hate each other; however, in this instance, Telemachus does not depart Ithaca on his own because Athena (Zendaya, who may not have ever even been on set with her husband) advised him to, for Athena is busy being a vision in Odysseus's (Matt Damon's) head, following him around and frowning at him.  Telemachus's problem remains the same as ever, even so: his father Odysseus has not returned from the Trojan War, and in twenty years the island kingdom of Ithaca has, remarkably, never formally resolved the absence of its king; and in the past three or so the aristocracy of Ithaca and its neighboring islands have sent their nominal best men to pay suit to queen regent Penelope (Anne Hathaway), which has become a farce due to various gendered features of archaic Greek society that don't pertain here plus some that still do, with the upshot being that Penelope has refused to select a suitor in her preference for her lost husband, but they won't leave, and neither she nor Telemachus have either the strength or exactly the right to evict them, leading to the current situation of a mob of resentful, rude drunks eating them out of house and home, first amongst the parasites being Antinous (Robert Pattinson).  As for Odysseus, he's a drug addict somewhere in the Mediterranean living in sin with the hermit, Calypso (Charlize Theron); his men are dead, and he's become an eater of the lotus, but in these latter days he's finally been moved to remember what it is he's been running from.

It oughtn't be terribly surprising that in adapting a poem that already uses flashbacks, Nolan of all people won't be telling the story in order, either, and though the Ithacan scenes predominate the first half hour, Nolan is correcting for that long stretch of Odysseus-free Odyssey by showing Odysseus early, though in point of fact the very first figure we meet is Sinon (Elliot Page), in this telling the ill-fated patsy used to bait the Trojans into accepting that famous gift which the Greeks bore them, now only one sad repressed memory amongst many in the tattered, broken mind of our dissipated hero.  So this, obviously, would be the radical departure from the Odyssey, done with no small amount of cleverness (the conflation of his captivity by Calypso, now made substantially more consensual, and the lotophagoi whom Homer's Odysseus wisely refused to join is, I'd say, done with a large amount of cleverness).  It's basically an entirely new thematic throughline for a much more traumatized and guilt-ridden warrior whose psychological contents would have been largely alien to the archaic Greeks; on the other hand, as Homer has it, all these great big he-men seem to cry at the drop of a hat, albeit only occasionally out of this film's more humanistic impulses.

So the particular remixings are novel, but the ideas are not, as such, new ones, and while Nolan's Odyssey takes some time to come out and say it outright, basic visual literacy should get you there in seconds (could there be some narrative content already being suggested by dressing our Greek heroes all in black and the Trojans in white? indeed there could! and if that's possibly too subtle, consider Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), rendered an unholy combination of Ares and Hades into one long-striding death-god whose face remains conspicuously unseen and who also appears to be wearing some sort of powered exoskeleton), though in fact Nolan's Odyssey does say it outright pretty early, if you know what the phrase "People of the Sea" portends, which, if Nolan actually believed you to have the loosest of grasps on contemporary scholarship, he'd have realized he wasn't being even slightly cagey.  So what it's saying is this: that the Greeks are the villains of the Epic Cycle, a conclusion most people came to around the time of... maybe Virgil (and it's arguably present within Attic tragedy), but has certainly been the broad consensus interpretation since after World War II, so that even stodgy 50s sword-and-sandal pictures like Helen of Troy conceive of the Achaeans as mostly rapist pirate dickheads (a pre-war conversation between Odysseus and Penelope here lifts the "it's actually about trade routes" dialogue almost verbatim from that film), and hence potentially rich sources of allegory for whatever you don't like about contemporary militarism and imperialism, or at least I certainly found it so in the mid-2000s, when I half-completed a comic book adaptation of (mostly) the Iliad that plopped that scenario into then-modern warfare, which I guess I'd have finished drawing if I'd known the concept was worth $1.5 billion bucks, inasmuch as the commonality between many updatings of the Epic Cycle is this sympathetic Odysseus, one who's tormented, but also conflicted.  (Nolan has added, also, the bizarre little tic of "plucking his bow," to announce his presence to animals on the hunt, a trait he'd prefer to carry into battle; and it's a nice audiovisual flourish, but "Odysseus, the guy who always fights fair!" is possibly the most absurd repositioning of a legend I've ever seen.)

