With The Odyssey, director Christopher Nolan tries to thread a particularly difficult needle—as if Odysseus, on his long journey home from the Trojan War, had attempted to sail between the whirlpool and the six-headed Scylla. Nolan takes Homer’s ancient tale of a fabled warrior and molds it into a moral awakening about the ruin of warfare. It’s essentially Odysseus as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Does it work?
The Odyssey absolutely works as galvanizing, glorious, out-of-this-world-while-clearly-created-within-it filmmaking, which is what we expect at this point from a director who eschews digital imagery as much as possible, favors locations over sets, and has chosen (entirely, in the case of The Odyssey) to capture images with widescreen IMAX cameras. Working again with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan casts a vision in The Odyssey that lives up to the movie’s opening text, which proclaims that the story takes place in a “time of apparent magic.” The archaic seas throb with a deep, foreboding blue, punctuated by the square red sail of Odysseus’ ship. An ebony horse figurine the size of a school bus stands in the tide of a vast beach, awaiting to be brought into the unsuspecting city of Troy. Then there is Cyclops, a familiar mythical figure brought to new, terrifying life, largely via practical effects and a spooky, physical performance by Bill Irwin (who provided the voices and movements for the robots in Interstellar). Like Nolan’s Batman films, The Odyssey presents a world that never existed and makes you believe in it with your whole body, not just your eyes.
Indeed, every actor brings a firm conviction to material that could slide into silliness or grandiosity with the slip of a single line. The standouts are Anne Hathaway as a ferocious Penelope, Odysseus’ long-suffering wife, and John Leguizamo as a sage but puckish Eumaeus, his loyal servant. (Others, like Robert Pattinson as the sniveling Antinous and Zendaya as the wispy goddess Athena, are underused.) As for Odysseus himself, Matt Damon at middle age has a grizzled stoutness that serves the part well, along with an unforced integrity that’s fitting for this vision of Odysseus as a benevolent warrior-king.
At the same time, this benevolence sits a bit at odds with both the Odysseus of Homer’s tale and the Odysseus we see elsewhere in the movie, who kills, pillages, and plunders in the manner of his time. This is most strikingly represented in the attack on Troy, which is led by Odysseus, who has hidden with his men inside the horse. Nolan envisions the devastation of Troy as the moral turning point for the movie, where the scales fall from Odysseus’ eyes. He comes to understand such subterfuge and aggression as a violation of “Zeus’ law”—a much-referenced code in the film, which is described by Penelope at one point as a commitment to “treat others as you would be treated.” This mingling of Jesus’ words with the Homeric notion of generous hospitality means to be the movie’s guiding light, yet it is shadowed by the gory climax, in which Odysseus returns home to slaughter the usurpers to his crown. Yes, these “suitors” of Penelope have violated Zeus’ law as well, but there is still a disconnect between Odysseus’ epiphany and his bloody triumph.
Nolan presses ahead with an ending that differs, distinctly, from the one of Homer’s tale. Some literary scholars may object, yet like the poets who recited versions of The Odyssey for hundreds of years before it was set as text, Nolan has every right to improvise. This is not exactly the Odyssey of old, but perhaps it’s the Odyssey we need in 2026, when warmongering is on the rise in violation of all manner of international law (if not Zeus’). I wouldn’t go so far as to call the movie a cautionary tale—it’s too embroiled in its own violence—but any story that has us questioning coordinated killing feels sadly pertinent to our current age.
(7/15/2026)
