The Odyssey ★★★1/2
- 2filmcritics
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
Availability: See at end of review.
Odysseus Does Hamlet
An enormous metal horse, rampant and atilt, its hind legs buried in sand, on the shore of a vast sea, opens Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” It’s a startling image, evoking the top of the beached Statue of Liberty in the last scene of “Planet of the Apes” (1968), about another civilization in crisis.
The ingenious director, characteristically rearranging time, again and again returns to the horse. Initially we see a boyish soldier pinned with arrows against the belly of the beast. Inside, Odysseus and a cadre of his men, their bodies jostled and hurled against the interior walls of the contraption, piss and shit and struggle not to drown in pools of fetid sea water. Hundreds of men, participants in their own destruction, drag the horse over sand and timbers, through the gates of Troy into the unsuspecting city, raising it as a god in the agora, the public square, to joyous acclamation. Within the epic story that is Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” the Trojan Horse is one of many episodes that are familiar yet chilling, obvious and yet mysterious, beautiful and fascinating, making the nearly 3-hour runtime seem less than it is.
The Greek king’s 10-year voyage from foreign Troy (in modern Turkey) to Ithaca (a Greek island) is the classic quest.
Homer’s The Odyssey was made for an action blockbuster, and Nolan wastes no time fulfilling expectations for that genre. The Greek king’s 10-year voyage from foreign Troy (in modern Turkey) to Ithaca (a Greek island) is the classic quest, laced with obstacles to be overcome as Odysseus struggles to return home—to Penelope, the wife he left behind, to Telemachus, his son, and to his rightful place on the throne and in the world. Along the way he’ll encounter armies of gigantic killers, a one-eyed monster (Polyphemus, the Cyclops, son of Poseidon—Bill Irwin), a demi-goddess (Circe—Samantha Morton) with witch-like powers, a nymph (Calypso—Charlize Theron) offering drug-induced escapism.
Bill Irwin's Polyphemus (the Cyclops) is particularly grotesque and human, shades of Guillermo del Toro.
The monsters are particularly grotesque—so much so that you can’t take your eyes off them—even more mesmerizing knowing they are not products of computer-generated imagery. Nolan has said he learned from Guillermo del Toro, not only about physical transformation—Circe turning Odysseus’s men into pigs is another can’t-watch-and-can’t-look-away scene—but also about the potential “humanity” of those we instinctively fear most.
Scenes of the men at sea are both terrifying and at times sublime: a square sail brilliant red against a setting sun.
Nature, controlled by the gods, is even more life-threatening: roaring, crashing seas that toss large vessels as if they were toys, the fatal whirlpool (Charybdis) and monsteroid rocks (Scylla), the temptations that draw one off course (the Sirens). Scenes of the men at sea, like the Trojan Horse, are both terrifying—Nolan famously eschewed CGI and used historic wooden boats—and at times sublime: a square sail brilliant red against a setting sun.
Matt Damon as Odysseus, captaining the storm-tossed ship. Damon and the crew contended with real storms. "The rest of the cast, a cadre of guys who worked their asses off rowing, was looking to him and everyone saw what he was doing for the film," Christopher Nolan told the The Hollywood Reporter.
Along the way, Nolan incorporates every action trope you’ve been exposed to in the last 75 years, recapitulating cinema’s blockbuster history, from the Biblical extravaganzas of the 1950s (“The Robe,” “The Ten Commandments”) to the Sam Peckinpah spectacles of violence of the late 1960s and 1970s (“The Wild Bunch,” “Straw Dogs”) to 2022’s “Avatar: The Way of Water.” While serving up Greek mythology to the masses, Nolan’s menu of visual anti-pleasures delivers battles, mass killings, chases and escapes, hand-to-hand combat, dying friends, revenge—and, inevitably, the superhero. In scenes that evoke any and every romantic adventure story of the past half century, Odysseus finally finds his way back to Ithaca (sorry for that spoiler!), disguised as a beggar (won’t everyone be surprised!), wins a bow-stringing competition (another surprise), shoots an arrow to its impossible target (shades of Robin Hood), and single-handedly vanquishes more than a hundred men who have been hanging around for years hoping to hop into bed with his wife. If you haven’t seen it all before, you’ve never been to the movies.
Just off playing the cute, young
Hugh Grant-like heartthrob
in "The Drama," Robert Pattinson is a particularly evil suitor Antinous.
Yet even those penultimate scenes, as familiar as they may be in some respects, contain a moral perspective. Those 100 suitors, led by a particularly evil Antinous (Robert Pattinson showing his range), abuse the hospitality of Penelope and demonstrate both the decadence of once-great civilizations (another theme with a contemporary valence) and the violation of “Zeus’s rule.” That rule, akin to the Biblical Golden Rule (Luke 6:31, Matthew 7:12), would have one treat strangers as one would want to be treated, because the beggar might be a god in disguise. The role of the beggar, both the aged swineherd Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) and Odysseus himself when he returns in the guise of a withered old man dressed in tatters, is to plumb the measure of a man. Antinous and his ilk take the bait; the high and mighty, the unfathomably rich (our billionaires) sneer and abuse the lowly and poor in material goods. (Zeus’s Rule is hot stuff on YouTube, with videos featuring a white male jerk who discovers that the shabby/dirty/woman/weakling they have been treating badly is the company president.)
Matt Damon brings his trademark earnestness to the role.
The moral/human side of Nolan’s spectacle is embedded in the character of Odysseus, an adventurer/king torn between his belief in the gods and the fates they dispense, and his chosen role as a pragmatic leader of ordinary men. While Matt Damon’s somewhat youthful and decidedly non-Mediterranean face may not be ideally suited to the role, his trademark earnestness is on full display, as a man lost—physically and emotionally “at sea”—for 20 years.
