“What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way?”
The first big swords and sandals epic in what feels like decades, Christopher Nolan’s massive cinematic adaptation of Homer’s classical poem is a staggering, star-studded achievement. Shot entirely in IMAX (thanks to a group of engineers who developed a special casing for the loud, rumbling IMAX cameras), The Odyssey seamlessly blends practical effects and on-location shooting (from remote locales in Morocco, Italy, Greece, Scotland, the United States, and Ireland), a rarity in our present-age of endless AI slop and CGI, but it goes without saying this was an incredibly exhausting 100-day shooting schedule for everyone involved. The Odyssey shocked many observers by becoming the essential blockbuster of the summer in 2026, a year which thankfully saw a revival of movie theaters thanks to surprise horror hits like Obsession and Backrooms, as well as the smash-hit blockbuster Spider Man: Brand New Day (2026). Coming off the incredible critical and commercial success of Nolan’s previous film Oppenheimer (which won the Oscar for Best Picture), Christopher Nolan decided to take a huge swing by adapting one of the greatest epics of the ancient world. Interestingly enough, Nolan was previously slated to direct the film Troy (2004), a very-2000s-Hollywood take on Homer’s Iliad, but he was dropped from the project by Warner Bros so that Wolfgang Petersen could return to direct it. Now, after the release of The Odyssey, suffice it to say Nolan has significantly outdone what was accomplished with Troy.
It makes sense that Nolan would be drawn to a story like The Odyssey considering that the original poem is uniquely told in a non-linear fashion. Weaving the fantastical elements of the poem with an earthy sense of realism, Nolan’s The Odyssey speculates as to what it might have actually felt like to be Odysseus, enclosed inside the Trojan horse as the tide washes in and slowly drowns his comrades, then wandering, lost and disoriented from island to island throughout the ocean. Living in a time of “apparent magic” (as the opening title tells us), this version of The Odyssey is less of an accurate re-telling, and more of an adaptation that is made anew in order to puzzle-piece its way into our modern culture. In other words, it has something important to say about our current predicament. As such, it goes without saying that there are a variety of departures in the film from the original source material. Notably, Odysseus never washes ashore with the Phaeacians nor does he have his famous conversation with Polephemus (i.e. Odysseus does not tell Polephemus that his name is “nobody”). This latter absence is perhaps one of the most striking distinctions since, in the book, it provides such an important clue as to Odysseus’s character. Also, the gods are mostly muted in the film, aside from a version of “Athena,” who is really just a vague memory and a manifestation of guilt. She visits Odysseus from time to time, coming in the form of a Trojan woman he once witnessed getting executed by his men during the siege of Troy. It’s hard to imagine a modern movie accurately capturing the Greek gods like Ares, Athena, Poseidon, Zeus, and so on as they are depicted in Homer without descending into 1950s style camp, but one has to give Nolan major credit for not eliminating them entirely as was done in the 2004 film Troy.
Other notable changes include an outsized role given to Sinon and his lot (there is an imagined relationship between Antinous and Sinon, and Sinon is betrayed by Odysseus in Troy to keep up the Trojan horse ruse), and the lotus eaters are wholly absent (though, in a way, they are blended with the Circe sequence), and in the book, Odysseus physically descends into the underworld where he meets the shade of Achilles, and others, but in the film, this sequence takes place on a dark sandy beach where the shades of Tiresias and Agamemnon and others emerge from the sand to speak with Odysseus. For me, the standout scenes in the film are: the grotesque Circe sequence (for which Samantha Morton is deserving of much praise), the incredible giant creation of Polephemus, and the harrowing Siren sequence which mutes viewers’ ears from hearing much like like the wax in the ears of Odysseus’s men.
The original poem is an incredibly satisfying pre-Christian revenge tale in which the hero is a “man of many ways,” an ever-elusive, wily, lying, vengeful, highly intelligent hero, an alternative to the heroic, but ultimately temporary, Achilles. Odysseus is a tactician and a survivor, a man who defies the gods through raw intellect, yet in the film he is also portrayed as slightly crazed, wracked with guilt, and even remorseful over the infamous Trojan horse stunt as well as his soldiers’ subsequent siege of the city. Indeed, even in the end, after he enacts his vengeance on the slothful suitors back in Ithaca, Odysseus is still merciful toward some of them (unlike in the poem wherein he brutally massacres them all). In this way, there is a predictable, but perhaps necessary, flattening of the characters in the film, placing them in a kind of “golden rule” modern Christian context. It is unfortunate and very much distinct from the Homeric world, but not the first time people have attempted to modernize and Christianize Homer.
