REVIEW

Monsters, Myths, and Morality Stand Between a Hero and Home in Christopher Nolan’s ‘THE ODYSSEY’

By Matt Oakes · July 15, 2026

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the biggest Christopher Nolan disciple. His devotees across the internet are as vast as they are loud, but I’ve often found myself struggling to connect with his films for a fairly consistent reason. Nolan is a champion of process. More invigorated by the physical how than metaphysical. By systems. By mechanics. By time. By practicality. Sometimes to the detriment of the characters caught inside his stories. His movies have a tendency to articulate their themes out loud – rather bluntly – transforming subtext into text in ways that can feel frustratingly unsubtle. The Odyssey occasionally suffers those same familiar slings and arrows. But so too does a lot of this movie just rip.

Perhaps more than any film Nolan has made before, The Odyssey embraces the joy of old-fashioned adventure. Cyclopes. Sirens. Giants. Shipwrecks. Gods. Monsters. One peril after another unfolds in this collection of blockbusting set pieces stitched together by one of the oldest stories ever committed to paper. It’s sweeping, handsome, and almost always visually impressive, with Nolan tackling Homer’s epic using the same practical-first filmmaking philosophy that’s defined his career, even if I remain not entirely convinced that those instincts necessarily produce a much more cinematic result.

As far as how faithfully this particular adaptation adheres to Homer’s original text, I have to admit my own relative ignorance here. I vaguely remember reading The Odyssey in a freshman lit class twenty years ago (shoutout to Ms. King) and can’t recall ever seeing another film adaptation. So rather than judge Nolan’s adaptation as scholarship, I can only judge it as storytelling. On that front, it succeeds. The narrative remains remarkably classical despite its blockbuster scale, telling the story of Odysseus (Matt Damon), King of Ithaca and one of Agamemnon’s greatest generals, struggling to return home after the Trojan War while his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) wait through two decades of uncertainty as opportunistic suitors descend upon their kingdom.

Meanwhile, Odysseus’ journey home proves every bit as treacherous as the war he survived. Having bested the impregnable city of Troy through an infamous big old horse deception, Odysseus spends the next cycle of his life bouncing from one impossible trial to the next, watching his men disappear to myths and monsters of all shapes and sizes. The consequences of his conquest, the impact of the decisions that led to victory loom large, as Odysseus comes to realize that divine favor may have abandoned him and his men altogether.

It’s in these sequences that Nolan appears most liberated as a filmmaker. Unlike much of his previous work which plays around with mechanics (often time mechanics), The Odyssey isn’t a mystery box or a temporal puzzle to be solve. It’s a good-old fashion adventure. The mythos looms large. The encounters are inventive but rooted in time-tested iconography. The action sequences are captured with clarity. The Trojan Horse sequence, achieved through Nolan’s preference for practical filmmaking, carries echoes of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo – albeit with a considerably larger budget and significantly better workplace safety regulations. Nolan and his army of craft workers and actors dragging literal tonnages to capture exactly the shot he’s looking for. There have been moments throughout his filmography where I wasn’t entirely convinced Nolan’s insistence on doing things practically resulted in imagery more cinematic than what digital effects might have accomplished, but it’s impossible to ignore the ambition at play here, even when one might question the execution.

The film’s strongest thematic material arrives much later. What begins as a swashbuckling odyssey across mythological landscapes gradually settles into something more reflective, exploring ideas of hospitality, betrayal, mercy, and the moral order established by the God Zeus himself. Guests are to be welcomed. Fed. Their feet washed. Even plotting enemies deserve sanctuary beneath your roof once they’ve entered it. To violate those sacred rules is to fracture something larger than law – it’s to upset the natural order itself. To undo the basis of Greecian morality in such a way that may be impossible to unwind. Those ideas ripple throughout the final act in ways I found genuinely thoughtful though a recurring issue I have with Nolan’s work resurfaces here too. He simply doesn’t trust those ideas to speak for themselves. He has to articulate them. And then underscore that articulation.