As Nolan rewrites Homer, Odysseus undergoes a transformation worthy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
As Nolan rewrites Homer, Odysseus undergoes a transformation worthy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: from a victor, celebrating war as he sits on the steps of Troy’s agora (the Troy scenes are imported by Nolan from an earlier epic poem, The Iliad), watching his men massacre everyone in sight and topple the city’s buildings and towers, even lop off the head of a statue of Athena—to a regretful, guilty man seeking atonement and forgiveness for decisions that at the time seemed reasonable, judicious, even inevitable.
Odysseus’s masculinity is complex, leavened with a measure of feminism.
Unlike that of our current Secretary of “War,” Odysseus’s masculinity is complex, consisting of cunning and intellect as well as strength—no testosterone test for that—and judgment as well as bloodlust, recognizing the debt a commander owes the warriors whose lives he risks and ends. It’s also leavened with a measure of feminism. Circe shows men to be the pigs they are, even though her #MeToo rage is not appropriately justified in this telling. Penelope (Anne Hathaway) asserts she could be king, that she’s been running Ithaca for 20 years, and that she’s more worthy than her 20-year-old untested son Telemachus (Tom Holland)—surely Homer didn’t put those words in her mouth. Nolan’s is a particular take on war, the general, the meaning of heroism, and the sexes, one resonant in our times.
The pillaging and burning of Troy is a victory that will haunt the Greek king.
Nolan has long been interested in—and made us interested in—time and memory: with 2000 “Memento,” told backwards; 2010 “Inception,” with its multi-layered reality; 2017 “Dunkirk,” recounted in one-hour, one-day, and one-week crosscut sequences. Crosscuts and flashbacks are paltry words to describe the sophisticated techniques that track Odysseus’s internal journey of recollection and re-evaluation, as he struggles to determine whether victory is in fact to be glorified and whether it is worth the price paid both away and at home. Nolan locates the absent king on Calypso’s island where she has fed him the amnesia- and hedonism-inducing lotus flower for 8 years. Only slowly and in fragments will he remember, and will the viewer understand, the meaning of what has happened at Troy, in Odysseus’s kingdom of Ithaca, to his subjects and his wife and son.
Samantha Morton brings interiority to Circe.
Besides a surprisingly effective performance from Damon, the stars and not-quite stars surrounding him are also for the most part impressive. Elliot Page, as the young soldier from the beginning of the tale, is appropriately soft and sacrificial yet defiant. Zendaya’s Athena is wise and mournful, watching her mortals defy the gods as they futilely try to alter their fate. Morton’s plastic face reveals competing moralities within Circe herself. Himesh Patel is a worthy foil to Odysseus as Eurylochus, the second in command of the ship, regularly second-guessing his captain. An exception is Holland, who at 30 looks too old for the 20-year-old son of Odysseus and Penelope and, at the same time, lacks the gravitas he needs to be taken seriously as a candidate for Ithaca’s throne.
Anne Hathaway as Odysseus's long-waiting wife, Penelope.
She challenges her more than 100 suitors to a bow-stringing contest—
one of the series of unsurprising scenes driving toward the finale.
One can question if Nolan has given us too little that’s new, aside from a 70MM IMAX shooting format that most movie-goers can’t experience. Grounding his film in one of the world’s most famous narratives, he has necessarily presented familiar themes and stories we’ve read—and seen on screen—before, and often. Arguably, he has privileged action over message, pandering to the masses, who, at this post-first-weekend writing, are lining up at theaters in near-record numbers. Ultimately, we conclude, Nolan has successfully repurposed the classic tale, exploring and updating its moral and philosophical issues while making an undeniably entertaining film. A remarkable feat, worthy of Odysseus.
She says: Not ever having read The Odyssey in its pure form (James Joyce, Dante, Ovid, Madeline Miller don’t count), I was open to Nolan’s incorporation of aspects of The Iliad that might make purists shudder. Though I didn’t think the ending (we won’t spoil it for you) matched the rest of Nolan’s strong storytelling.
He says: I’m glad Christopher Nolan thought of filming The Odyssey before Steven Spielberg got his hands on it.
Date: 2026
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Samantha Morton, Himesh Patel, Elliot Page, Zendaya, John Leguizamo, Charlize Theron, Bill Irwin
Country: United States (filmed in Los Angeles, Iceland, Scotland, Italy, Morocco, Greece, Malta)
Language: English
Runtime: 172 minutes
Other Awards: 2 wins to date; expect many more, including nominations for 2027 Oscars
Availability, including information on 70MM IMAX: Rolled out in US theaters and more than 70 foreign markets July 17. You’ll have to wait to see it at home, which is less than optimal, given its 70MM IMAX shooting format and action scenes designed for the big screen. Expected mid-November on digital premium sites such as AppleTV; streaming on Peacock mid-February 2027 and on Amazon Prime Video April 2027. See JustWatch here for current availability.
Most of the IMAX screenings are not true 70MM IMAX. Though the film was shot in 70MM IMAX, it is usually projected digitally, even when billed as 70MM and 70MM IMAX (sometimes referred to as “DigiMAX” or “LieMAX”). There are only 25 true IMAX screens in the US (some viewers are traveling internationally to find one), including 3 in Los Angeles, 1 in Rochester, and 1 in New York City. Others are in Vaughan, north of Toronto, and in London (2). There are none in Italy.
As this promotional poster says,
"Every Frame in IMAX." Maybe.
Shot in IMAX? Yes. But if you see it in IMAX,
it's most likely to be digital, not 70MM IMAX.
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