Well, as that's a theme not actually in the Odyssey, so must be supplied from without, perhaps it's worth reckoning where the hell our modern idea of Odysseus does come from since we all seem to have it.  And my supposition is that it's the traditions relayed by Pseudo-Apollodorus, which includes the single most salient aspect of the Odysseus myth not already relayed by Homer, which is that Odysseus desperately did not want to go; that he initially refused to honor the oath of Tyndareus, then feigned madness to escape it, was checkmated into revealing his ruse under a threat to the life of Telemachus, and at last dutifully (albeit cynically and resentfully) joined his comrades on their war with Ilion—and also subsequently conspired to have his interrogator murdered by framing him as a traitor, because that's the kind of grudge he held against his own participation in a war that, according to the lost Iliupersis and the Aeneid and such, was in the end only won by his criminal stratagem.  And considering this deuterocanonical story seems to be where we get the Odysseus we can stomach—considering, too, that interpolations aren't beyond Nolan's ambit; Sinon ain't in the Odyssey either, that dude's first attested by a fellow disliker of the mystical, Palaephatus, who wrote a book that could be translated (liberally) as "Apparent Magic"—I consider it pretty bogus that what I'd call the most important feature of the whole Odysseus myth, at least for the modern purposes that this Odyssey would like to put Odysseus to, was something Nolan didn't bother putting in it.

Still, we do kind of already know this, so The Odyssey gets to cheat a bit, and it's a solid spine for its retelling, even as it's in a very visible but arguably-productive struggle against the substance of what it's adapting, that argument being mostly decided in Nolan's favor in the form of Damon's performance, which is thrust into fairly narrow channels (there's the occasional extra-dry Nolan humor, not unwelcome) but excels within those channels, nailing both the diffident dissolution and the re-formed personality that's taken the weight of a world on his shoulders and found brittle, raspy gravitas in his infinite regrets.  Which is good, because this all-star Odyssey is a rather inconsistently-acted thing.  Nyong'o, Bernthal, Safdie, I suppose even Pattinson doing his usual sweaty, smarmy Pattinsonian thing: good.  Theron, John Leguizamo's Ithacan servant Eumaeus, Zendaya's function of helping her client mortal by scowling at him then, eventually, sadly smiling: very good.  Samantha Morton's Circe: extraordinarily good.  Page: bad.  Himesh Patel's "main sailor guy" Eurylochus: catastrophically bad, giving such a hollow performance he barely feels like he's helping Damon do a table read.  Holland is inconsistent in himself, partially victim to a(n inconsistently) "contemporized" screenplay that is so furiously eager for Telemachus to call Odysseus "dad"—fair enough!—that it's going to shove "dad" into places even a native speaker of English would never use it because they'd realize it sounds pathetic and mewling; and he gets better, though he's also just blatantly too old for the part.  But then, Hathaway is out-and-out great, wrangling a part that, on the level of screenplay, continually feints at and then refuses to take any number of fascinating turns (a feminist module that Nolan doesn't really know how to fit into a patriarchal poem, ancient realpolitik, even temptation and lonely horniness for the very icon of marital fidelity), and integrating them into her performance anyway, knowing that Penelope's most effective path for us is straight through the pyrotechnics of a borderline-psychotic grief.**

Of course, "great Penelope" gets you only so far in an Odyssey, and the claims to greatness we're certainly already awash in are, undoubtedly, founded in other things, and whatever else, it's a hell of a movie.  I've already mentioned van Hoytema's photography, which does what it's asked of it very well, both in the nighttimes and in the many landscapes that Nolan's captured for his all-IMAX spectacle (and in its achievement with a great many, potentially-staling scenes of Odysseus's house, it's probably of special benefit to Hathaway, whose characterization gains a great deal from being so frequently shot through an occlusion like that shroud or the screen that separates her from her suitors and, very memorably, from her husband in the end), but the champs here are composer Ludwig Goransson, editor Jennifer Lame, and the sound team.  Lame is doing plenty without the other two—even her infelicities seem designed to keep you awake during the dialogue scenes of a three hour movie, and I kind of love the illustrative montage she and Nolan are getting up to where someone will mention a concept in dialogue and some image connoting that concept slaps us in the eyes—and the same is true of Goransson, who's having fun with some weirdnesses that are neither classical nor contemporary, and whether Nolan knew or not, I recognized cues that I'm pretty sure just have to be homages to Luigi Cozzi's Hercules of all possible things, notably during the journey to Hades, cosmic metallic noise that gets across a kind of violent ethereality to the most mystical of the Odyssey's episodes.

