‘The Odyssey’ Review

There is a version of The Odyssey that only Christopher Nolan could make, and for stretches of its nearly three-hour runtime, that version is genuinely astonishing. The Trojan sequence that opens the film has a cinder-and-salt-spray tactility that no amount of digital polish from other studios has managed to replicate. Ships stacked against a horizon that curves with the actual planet, compositions of such physical authority that they border on the sublime, and a technical commitment to shooting entirely on IMAX cameras that shows up on screen as a stubborn, beautiful insistence on capturing everything for real. This is a filmmaker who has spent decades earning the right to stage the fantasies of his childhood with an A-list budget behind them, and for long stretches that conviction is genuinely intoxicating. And then, rather quickly, you start to feel the hollowness at the center of it all.

Because for all its evident scale and visible labor, The Odyssey often feels like it was assembled from the outside in: spectacle first, human being second, and the interior life of its protagonist filled in almost as an afterthought. It is a strange thing to say about a film this expensive and this visibly ambitious, but Nolan has made a mythic epic that is curiously uninterested in myth. "The Odyssey," the poem, is a story about love and humanity and family. It is a meditation on the cost of violence, on what a man becomes when he has been away from his people for too long, and on whether the self can be recovered once war has hollowed it out. It is not a collection of monsters and set pieces. And that is, regrettably, what Nolan has primarily delivered.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus with a hardened, unshowy stoicism that suits the film's early stretches. He's a soldier before he is a husband, and Damon lets you feel the cost of that ordering of priorities, the way violence has rearranged his inner life so thoroughly that tenderness now arrives to him like a language he has forgotten how to speak. It is a performance built on subtraction and withholding, and in isolated scenes it lands with real force. There is a discipline to how little Damon gives an audience in the film's first hour, a trust that stillness will read as depth, and for a while that trust is rewarded. He is, unambiguously, the film's MVP, and the only performance I see earning genuine awards traction. The entire film rests on his shoulders, and he carries it more capably than the screenplay deserves.

Tom Holland's Telemachus is the other genuine surprise: nervy, overcorrecting, a boy performing a confidence he does not feel, and there's a specificity to his anxiety that cuts through the film's more ponderous passages. It is telling that some of the quieter, more effective beats belong to him rather than the ostensible lead.

The film finds its true nerve in the Cyclops sequence, a passage of sustained, unglamorous terror that reminds you Nolan can still surprise himself. Bill Irwin's physical performance as Polyphemus, built on scale and movement rather than conventional monster design, gives the sequence a lumbering, tactile menace that CGI alone could not have supplied. The camera lingers in near-total darkness. Tension is allowed to accumulate without cutting away. It is the one stretch of the movie where Nolan seems to be genuinely improvising with tone rather than executing a plan that was entirely decided in pre-production.

Samantha Morton's Circe arrives with a similar jolt of strangeness, her scenes carrying more genuine unease than anything in the back half of the film. Robert Pattinson's Antinous supplies the human menace the mythic material sometimes lacks, a performance built on patience and contempt that makes him the most purely enjoyable presence in the ensemble.

But then there is what Nolan does with his women, and this is where the film becomes genuinely frustrating. Anne Hathaway is given almost nothing to do with Penelope beyond suffering nobly in doorways and unraveling her loom work under candlelight. There is one confrontation with a suitor in which she is coiled and dangerous and completely in command of the room, and it is exactly the register the character deserves across the entire film. Its scarcity only underlines how badly underwritten the rest of her arc is.

Charlize Theron's Calypso gets one hypnotic extended sequence and then essentially vanishes. Zendaya's Athena is deployed more as a recurring idea than a character, present in glimmers rather than sustained scenes, and the idea of portraying her as a spectral presence throughout could have been meaningful. Instead you feel nothing when she appears. Just indifference. Mia Goth has approximately four lines. These are not incidental characters in Homer's poem. Women are central figures of the story, and what Nolan does with them here is not just a missed opportunity. It is a fundamental misreading of the source material.

The writing is the film's deepest wound, and I find myself thinking, not for the first time with Nolan's recent work, that something essential was lost when Jonathan Nolan stepped back from the screenplays. There is a difference, and you can feel it. The dialogue here constantly explains what we are already watching, describing emotion rather than trusting it, and there is a verbal tic, the phrase "the law of Zeus" repeated to the point of parody, that started reminding me of "Murphy's Law" in Interstellar. When a film's central thematic language becomes unintentionally comic through repetition, something has gone wrong at the script level.

The film also structures itself around a cross-cutting between Ithaca and the open sea that never quite accumulates the dread or longing it needs. Scenes are trimmed at exactly the moment they start generating real tension, as though the instruction was to keep moving rather than to let any single sequence breathe to its natural conclusion. You watch Damon's Odysseus begin to reveal something genuine, a crack in the stoicism, a flash of guilt, and then the film cuts away to Ithaca, and when we return the momentum has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Ludwig Göransson is doing generational work right now, and there is no question that his score elevates the film's major set pieces in the way only the finest film composers can. But Nolan occasionally leans on that score the way a lesser screenplay leans on expository dialogue: using volume and grandeur to paper over moments where the writing has not yet done its job. When the music is allowed to breathe alongside a scene rather than carry it, as in the film's quieter stretches with Damon, it is extraordinary. When it is being used as compensation, it becomes the most expensive patch over the most visible cracks.

Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography is nearly beyond reproach, and the full IMAX approach earns its keep rather than merely advertising itself. Wide shots let the eye travel across entire coastlines without compositional clutter, and a handful of close-ups, particularly on Damon, feel almost uncomfortably intimate at that scale, as though the format itself is daring the actor not to flinch. The production design has the smoky, cluttered texture of a place people actually inhabit, salt-stained fabrics and functional ugliness rather than museum diorama prettiness, and it gives the film a physical groundedness that the screenplay does not always earn on its own. These are the bones of a genuinely great epic. That the flesh does not always follow is what makes The Odyssey such a particular kind of frustration.

I know what is coming. The Oscars conversation, the discourse, the accusations that anyone who did not fully surrender to the scale is simply being contrarian. And I understand the appeal, genuinely. The craftsmanship here is undeniable. When this film works, it works with an authority very few filmmakers alive can match. But I have been watching Nolan long enough to notice the gap between what his films promise and what their screenplays deliver, and I find myself constitutionally unable to let the spectacle settle the argument by itself.

The Odyssey needed to be a film about a man who cannot find his way home to himself, not just a man navigating one remarkable obstacle after another. What Nolan has made is closer to the second than the first, and for a story this foundational, this human at its core, that gap is not a small one. Still, I will never give up on Christopher Nolan. He remains a filmmaker whose work I genuinely love at its best. And that love is precisely what makes the disappointment land as hard as it does.

Experience The Odyssey on IMAX® film screens everywhere on July 17, 2026.