Every few years Christopher Nolan picks a subject so enormous that the only sane response is to ask why anyone would try to film it at all. A physicist who split the atom. A war fought across land, sea and air in a single week. And now, of all things, a 2,800-year-old poem about a man rowing home. The Odyssey, in theatres since July 17, is Nolan’s first film since his Oppenheimer swept the Oscars, and it’s fair to say the pressure on this one was different. Oppenheimer had history to lean on. The Odyssey has to compete with a story everyone already thinks they know.
It doesn’t play it safe. Matt Damon’s Odysseus isn’t the clever trickster you remember from school – he’s a man who has started to notice what his cleverness has cost other people, and can’t put that knowledge back down. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope isn’t a woman waiting quietly by a loom either; there’s an edge to her patience that suggests she knows exactly what kind of man is coming home to her, if he ever does. Tom Holland’s Telemachus, Zendaya’s Athena, Robert Pattinson’s Antinous, Charlize Theron’s Circe – the cast is stacked deep enough that you could build three smaller movies out of the supporting performances alone.
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The war never really ends
Nolan opens with Troy, and he doesn’t linger on the triumph of it. The wooden horse works, the city falls, and almost immediately the film starts asking what winning actually bought anyone. Odysseus’s crew – a hundred and eight men when they set out – begin the voyage home already carrying more than they can put down. Nolan is careful not to treat the monsters that follow as random obstacles. The Cyclops, the sirens, Circe turning sailors into swine – each one lands as a consequence of something the men did, or refused to look at, back on the beach at Troy. It’s a smart choice, because it means the horror sequences never feel like padding between the ‘real’ drama. They are the drama.
What’s genuinely striking is how Nolan resists making Odysseus a straightforward hero even as the film keeps him at its center. Athena’s guidance plays less like divine favor and more like an accusation he can’t shake. Calypso doesn’t just delay him with an island paradise – she offers him the chance to simply stop remembering who he’s hurt, and for a while, he takes it. That’s a bolder note than the marketing lets on: a war-winning king who’d rather forget than atone, until forgetting stops being enough.
A director who knows exactly what he’s good at
Structurally, this is recognizably a Nolan film even in unfamiliar territory. He cuts between Odysseus’s ten-year voyage and Ithaca, where Penelope is fending off suitors and Telemachus is trying to become a man his father would recognize, and the two timelines talk to each other constantly rather than simply alternating. Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, gives the ocean sequences a scale that genuinely earns the big screen – this is a rare 2026 release where the format isn’t a marketing gimmick, it’s load-bearing. Ludwig Göransson’s score, his third collaboration with Nolan running from Tenet through Oppenheimer, mostly holds back until it doesn’t, and the moments it chooses to swell are almost always the right ones.
The film’s most interesting formal idea is a quiet one: objects. A bow, a scar, a shroud Penelope keeps unweaving at night – small physical things that accumulate meaning as the story moves, and pay off exactly when you’d stopped consciously tracking them. It’s the kind of patient plotting Nolan has built a career on, just pointed at a text that’s had three thousand years of adaptations already try the same trick.
Where it earns its ambition – and where it costs something
The film’s most unusual choice is saved for the very end. Homer’s poem closes with Odysseus reclaiming his throne and his household. Nolan doesn’t stop there – his Odysseus, having gotten everything he sailed ten years to get back, chooses to walk away from it anyway. It plays less like a twist than like the film’s actual thesis: that going home was never really the point, and that some debts can’t be settled just by showing up. It’s a genuinely bold way to end a story this famous, and it’s the choice most likely to divide audiences walking out of the theatre.
Not everything lands as cleanly. A few critics have pointed to Tom Holland and Zendaya as the softer links in an otherwise ferocious ensemble – not bad, just outmatched by the size of the performances around them. And at nearly three hours built almost entirely from dread and consequence, The Odyssey occasionally forgets that Homer’s original had room for wit and mischief too. Nolan’s version is so committed to the moral weight of the story that it can feel like it’s holding its breath for its entire runtime.
So, is it worth the ticket?
If you’re going in expecting a rip-roaring adventure with a returning king and a happy ending, adjust your expectations – this is closer to a war film that happens to have a hundred-eyed giant in it. But if you want to see a director who just won every Oscar going take the oldest story in Western literature and use it to ask what a person owes the people they’ve hurt, this is one of the more ambitious blockbusters of the year, and very likely one of the ones still being talked about come awards season. Just book the IMAX showing if you can – some films you can watch anywhere, and this genuinely isn’t one of them.
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