The One ‘The Odyssey’ Change That Makes it a True Christopher Nolan Movie

Christopher Nolan may be the current cinema’s most pragmatic fabulist. Depending on who you ask, that either means he has the rare 21st-century gift of creating spectacle with real weight and emotional grounding behind it—of making you kinda-sorta believe a man could fight crime dressed as a bat, at least for a limited period of time—or that he’s a literalist beloved by basic film bros. Maybe it’s that swirl of the workmanlike and the sublime that makes him an ideal lightning rod to plant atop Homer’s Odyssey, the ancient Greek epic that he’s filmed—on IMAX celluloid cameras, no less—as the more definitively titled The Odyssey. After all, lugging all that equipment around the movie’s litany of real-world locations (spiritually, anyway; he’s probably not carrying the cameras himself) might well make Nolan, however humble he attempts to stay, feel a bit like Odysseus himself. Then again, making big-budget movies might feel more like a Sisyphean pursuit these days.The Odyssey looks like the most straightforward Nolan project in a while, given that his last movie won a bundle of Oscars while attempting to wrap its arms around the life and legacy of Robert Oppenheimer, and the one before that attempted what I believe is known as a temporal pincer movement. In Hollywood terms, Homer’s epic tale of a warrior and his men attempting to make their way home to Ithaca following their Trojan War triumph is a real set-piece machine. Even those who haven’t read it in full (ahem) may know some of its episodes: the cyclops, the witch Circe, the sirens. (DuckTales offered one generation a particularly appealing CliffsNotes. I’ll stop before they revoke my English degree.)It would therefore be easy enough to announce that the writer-director has Nolanified Homer, by splintering the story into a non-linear narrative. Some of these are full sequences; others, just a flicker or two of reflection. So while we experience the travails of Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men more or less chronologically, the movie intercuts these adventures with his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) awaiting his return, grumbling over menacing suitors circling the queen, and (in the case of Telemachus) attempting to figure out whether the man is truly alive or dead; some early flashbacks of Odysseus and Penelope before his journey; the Trojan Horse episode, told in large (if incomplete) part by Menelaus (Jon Bernthal); and Odysseus himself attempting to remember his life before meeting the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) on the beautiful, endless, forbidding shores of Ogygia.Really, almost every landscape these Greeks encounter is beautiful, endless, and forbidding—not to mention IMAX-sized, at least on the couple of dozen screens capable of presenting the film at its full, eye-filling, ceiling-scraping height. (I’ve only seen the IMAX print, but all indications are that the regular-theater version plays just fine—maybe better, compositionally speaking.) Scrambled chronology; real IMAX cameras; Damon, Hathaway, Robert Pattinson (he plays Antinous, the most aggressively villainous of the vile suitors). Gosh, where have we seen this stuff before? Somewhere around Tenet, Nolan reached that point where you can either actively resist his visual, thematic, and aural trademarks, or embrace them all as Part Of It. For anyone inclined toward the latter, the particular pleasure of The Odyssey is seeing such a familiar story through the Nolan lens—and as usual, the time tricks do serve a greater purpose. Without blunting too much of the film’s emotional impact, let’s say that The Odyssey has more in common with the tightly-wound, slow-building despair of Oppenheimer than the grand spectacle of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, though there are more than traces of those movies, too, particularly The Dark Knight Rises.The time-jumping edits, overseen by Jennifer Lame (who won an Oscar for Oppenheimer and brought notable comic rhythm to some Noah Baumbach/Greta Gerwig films), maintain The Odyssey’s momentum even while allowing some narrative sleight-of-hand—not a Prestige-level twist so much as a lesson from that movie’s fusion of magic and science, though here, confusingly, the science provides the visual effects, which leaves the magic to the movie stars. On a pure production level, this thing has all the starry heft of a 1950s Bible epic, with a cast so big it encompasses multiple other 2026 movies in crossword-puzzle fashion (Pattinson plus a small role for Zendaya make The Drama; she also figures into Spider-Man: Brand New Day with Holland and Bernthal).At times, the combination of the heavy ensemble and the material’s approach to its actual gods vaguely recalls 2004’s Troy, a film Nolan was at one point tipped to direct (and which later became a hilariously revisionist cudgel against this one, mainly for casting—German, not Greek— Diane Kruger as Helen of Troy, as opposed to this movie’s supposed desecration of the role with Oscar-winning world-class beauty Lupita Nyong’o). In that sense, the cast, all-star as it is, threatens to become similarly beside the point, in that way that renders the ‘04 movie more novelty than art (or even great entertainment). The Odyssey largely stays on the right side of that line, though. Damon, in his first outright lead for Nolan, cannily exploits his former golden-boy image, and Hathaway makes the colloquial version of Homer sound almost Shakespearean early on. Morton makes a terrific Circe; Bernthal chews up a patch of scenery; John Leguizamo and Elliot Page are equally affecting as Odysseus allies from opposite ends of the age spectrum. I could go on.And unlike Troy, the movie doesn’t exactly shy away from the fantastical—not exactly. Zeus and Poseidon are only discussed, but we do see a cyclops, albeit only briefly in full light; it’s a sequence where maybe the director’s fondness for shrouding amazing sights in shadow gets the best of him (though the cyclops design is cool as hell, and congratulations to Bill Irwin for presumably beating out Mark Rylance for the opportunity to act it out). Better is his interpretation of magic at the hands of Circe (Samantha Morton), a particularly visceral and hands-on experience, and the brief passage of the sirens, even if we're denied further crossover with The Drama by Nolan’s refusal to cast the Haim sisters in the roles. Another Nolan hang-up—don’t make the fantasy stuff too colorful or stylized—pays off in resonance, as the various purveyors of magic feel closer to human scale, and the world of Odysseus, while magnificent to look at in its semi-natural splendor, is starting to decay.Early on, the blame for this diminishment falls to the much-referred-to, less-often glimpsed “people from the sea,” a clear shot at fearmongering ethnonationalism. In a perverse way, the furor over the movie, however minority the most frothing online opinions, only feeds into Nolan’s consideration of what it means to return (or, if you will, RETVRN). Here, echoes of his more noirish work in Memento and Inception take on a broader mournfulness than the personal dilemmas of those films’ protagonists. “You need to remember,” Odysseus is told at one point, and it is ultimately the act of remembering that most complicates his journey home. (He’s also told that he’s “a man who needs to control his fate,” in case his Nolan Protag lineage wasn’t clear enough for you.) More than just about any Nolan movie, The Odyssey has to grapple with whether its old-fashioned entertainment value amplifies or distorts its emotional tenor. Ultimately, I think it does both, and not just in the literal sense of IMAX speakers vibrating with bass notes. The movie, and its Odysseus himself, are aware of the songs that will be sung. Nolan doesn’t seek to quarrel with that inevitability so much as bend the notes enough to prompt the question: Will our mythologies fail alongside our societies? Or could they provide some raw materials to rebuild?