Like many characters in other Christopher Nolan films, Odysseus is traumatized by war and even consumed with despair and guilt. He worries that he has violated “xenia” and Zeus’s law, a Greek principle of friendly comradery, neighborliness, comity, hospitality, especially toward strangers, and a god-honored rule upon which civilization depends. By tricking the Trojans and exploiting their willingness to accept a gift from the gods, perhaps he has wrought something far uglier on the world than war. Odysseus has conquered Troy, but he has unleashed the collapse of ancient Greek civilization. Indeed, throughout the film, characters seem to be aware that they are living through the end of the Bronze Age, as trust is eroded and foreigners are treated with suspicion rather than welcome. There is a constant drumbeat of fear regarding the dreaded “sea people,” a mysterious raiding band of pirates who are coming from somewhere beyond the sea to destroy civilization (as far as I can recall, the “sea people” do not play an outsized role in Homer’s Odyssey). But by the end, it is heavily implied that Odysseus and his men were, in fact, the dreaded “sea people” that everyone is afraid of, they are the great raiders of civilization, the violators of sacred customs, the thieves, and the trespassers on the sacred unspoken courtesy of “xenia.”
Odysseus’s guilt over “xenia” is also contrasted with all the mythical islands he visits. Consider the lack of “xenia” exhibited when he visits Polephemus (here, the one-eyed cyclops simply eats his guests, and likewise Odysseys eats Polephemus’s food), or when he visits Circe (Odysseus’s men invade her space and she gorges them before shockingly transforming them into pigs). To be fair, this is all a creative interpretation of the Greek concept of “xenia,” but it all serves to show a violation of sacred trust between strangers. Everywhere he goes, Odysseus is reminded that foreigners are now treated with disdain. Trust has vanished from the world and, as it turns out, the heroes of civilization like Odysseus, are actually the villains. How are he and his men truly any different from pirates or pigs after all? Notice how in the film, when uttering her witch’s spell, Circe suggests that the true form of the men is in fact pigs, not human beings. In other words, when they transform back into men, she offhandedly mentions it is not their natural state. In this way, Nolan examines Odysseus from the lens of the modern anti-hero.
Do I recommend Nolan’s The Odyssey? Absolutely. I was always going to be a tough customer to please with an adaptation of Homer, but this is an incredible work from one of the great masters of cinema today. It’s rare that we even see films made with such extraordinary vision, budget, and drive to push the boundaries, such as with the use of innovative IMAX cameras and on-location practical effects and so on. The imagery that most stands out to me in this film includes: the unique scene of the horse half-buried in the tide at Troy, the shadowy look of the giant cyclops Polephemus from inside his fire-lit cave, and the scene of Circe turning Odysseus’s men into pigs (perhaps the singular most horrifying scene in the whole film). Of course, the braindead, deeply unserious, culture-war-obsessed American political right was desperate to turn this movie into yet more fodder for their endless outrage machine. This time, they were upset that Lupita Nyong’o, a black woman, was cast as Helen of Troy, reputedly the most beautiful in the world, and Elliot Page, who is transgender, was cast as Sinon. Both of whom are minor characters in the film, with only minutes of screen time, but nevertheless were a huge subject of controversy this summer. I likely would have chosen different actors for a variety of the roles in this film, but perhaps this silly “controversy” serves to neatly highlight one of the points Nolan seems to be expressing in the film. As in his depiction of Bronze Age Greece, today many people feel as though civilization is under threat and in decline, facing the ever-exacerbating threat of global climate change and nuclear weapons proliferation (both of which are rarely even discussed anymore in American political discourse), and now there is the exponentially expanding threat of AI which promises to exacerbate both of these problems in unique ways, at least according to the very titans of industry who are hurriedly unleashing it upon society. And everywhere there is a painful absence of “xenia.” Foreigners are treated with disdain rather than pride, people feel scarcity rather than abundance and benevolence. And the supposedly “conservative” political movement in the United States is aggressively leaping off the precipice into tyranny, chuckling all the way down. One longs to escape this madness across the wine-dark sea like Odysseus and Penelope at the end of the film (an ending scene which is yet another revision to the original source material). Like Robert J. Oppenheimer in Nolan’s previous film, Odysseus in The Odyssey is torn by guilt over what he has unleashed, and perhaps, in some ways, we see ourselves in Odysseus’s same predicament: longing to escape so that we may finally return home again one day.
Credits:
- Director: Christopher Nolan
- Screenplay by: Christopher Nolan
- Produced by: Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan
- Starring:
- Matt Damon…..Odysseus
- Tom Holland…..Telemachus
- Anne Hathaway…..Penelope
- Robert Pattinson…..Antinous
- Lupita Nyong’o…..Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra
- Samantha Morton…..Circe
- John Leguizamo…..Eumaeus (Odysseus’s blind swineherd)
- Zendaya…..Athena
- Charlize Theron…..Calypso
- Jon Bernthal…..Menelaus
- Himesh Patel…..Eurylochus…..Odysseus’s second-in-command
- Bill Irwin…..on-set performer of Polephemus
- Elliott Page…..Sinon
- Benny Safdie…..Agamemnon
- Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema
- Edited by: Jennifer Lame
- Music by: Ludwig Göransson