The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of Homer’s Greek myth epic, is an overwhelming experience (despite some reports to the contrary). A nearly three-hour long retelling of Odysseus’s (Matt Damon) journey home after the Trojan War, it features a stellar cast, stunning visuals, some occasionally stilted dialogue, and will leave you breathless and drained thanks to some of the most ambitious filmmaking of the modern era. It’s also, not insignificantly, a companion piece to Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer, continuing the director/writer’s theme of, in this case quite literally, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Mind you, this isn’t quite history; it’s myth, as the mostly faithful retelling includes a Cyclops, Sirens, and other monsters and gods that don’t (and have never) actually existed, but aid in elaborating on the ideas Nolan is playing with. It also leads to some of the most fluid use of CGI I’ve seen, maybe ever. A lot of hay has been made about Nolan filming the whole thing in enormous, noisy IMAX cameras, and yes, you do get to see thousands of soldiers storming Troy at the end of the Trojan War. There are boats sailing the Aegean Sea, and jaw-dropping treks across sandbars, beaches and through snowy forests. That’s all real (though likely augmented at least in part by digital bits, here and there).
And as a point of clarification before I go further, I saw the movie in IMAX at the AMC Lincoln Square in NYC, aka one of the 40 or so “real” IMAX screens showing 70MM in all its enormous glory. The frame is crystal clear, the sound pounding, and it fills an entire wall of the theater, so large you can see every freckle on Tom Holland’s nose (he plays Odysseus’s son, Telemachus). And because of the large size and fidelity to film, you can see occasional grains, hairs on the frame, or a split where one reel is switched for the next. It’s a part of the theatrical experience that succeeds in making the unreality of what you’re watching feel more real, and something we’ve been sorely missing in the digital age, where movies are mostly streamed to theaters; large TV screens, instead of a separate, unique viewing experience.
As a not insignificant side note, while seeing this in real IMAX 70MM is a stunner if you can make it to one of the scant locations showing the movie that way (and manage to snag a likely sold-out ticket, as these showings wildly went on sale last year), if you’re curious about the film I’d suggest seeing it on a regular screen first. The scale and scope of the movie will still be present, but – unless you’re sitting in the first row – it will likely allow you to better embrace the story Nolan is telling, versus a deep dive into Anne Hathaway’s pores (she plays Penelope, the wife of Odysseus).
I bring this digression up mostly to explain how the large size of the screen should show the seams of the digital elements, but instead Nolan expertly weaves them into the frame. The Cyclops (Bill Irwin) is a horror show, but mostly depicted in shadow; and when he does emerge, he moves at such a slow pace that it emphasizes the unreality of what we’re seeing. When the crew visits Circe’s (Samantha Morton) island, their transformation into swine is again, horrifying, but filmed in and out of focus. The technical aspect of this allows Nolan to mask the transformation, but the result is it allows us, the viewers, to fill in the gaps. The one exception is the Scylla, a multi-headed monster which is digitized in broad daylight, and does play like any tentacled beastie in any other movie. But it’s the one visual hiccup in a movie whose fidelity to “reality” extends to a sequence in the underworld that looks and plays like a lost reel from The Seventh Seal.
The story, in typical Nolan fashion, is presented out of order, beginning at the end as Odysseus has been missing for years since the Trojan War, Telemachus increasingly worried about the suitors that crowd his court, vying for the hand of Penelope. She is in mourning for Odysseus, refusing to believe her beloved husband is dead… But fewer and fewer allies believe as the years tick by that the hero can still be sailing the sea, when every other member of Agamemnon’s (Benny Safdie, for some reason) army has returned triumphant. With only the blind Eumaeus (a stellar John Leguizamo) to hold down the fort, Telemachus heads out on his own journey to find his father, while back at court the cowardly Antinous (Robert Pattinson, adding Greek Myth Weirdo to his stable of great film weirdos) makes his moves to secure the throne for himself.
And while Telemachus searches, Odysseus, high on lotus flowers*, tries to remember how he got to where he is, being nursed back to health by a relatively underused Charlize Theron as the nymph Calypso. As his fractured psyche heals, we see glimpses of the “real” story of the Trojan horse, how Odysseus pissed off Poseidon enough to be stranded at sea for eight years, and how he and his crew braved various terrors of the gods until he is finally allowed to return home. Once he does, there’s more to come thanks to Antinous, as Odysseus needs to both retake his kingdom of Ithaca, and grapple with the cost of what was lost in the world thanks to the Trojan War.
