‘The Odyssey’ Review – Nolan’s Epic Is A Remarkable Cinematic Achievement

Christopher Nolan does things big. And while it’s much too early to tell whether The Odyssey is the best movie of his already legendary catalogue, it’s undeniably the biggest, the most Nolan-esque, in myriad different ways. The first feature shot entirely with IMAX Film Cameras, bringing to life a foundational work of epic poetry in largely practical effects and deeply human performances, it’s an epic in every sense of the term, a three-hour tour de force of filmmaking that, while flawed, is nonetheless a bombastic cinematic achievement of a type that doesn’t come around too often.

It’s easy to see why Nolan, of all people, would be attracted to Homer’s Odyssey, a disjointed and non-linear adventure that nests within itself, letting history blur with myth and gods meet monsters, humans as their supplicant playthings. And yet for a filmmaker who has historically prioritised sheer craft over emotional sentiment, this movie combines both, weaving the grand ideas of the original text into a deeply human story of violence and trauma. There’s unavoidably more overt supernaturalism than Nolan is typically inclined to include, but he finds a way to ground it in universal – if less romantic – terms.

While the episodic structure of the story can cause problems, which we’ll get to, there is nonetheless a coherent shape to the movie, even if it takes multiple forms. The most essential is the emotional journey of Odysseus (Matt Damon, The Rip) from impulsive warrior to haunted veteran, a transformation that builds through isolated encounters in the past and present. The more literal journey is Odysseus’s actual trek back to Ithaca after winning the Trojan War at the behest of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), King of Mycenae, but it isn’t presented linearly, instead playing out as a series of vignettes while, back in Ithaca, the Greek isle of which Odysseus was formerly king, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway, The Idea of You) and their son Telemachus (Tom Holland, The Crowded Room) try to stave off the advances of multiple bawdy suitors, notably Antinous (Robert Pattinson, The Batman) and Polybus (Corey Hawkins, Poker Face), who believe that after two decades of absence, Odysseus isn’t coming back and fancy Ithaca for themselves.

Tipped off by the goddess Athena (Zendaya, Euphoria) that his father is still alive, Telemachus sneaks out of Ithaca to find proof, leading him to Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus (Jon Bernthal, The Punisher: One Last Kill), the king of Sparta, and thus more stories of Odysseus’s exploits, excusing more flashbacks and deviations in the timeline. Events lead naturally into those being described or recalled, and then wind back again, creating a fluid narrative structure that can initially be alienating but has the pleasing effect of gaining more clarity and momentum as it goes, leading to the most dynamite third act in Nolan’s entire filmography.

There are downsides to this, as mentioned. One of them is too many dream-like scenes spent with Calypso (Charlize Theron, Apex), a nymph who essentially drugs Odysseus and keeps him as her placid lover while he tries to recall the horrors of the war, which continue to haunt him. The pacing is at its worst in these sequences, and one can’t help but wish less time had been spent on them so that it could have been put to better use elsewhere. Classicists will lament the loss of a few stops on Odysseus’s journey, and several characters and moments are consigned to the margins. Everything involving Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o, The 355) and her twin sister, Clytemnestra, is rushed, and even some of the large-scale set-pieces, which presumably accounted for a good chunk of the movie’s substantial budget and were filmed in various extremely innovative and impressive ways, are blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affairs. Scylla, the six-headed hydra, and her counterpart Charybdis, a kind of monstrous living whirlpool, are given extremely short shrift, and the man-eating giant Laestrygonians appear so out of nowhere and are sped away from so quickly that they feel like an almost random inclusion.

But Nolan’s long-time Dutch cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema sells the hell out of these sequences all the same, and the set-pieces that get proper attention are deliriously good. A horror-adjacent encounter with Poseidon’s cyclopean son, Polyphemus, is superb filmmaking on every level, and Nolan’s less-is-more approach to Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens is genius. But the standout in many ways is Circe (Samantha Morton, The Serpent Queen), an isolated witch who pre-empts the inhospitality of Odysseus’s men by hand-moulding them into gluttonous pigs, a sequence of uncompromising discomfort.

The climax, back on Ithaca with Odysseus disguised as a beggar and using the name of one of his fallen soldiers, brings everything together superbly, not just plot-wise, but also thematically, revealing how Nolan’s bold interpretation of the text has warped Odysseus’s wartime regrets into the history and mythology of the setting and story. It’s a rich reward for the journey and elevates the entire work to a level that few living directors can even come close to, more than accounting for some of the flaws elsewhere.

And there are some, don’t get me wrong. Pacing aside, Tom Holland is miscast as Telemachus, once again unable to escape his British accent and Marvel poster-boy vibe in a more serious role, and Nolan’s decision to eschew classical language in favour of anachronistic modern speech is sometimes jarringly noticeable, especially when it comes to the aforementioned Holland.

But I do feel like I’m complaining just for the sake of it, to be seen as even-handed in the face of what would otherwise be a gushing torrent of praise. This isn’t even an actor’s movie, really; several of the stars are very good in it, but there are so many of them, often in such thin supporting roles, that individual performances matter less than the overall sweep of the story, which becomes truly masterful by its end. As a work of craftsmanship, too, it’s almost unassailable, full of arresting imagery brought to life on sprawling sets and embellished by another dependably excellent – though admittedly not best-in-class – Ludwig Göransson score. It’s just big, bombastic filmmaking of the highest order, a contemporary epic of an extremely distinguished vintage that’ll be wildly popular and make a metric ton of money, as well it should. There might be better movies than The Odyssey in 2026 – it’s still too early to tell – but there certainly won’t be a bigger one in all the ways that count.