‘The Odyssey’ Review: Nolan Builds a Colossal, Flawed, and Compelling Spectacle

You have to give Christopher Nolan this much: he’s not afraid of anything. A film that runs backwards in time, one where space folds in on itself, another where time multiplies fivefold, one about an atomic bomb, one about a man who dresses like a bat at night, and one where it’s hard to tell what the hell is going on at all. Operating at those interstellar scales, The Odyssey might seem like child’s play—something almost terrestrial. But it isn’t, because Nolan is a full-blown maximalist, a daredevil, the kind of guy driving a semi-truck straight into impact because he knows the world will part before him. And if it doesn’t—well, something is bound to explode.

No one had really dared to tackle the mythical poem attributed to the original Homer head-on. There have been versions, reductions, betrayals—but few have had the stamina, or the hubris, to take on a myth so loaded with history and tradition. Nolan can. He couldn’t care less about what people will say—least of all the academics of all things Greek—or about the sheer scale of the challenge. At 55, he seems to be in the perfect place to take it on, having shed—something that began with Oppenheimer—those adolescent narrative gimmicks that once defined him, without losing the audiovisual force that has always powered his cinema. His Odyssey is imposing, overwhelming, “sublime” in every sense of the word. It steamrolls the viewer, the critic, the scholar, and anyone who thinks Calypso is a Caribbean music genre. Resistance feels both futile and beside the point.

Does that make it a great film? Not necessarily. But it is an experience—overwhelming, invasive, total. Nolan is not subtle; he always moves one gear faster than needed. But he has absolute control over his terrain, over the universe in which his creatures exist and move. And if there is one thing in The Odyssey, it is movement. It’s a kind of road movie without roads, without even a compass to guide anyone—a journey into the (un)known, a relentless narrative machine even when it bulldozes traditions in its thunderous path. What sets this film apart from the Hollywood or pan-European epics of the 1950s—the classic sword-and-sandal peplum—is precisely that: the aggressive conviction of its director that he alone can tell one of the oldest stories in Western tradition. And if you don’t like it, that’s your problem.

I’ll skip the usual paragraphs explaining the plot. Partly because it would take forever, partly because anyone who’s been to school knows it, and partly because maybe some viewers don’t—and that’s fine. At its core, The Odyssey follows the convoluted and winding attempt of Odysseus (Matt Damon) to return home to Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War, beginning—yes—with the horse. The story splits in two: one thread in Ithaca, where Penelope (Anne Hathaway) waits, weaving and unweaving, manipulating a group of suitors (with Robert Pattinson as the most prominent among them) eager to replace him, and where his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) searches for him in his own way; the other thread follows the journey itself, one that Odysseus recalls while spending rather too long on an island with a certain Calypso (Charlize Theron). In that act of recollection unfolds the journey of all journeys: a saga of encounters and misadventures, of massacres, creatures, gods, winds, and seas that should—eventually—bring our archetypal hero back home.

Specialists will no doubt debate the changes in sequence, in specific episodes—since not everything happens here as it does, or when it does, in the original—and in the relatively reduced presence of the famous gods, who are felt more through their effects than through actors embodying them. Here, the only figure with a self-appointed divine authority to manipulate events is the director himself. He needs no intermediaries on Earth or within the cinematic canvas: he stirs the winds, conjures storms, churns the seas, and unleashes creatures and characters of every size and shape (Polyphemus, Circe, Tiresias, Scylla, the Laestrygonians, and… Travis Scott) for the battered yet persistent Odysseus to confront over the years, without so much as a pause to catch his breath.

Perhaps the film’s most significant shift—the one that updates the story for a 21st-century sensibility—is how its protagonist processes his own journey. It’s no longer just a recounting of feats, nor merely the ability to survive adversity. It is also about pain, guilt, regret—the sense that, as Nolan has it, everything began to rot during the Trojan War, that the celebrated ruse opened the door to a human catastrophe that continues to this day. It’s a reinterpretation that gives dramatic weight to the final act—where Nolan edges, perhaps too eagerly, toward superhero cinema or a kind of Ancient Greek John Wick—but it can feel somewhat imposed. The laws of Zeus—those moral rules governing how to treat others, respect for strangers, the sacred code of hospitality, xenia—begin to erode there, perhaps never to fully return. And it is precisely this contradiction, at least in this version, that Nolan installs at the center of Odysseus’s character: his theme, his conflict, his trauma.

Technically, The Odyssey is as flawless as one would expect, but what stands out most is how it avoids turning its vast informational load into something sluggish or mechanical. Nolan often falls into the trap of making two films at once—the one that tells the story and the one that explains it as it goes—but here he largely sidesteps that avalanche of names, facts, and exposition. Still, at times it feels rushed, unable to pause and let the emotional weight of its vastness resonate. Nolan has rarely thrived in emotional territory: whenever he reaches for feeling, he tends either to miss or to overcompensate. Here, he succeeds in small moments—you’ll see what happens with a dog named Argos—but struggles to convince us that the love between Odysseus and Penelope is strong enough to sustain the entire structure that drives him home.

To say the film feels influenced by The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones would be to reverse the timeline: those sagas drink from The Odyssey, not the other way around. Still, those are the visual references contemporary audiences will recognize, the ones that make this world feel familiar. Somewhere between realism and fantasy, between the human and the mythological, between gods and men, Christopher Nolan has created a blockbuster from another era—one that still believes in the weight of the physical (practical effects, 70mm, his usual path) and reflects the brutality of war in its darkest form without surrendering to the digital banality and generative aesthetics of the present moment. It may be a solemn and self-serious gesture, even a hubristic one—but Nolan has the material to back it up. Not everyone dares to tell the greatest story ever told. It takes courage—and a touch of madness—to try. And for all its excess, its hubris, and its occasional strain, Nolan has done it. The Odyssey is his definitive film: everything before it was preparation.