THE ODYSSEY (Film Review)
Throughout Christopher Nolan’s filmography, he’s analyzed characters trapped by time, guilt, memory, obsession, or the consequences of choices they can never take back. Cooper crosses the universe trying to get home to his family. Oppenheimer spends the rest of his life haunted by a victory that changed the world forever. Nolan’s constantly asking whether we can ever return to the person we were before history found us. The same question rests at the heart of Homer’s poem. Nolan has produced the oldest version of the story he’s been telling his whole career.
Whenever a director takes on a work this famous, the conversation almost always becomes about fidelity. What’s missing? What changed? Which scenes were left out? The Odyssey has survived for nearly three thousand years precisely because nobody has told it exactly the same way twice. Long before Homer’s poem became required reading, it existed as oral tradition, passed from one storyteller to another, shaped by different voices, different audiences, and different generations. Every retelling emphasized something new while quietly letting something else fall away.
Nolan understands that’s how myths stay alive; finding the parts of the story that speak most directly to its own time.
The story itself remains familiar enough. The Trojan War has finally ended after a decade of bloodshed, and King Odysseus (Matt Damon) begins what should be a straightforward voyage home to Ithaca, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) have spent years waiting for his return. Instead, the journey becomes another decade of loss, wandering, and impossible choices as Odysseus and his increasingly fractured crew encounter the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso, the Laestrygonians, and even the dead themselves.
Back home, Penelope struggles to hold together a kingdom that’s beginning to collapse beneath the weight of ambitious suitors who have already decided their king is never coming back. Telemachus grows into adulthood surrounded by stories about a father everyone seems to know except him.
It should go without saying that Nolan refuses to tell those stories in a straight line. He jumps between memory and the present, between rumor and reality, asking the audience to slowly assemble the same picture Telemachus is trying to construct.
The Greek idea of kleos becomes one of the film’s defining themes. In Homer’s world, glory wasn’t simply fame. It was the promise that your name would outlive your body. To be remembered was a form of immortality.
Nolan asks throughout what that glory and promise costs. The Trojan Horse is remembered as one of history’s greatest military triumphs, but Nolan stages it like a horror film. Cramped bodies hidden inside rough timber. The sound of soldiers trying not to breathe. The unbearable tension of waiting for violence to begin. This becomes the centerpiece of the examination of the machinery that created Odysseus.
Homer’s Odysseus is unquestionably flawed, but he’s still presented as the model of heroic intelligence. His greatest weapon is always his mind. Nolan keeps that intelligence intact, yet repeatedly asks whether brilliance can become its own form of blindness. The Trojan Horse isn’t framed as the moment he won the war, but the moment the rest of his life became impossible.
It reframes the entire journey. Nolan takes the Greek idea of nostos, or the long journey home, and presents it as almost emotionally impossible. Can someone who helped destroy a civilization ever become the person who left home twenty years earlier?
Hospitality was an unwritten contract between strangers, a belief that civilization depended on generosity, restraint, and mutual obligation. Every island Odysseus visits becomes another test of those values. Some honor, others violate. Ithaca isn’t falling apart because Odysseus is gone. It’s falling apart because everyone left behind has stopped believing those obligations matter. Watching the suitors slowly consume another man’s home emphasizes how little has changed. Societies rarely collapse overnight. They erode one compromise at a time, until people convince themselves that power matters more than principle.
While Odysseus fights monsters across the sea, Penelope is navigating a political battlefield every bit as dangerous. Every conversation with the suitors is a negotiation, and every delay buys another day for a kingdom that’s slowly slipping away.
Anne Hathaway never overplays the role, never asking us to admire Penelope. By the time Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, Penelope has been on her own odyssey all along.
One of the most persistent Nolan criticisms is that he struggles to give his female characters interior lives equal to his male protagonists. He doesn’t completely escape that here, but this might be the closest he’s come.
It’s easy to describe Telemachus as a son searching for his father, but that’s only the surface of what’s happening. He’s trying to decide whether the legendary figure everyone reveres is someone he should want to become. Every new story he hears about Odysseus complicates that question a little more. Holland confidently plays that uncertainty, resisting the temptation to turn Telemachus into another idealistic young hero. That uncertainty makes his eventual reunion with Odysseus far more moving.
Matt Damon meets him with one of the quietest performances of his career. There’s almost no vanity in what he’s doing here. Damon’s Odysseus has spent so many years making impossible decisions that certainty has become impossible. Even when he succeeds, he rarely looks victorious. That restraint separates this performance from many earlier interpretations, which often emphasize Odysseus’ confidence above everything else.
Robert Pattinson injects Antinous with such a monstrous level of self-assurance that you can’t wait for him to get his comeuppance. Himesh Patel’s Eurylochus slowly is kind of the film’s moral compass, asking the questions Odysseus would rather avoid. Samantha Morton’s Circe is unsettling and compassionate, while Charlize Theron’s Calypso becomes less a temptress than someone imprisoned by eternity itself.
Even Zendaya’s Athena represents one of Nolan’s more interesting departures from Homer. She’s present, but never overwhelming. Instead of steering events directly, she’s the quiet voice of judgment Odysseus repeatedly ignores.
I say give this film Best Picture already for actually using John Leguizamo’s talents to remind us how brilliant an artist he is.
Some might walk away wishing the gods played a larger role, but by stepping back from divine intervention, Nolan forces every triumph and every failure back onto human shoulders.
Hoyte van Hoytema’s IMAX photography is undeniably spectacular, filled with sweeping coastlines and endless horizons, and worth the trek to a 70mm IMAX screen. Nolan’s commitment to practical filmmaking once again provides weight that computer-generated imagery can’t achieve. Jennifer Lame’s editing deserves credit for never allowing the fractured structure to be confusing. And Ludwig Göransson’s score is one you’ll be playing on repeat.
Quiet moments are just as memorable as the giant set pieces. Argos, the aging dog who has waited faithfully for a master everyone else believed was gone forever has one of the best moments that brought me to tears. I assume it’s going to have the same effect on you. Then there’s Eurycleia recognizing Odysseus by old scars.
Even the slaughter of the suitors refuses to play as uncomplicated triumph. Justice is necessary, but Nolan stages the violence as not ending where the characters want it to.
Christopher Nolan had made the definitive adaptation of The Odyssey. Homer’s poem introduced ideas like kleos, nostos, and xenia to explain what it meant to live honorably in the ancient world. Nolan uses them to ask how they survive in contemporary times.
Three thousand years after Homer first imagined a weary king struggling to find his way home, we’re still telling his story because every generation discovers a different story waiting. Nolan’s contribution isn’t to end that conversation, it’s to give it another compelling chapter.
This much of greatness we have witnessed so far, but what the cinema holds in store for the rest of the days, only the gods know.
Great movie that everyone should see!