Characters explain the movie’s themes of moral wreckage and the cost of defying the gods out loud, spelling out concepts that already land perfectly well through action and imagery. Nolan has always possessed a curious habit of underestimating his audience’s ability to connect thematic dots on their own. Whether it’s Interstellar, Tenet, or now The Odyssey, Nolan seems compelled to verbalize the thesis rather than trust audiences to piece it together for themselves. Love may be the one thing that transcends time and space, but Nolan’s love of spelling out exactly what he wants you to take away from his films could maybe be reeled in a touch – regardless of whether it’s projected in 70mm, IMAX, or both. The philosophy itself is worthwhile. I just wish he had a little more confidence in the earned silences and his audience’s level of understanding.

The cast, unsurprisingly, is stacked to absurdity. Matt Damon makes for a sturdy Odysseus, convincingly carrying both the physical demands of the role and the weariness of a man who’s spent twenty years trying to find his way home. Anne Hathaway is predictably strong as Penelope, Robert Pattinson is well-cast as a sniveling weasel of a suitor, and Tom Holland brings a youthful earnestness to Telemachus that gives the homefront storyline emotional momentum as as son comes to know his father through legends of his life. Charlize Theron, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong’o, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Travis Scott, Elliot Page, Mia Goth, Benny Safdie, Samantha Morton, and what feels like a good half of Hollywood all make appearances, yet strangely no single performance completely steals the film. Nolan has previously directed multiple actors toward Oscar-winning work but I’m not convinced anyone here quite reaches that level, though everyone undeniably acquits themselves well.

And though I almost never waste my breathe on discussing the reactionary cultural context that exists outside of a film, it’s worth briefly addressing the online outrage that attached itself to the early conversation of the Odyssey like a cancer, well before anyone had actually seen it. Claims that Nolan’s film would be somehow “woke” because a Black actor or trans performer appeared in this Homerian adaptation of a Greek myth have now been proven to be every bit as absurd and stupid as they sounded at the time. Nolan has made one of the most classically masculine epics imaginable, deeply rooted in patriarchal mythology and traditional heroism. The manufactured culture-war hysteria was exactly that: overblown ridiculous internet chutzpah. It’s embarrassing and anyone who participated in it should feel ashamed for having entertained the narrative.

Because ultimately, The Odyssey succeeds due to Nolan finally allows himself to make something surprisingly straightforward. Unfussy. This isn’t another film so impressed by its own mechanics that it forgets to tell an emotionally satisfying story. Time, of course, has always fascinated Nolan. In Memento, it fractures memory and moves backwards. In Inception, it distorts across layers of dreams. In Interstellar, it is a currency to be spend wisely. Dunkirk unfolds across competing timelines, while Tenet quite literally has its pieces fighting backwards through it. Here, however, time isn’t a puzzle to be solved or a mechanic to be toyed with. It simply passes. Ten years disappear. Then another decade. Kingdoms change. Children age. Wounds scar over while others deepen. Nolan resists the temptation to turn time into a gimmick and, in doing so, perhaps engages with it more honestly than he ever has before. As a fixed thing trudging always forward.

The monsters, gods, temptations, and battles all exist in service of that simple emotional truth. Time alone cannot heal what Odysseus has done. It merely gives him the opportunity to confront it. Time and time again. As to whether this translation itself will stand the test of time, that is to be determined. Sure, The Odyssey is a long sit but it’s never not ambitious, despite occasionally mistaking exposition for profundity. But at no point does one forget that they are under the spell of a weathered commander of his craft.

CONCLUSION: Christopher Nolan stages an accessible, modernized retelling of the archetypal hero’s journey with visual flair, technical wizardry, and enough monsters, myths, and spectacle to make for a thoroughly entertaining adventure. Though it occasionally falls victim to the director’s familiar habit of over-explaining his film’s central ideas, ‘The Odyssey’ proves that sometimes straightforward, swashbuckling storytelling can be more than enough.