But they are all at their best together, most often in service to the thing that I imagine has left the most impact on the people who've watched The Odyssey, which is Nolan, confronted with the inescapable fact of magic in the story he wanted to tell, deciding that his way into that was to basically do his first horror film.  Now, not all of these are great: the Sirens episode is so utterly sandbagged by Nolan's materialist preference that, if not for the way it permits him to sneak in his narrative reconfiguration of Odysseus, it'd kind of outright suck; and Charybdis, though effortfully pursued, is just kind of a whiff; the Laestrogynians only differentiate themselves from the better, earlier scene of gigantism by recourse to a moving forest backdrop, whatever inspired that.  But even if it'd be a stretch to call The Odyssey "horror," I'm tempted to, thanks to the deformed cannibalistic giant in the dark that is Polyphemus, or the editing-driven resculpting of men made docile by Circe, that's already been led up to by a lovely little prefatory sequence that's charmingly uncanny in how lo-fi it is, mostly Lame intercutting shots of the zoo animals the Ithacans meet on their way up Circe's hill and Odysseus's discovery in a nearby field, done with a rhythm of doomy fatalism.  Above all, it's in strategic deployment of all their arts for the setpieces, Lame getting manic, and Goransson obligingly providing a recreation of Dunkirk's piercing, ever-rising note, and while this isn't ever as much of an experiment in sound-over-clarity for Nolan as its semi-successful employment in Tenet or its triumphant uses in Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, suffice to say this motherfucker is loud, and Nolan and his people have contrived that possibly the most exciting thing in this Odyssey actually is the slaughter of the suitors, a tremendously well-staged action scene that is guided by sound and by the fact of its editing, as much as it is the increasingly-imparsable chaos of its imagery.  I'm still flummoxed that this movie is rated R—it can't really just be the (awesome) reference to Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, right?—but I kind of get it: Nolan movies are by nature intense, and this is going for intensity like his goal was to top himself.

So, in a sense, that's not very many negative things to say about The Odyssey, and it was cruising towards excellence, ultimately putting Damon and Hathaway next to each other and giving to the former a summation of this Nolan film and, after a fashion, Nolan's approach to film—this film's "twist ending" is the Sack of Troy, the thing that happened at the beginning (though this R-rated Trojan War movie is not earning it in this regard, sort of soft-selling the subsequent horror of rape, rape, slavery, and lots and lots of rape, while another irritating omission is the lack of Astyanax-killing, often attributed to Odysseus, let alone using a dead man's baby as a club to kill that baby's grandfather, which I present to you as the metalest thing I've ever seen).

...Are we the baddies?***

But, ultimately, tying up the contradictions of this Odyssey, including an Athena seemingly as antagonistic to its Odysseus as helpful.  It's a phenomenal sequence, despite my misgivings, moreso because of its thorniness between Odysseus and Penelope and the questions it asks about guilt and survival, even tending to square the fits of pique that weren't exactly consonant with his doomed desire to save his fellow murderers, all of it timelessly relevant and now, unfortunately, more timely than I expect Nolan would have guessed.  It's a good monologue, too, for as long as its focus remains upon Odysseus's sin and Odysseus's repentance—and I simply don't know if I've ever in my life seen a movie in the moment of its crowning glory shit itself like The Odyssey does (imagine the Bhagavad Gita scene from Oppenheimer, but now it's the emotional climax and worse) when Damon, into the midst of this, is compelled to muse upon, and in these words, the Bronze Age Collapse.  This was, in Nolan's view, caused by the Sack of Troy (uh... huh), plus something something the perversion of hospitable xenia both at home and abroad (I alluded to it before, but Nolan has clearly lost track of the number of times he uses the phrase "Zeus's Law," and it becomes awfully irritating by about the twelfth or thirteenth).  Later, our Odysseus shall prophesy the Greek Dark Age, because the Sack of Troy also caused the end of Greek literacy—and the Sea Peoples were coming from inside the house!—and it is just so utterly and needlessly blunt and stupid that even the three hours that had led to it likewise collapsed quite a bit in the process, despite this heaving beast of a film having been working for me beforehand more often than it had not.

Score: 7/10 (real, real close to an 8)

*No Phaecians, though, which I frankly do not mind.

**Nolan, big literalist, is noticeably embarrassed by the "unwinding the shroud" business; even more noticeably "Noman has blinded me."  I'm sorry, but I do sympathize.

***I'm okay with omitting the lynching of the twelve maidservants; less so what I'm pretty sure is the outright vanishing of Mia Goth's Melantho, whom I guess dies in the general slaughter?