YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN: Matt Damon (center) stars in The Odyssey. (© Universal Studios)
Review by Curt Holman
Director Christopher Nolan will be forever associated with Batman thanks to the success of his sprawling, grounded Dark Knight trilogy. In a recent interview, however, he echoed the ethos of a different superhero.
“There are many directors who would kill to have the resources I’ve put together,” he said. “I have the responsibility to use them. If you’re given that kind of power, you should make the biggest, most ambitious films you can.”
With great cinematic power comes great storytelling responsibility, and Nolan has made the most of it. If The Dark Knight’s critical and commercial achievement gave him a series of blank checks, he’s cashed them to make films so big and bold, they make his Batman movies look modest.
In 2023, the filmmaker’s Oppenheimer earned almost a billion dollars and seven Academy Awards, giving Nolan capital to spend on perhaps his most ambitious film to date. The Odyssey adapts Homer’s foundational work of Western literature as a mythic Bronze Age period piece with a 21st-century sensibility. It’s a thrilling, thoughtful, imperfect film that delivers wild, fanciful set pieces and grounded, relevant ideas.
Like most of Nolan’s work, The Odyssey shrugs off a straightforward narrative structure, beginning with a gigantic wooden horse that marks the beginning of the end of the Trojan War. “Present day” is almost 20 years after the war began and master strategist Odysseus (Matt Damon) left his kingdom of Ithaca for the war.
Two decades later, his bereft wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway, quietly furious) is besieged with boorish suitors seeking her hand as a means to claim the throne. Penelope and Telemachus (Tom Holland), their nearly-grown son, keep the faith that Odysseus will return, but suitors like the scheming Antinous (Salacious Crumb—I mean, Robert Pattinson) press her to accept his death and move on. Telemachus, the heir to the kingdom, is too young to assume the throne himself, but Holland, who was almost 30 during filming, has aged out of this kind of princeling role.
Meanwhile, on a distant beach, an amnesiac Odysseus lives with the beautiful Calypso (Charlize Theron), who feeds him lotus flowers. Odysseus’s fragmented memories gradually return, setting up flashbacks to his idyllic past on Ithaca, the brutal sack of Troy and his misfortunes trying to get home in the war’s aftermath.
Nearly the whole first act is taken up with the Ithaca scenes, which tend to be deliberate and heavy-handed. Nolan really takes pains to establish the era’s rules of hospitality to guests and that Penelope’s suitors are evil. (They’re mean to an aging dog! More than once!) Nolan’s screenplay carefully establishes concepts and plot points that pay off with great satisfaction, but the domestic table-setting can make you impatient for the big-budget Homeric spectacle.
Odysseus’s use of the gift horse deception to overthrow Troy leaves him not only haunted by his actions, but possibly cursed by the gods, whose existence the film leaves ambiguous. The only deity we see is Athena (Zendaya), who could just as easily be a ghost or a figment of Odysseus’ imagination. Nolan has always been more of a cinematic technician than a fantasist, and here he commits to a loose naturalism that makes the settings and characters relatable without being strictly accurate to a historic time period.
The voyage home turns into a series of nautical perils, and Nolan has cited the likes of Jason and the Argonauts and Ray Harryhausen’s other 1960s adventure films as inspirations. But the supernatural episodes play less in a register of matinee derring-do and more moody, tactile and intense, like the dreamscapes of David Lowery’s The Tale of the Green Knight.
The towering Cyclops who captures Odysseus and his crew isn’t some slick CGI creation but a mix of gigantic puppetry and actor/mime Bill Irwin, infused with a quiet melancholy even as he bites people’s heads off. Perhaps the film’s highlight is the island encounter with the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton), which could be lifted out of the movie and play as an A24-style body horror short film.
As Odysseus, Damon’s controlled, watchful acting style gives the film a firm foundation. He captures Odysseus’s quick, strategic thinking, trying to game out high-stakes situations, while also grappling with the consequences of his choices. Elliot Page, returning to a Nolan film for the first time since Inception, brings enormous impact to just a few of his scenes as one of Odysseus’ most loyal soldiers and most tragic sacrifices.
The Odyssey culminates with a violent confrontation that delivers the kind of revenge-movie catharsis the audience is hoping for. But its resolutions also draw some surprisingly direct parallels to Oppenheimer, both movies about brilliant leaders whose wartime decisions achieved victory while possibly changing the world for the worse.
The film suggests that the Trojan war and Odysseus’ choices fundamentally damaged the social contract, leaving him uncertain whether he even deserves a happy ending. The Odyssey, despite its roots in antiquity, argues that people have lost sight of their responsibility to each other, a point that feels sadly relevant to 2026.
The Odyssey. Grade: A-. Stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Rated R.