(*Towards the beginning of the movie, when we see Odysseus eating the flowers, and Calypso tells him to “stop eating the lotus” the guy next to me said “OHHH” out loud like it was an Easter egg in a Marvel movie. Which, I guess Greek myths were the original MCU, but I still had to bite my tongue not to laugh out loud.)
None of this is spoilers, by the way, unless you’ve somehow avoided the plot of a story that’s been around for thousands of years. So given our familiarity with this, Nolan’s storytelling deploys bits of the tale when they are necessary, not in the exact order they happened. And that allows him to weave his own epic, slowly building to a crescendo that is easily the most emotionally charged movie the normally icy director has ever made. While the crashing waves and clashing armies provide the “wow” factor you need from a Greek epic, it’s the smaller moments that stand out, from Hathaway’s trembling chin and watery eyes dealing with the loss of her great love, to several scenes with Lupita N’yongo as both Helen of Troy and her twin sister Clytemnestra that are haunting, to say the least.
The cast is, uniformly, excellent. Without listing everyone, Elliot Page is appropriately tragic as Sinon, a soldier sacrificed to give Odysseus the edge he needs to win the war. Himesh Patel almost deserves second billing and provides a steady presence as Eurylochus, Odysseus’s second in command who begins to doubt his king as their journey wears on. Zendaya is ethereal as Athena, though her true role doesn’t become apparent until late in the movie; and it’s a little unfortunate this is coming out the same year as Dune 3, as seeing her wander sand dunes in flowing garb definitely calls to mind an entirely different franchise. Speaking of which, in an odd bit of coincidence, Jon Bernthal appears as Menelaus, King of Sparta, and it’s odd to see him in an antagonist/mentor role with Holland’s Telemachus as that’s basically what they’re playing in two weeks time, again, in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Odd coincidences aside, though, the movie really belongs to Damon, who transforms his everyman looks and status into becoming a kind of Greek myth Jason Bourne. He’s incredibly strong and smart, he fights better than most men, and as indicated above bests various monsters of myth and legend. But what the movie does best is indicate that above all that, he’s a normal man stuck in an impossibly large situation, who loves his wife and son and just wants to get home to Ithaca. It’s that personal connection which Damon’s performance threads through the middle of The Odyssey that makes the movie work.
Mind you, not everything works. Some of the dialogue feels like blunt, action movie lines, and the decision to have everyone casually talk in American accents leads to odd clashes between arch, epic speeches and elements like Telemachus casually calling Odysseus and Penelope “dad” and “mom.” While the real cost of the Trojan War, and why Nolan is telling this story now, in 2026, are bluntly apparent by the end of the movie, looking backwards the episodic nature of Homer’s story doesn’t always serve the eventual point Nolan gets around to, making some of the islands visited feel like digressions (stunning as those digressions may be). And speaking only from the perspective of watching in the real IMAX, battle scenes are sometimes so large and so loud and frenetic that this viewer at least entered a bit of a fugue state after the tenth or so minute of clashing swords and screaming men. Nolan’s talent has never really extended to fight scenes, and while they are on a whole better here than there were in, say, his Batman trilogy, he seems less deft at depicting the mechanics of thrusts and parries than the emotion of the characters who are in the midst of those fights.
But all that are quibbles for a movie that is yet another masterpiece in Nolan’s filmography, which is full of multiple masterpieces. Can one have multiple masterpieces? Nolan does, and you can add The Odyssey to the pile, a movie that gives us the sort of epic we haven’t seen on screen in years, if not decades. And one that is less sand and sandals than a frightening polemic, a warning about the toll of war on society that goes further back in time than Oppenheimer, but ends similarly with Nolan all but shouting at the audience that all this has happened before, and it is happening again, right now.
The Odyssey is breathtaking, generational filmmaking at its best, and one that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible… Though perhaps see it on the biggest screen possible the second time through, so you can more effectively take it all in.
The Odyssey opens in theaters on July 17, 2026.
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