The Odyssey

A Nearly Great Adaptation, Missing Its Final Gear

Christopher Nolan reached what looked like the apogee of his career with Oppenheimer (2023), a film that seemed to fuse every skill and instinct he'd spent a career honing. Following an achievement that grossed nearly $1 billion telling the story of a nuclear physicist, and that finally won Nolan his first Oscars, was always going to be a tall order. Undeterred, he raised the stakes further still, choosing to adapt the epic of epics: The Odyssey (2026).

The Odyssey is the Bronze Age proto-hero's-journey tale by Homer (second, chronologically, only to The Epic of Gilgamesh), in which the Ithacan king Odysseus (Matt Damon), having won the decade-long Trojan War thanks to his ingenious wooden horse, sets sail for home only to be waylaid by cyclopes, witches, sea monsters, and a string of other misfortunes. Back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) hold off a horde of suitors angling to claim the throne, chief among them the conniving Antinous (Robert Pattinson).

No synopsis does justice to a story this epic, one that nearly every work of Western fiction owes some debt to. Many filmmakers have found it unwieldy; Nolan's decision to tackle it at all is a genuinely bold one. Length alone is a challenge, but so is holding fantastical elements inside a realistic setting, subverting audience expectations of Greek myth, and preserving the epic's dark, often cynical undercurrent beneath what modern audiences expect to be a straightforward "hero's journey."

And yet, against considerable odds, Nolan pulls it off. He has delivered a comprehensive adaptation that doesn't just march through the what of the story but genuinely interrogates the why. We get not only the chronology of Odysseus's journey (told, in typical Nolan fashion, non-sequentially) but an excavation of the man himself: his impulses, his guilt, his greed, his trauma, all filtered through a fraught relationship to faith. Few texts have stayed as central to the Western canon as The Odyssey, and that's not just because the story moves; it's because of how much the poem yields to different readings, interpretations, and outright reinventions. Nolan brings his own thematic lens to it, one that lines up, curiously, with Oppenheimer's cynicism about men who turn their gifts toward violence and war. But he's careful to leave enough of the original intact that viewers can bring their own frameworks to the film too, whether that's a crisis-of-faith reading, a pacifist one, a historiographic one, a psychological, feminist, revenge, or even atonement lens. The film holds up no matter which of those perspectives you walk in with.

The technical craft, as with any Nolan film, is extraordinary. He again avoids CGI wherever possible, and the tangible sets, costumes, and practical effects go a long way toward making ancient Greece feel almost touchable. The monster and magic work in particular impressed me: bleak, grounded, and achieved through make-up, prosthetics, and forced perspective rather than a screen full of pixels. His Polyphemus, the cyclops, is a particular triumph, a design that looks torn from a cubist Picasso nightmare and will likely linger in your head longer than you'd like. Nolan seems to understand that the mind's own imagination beats any special effect, so he keeps much of the film's mysticism half-obscured in mist, right up to the edge of overuse without ever quite tipping into it.

Once again, Nolan has assembled a cast so stacked it feels like every actor in Hollywood wanted a piece of this. Some big names show up for barely a scene, evidence that nobody wanted to sit this one out: Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong'o, Benny Safdie, and Logan Marshall-Green all turn up in blink-and-you'll-miss-them roles. Of the supporting players with real weight, Hathaway's Penelope stands out most: she plays the character's depths with a naturalism that never tips into theatricality. Damon, as the title hero, carries the film capably too, swinging from honorable to impulsive to outright cruel while dragging behind him the weight of a war he can't shake. But it's here, in the film's exploration of guilt and atonement, that Damon's performance runs up against its limits. He's an expert at the charismatic everyman, and even, on occasion, at conveying rot beneath the charm (The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); The Departed (2006)), but he never fully commits to Odysseus's uglier instincts, his selfishness, his greed. You can feel him pulling his hero back toward the light rather than letting him sit in the grey, morally compromised space the character is meant to occupy. It's a narrow crack in an otherwise strong performance, but it's precisely the crack that would have given Nolan's character study its full emotional weight.

The Odyssey is a sprawling epic, and adapting something this sprawling inevitably means leaving things behind. Nolan does an admirable job compressing the whole of it, but the compression comes at a cost: certain islands and adventures blur past in a way that feels genuinely rushed rather than deliberately economical. The film covers a remarkable amount of ground, yet you can sense the connective tissue missing in places. Calypso (Charlize Theron), for instance, barely registers, and the land of the giants gets similarly short shrift, while the homecoming to Ithaca, anchored by a lovely staging of Odysseus's reunion with his dog Argos, and the extended stay with Circe both get all the room they need to breathe.

Successfully adapting The Odyssey at all is an achievement, and the logistics alone must have been punishing. And yet the film is missing that one indelible image, the moment that tips it from very good into unforgettable. The arrow-through-the-axes sequence, one of the poem's most iconic beats, goes by almost too quickly (the recent version in The Return(2024) staged it with considerably more force), and elsewhere you sense Nolan, for all his visual beauty, playing it a touch too safe: nothing here quite reaches the audacity of the dance number in Sinners (2025) or the closing image of raindrops on a pond in Oppenheimer.

In the end, Nolan's gamble pays off. What we get is a genuinely convincing, absorbing adaptation of The Odyssey, one that provokes with its ideas, thrills with its adventures, and dazzles with its scale. What keeps it from standing alongside Nolan's very best is a missing final gear, whether that's a dimension of the protagonist left unexplored or a single cinematic moment daring enough to define the film. And maybe that's fitting. What actually lingers once the film ends isn't the visuals, or the score, or even the performances, but something Homer himself would probably appreciate most: the words, and the ideas underneath them.

8.6/10