Review: The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan has spent a career chasing men who cannot get home. The astronauts of Interstellar bleed decades for a goodbye. Cobb builds mazes to steal a waking life. Oppenheimer invents a sun and cannot uninvent the guilt. The Odyssey is the myth those movies were already quoting — Homer’s complicated man, twenty years late to Ithaca, and a filmmaker finally allowed to put the poem on a screen tall enough to drown you.

This is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras. Runtime lands at 173 minutes. Budget sits around $250 million. Universal and Syncopy opened it July 17 after a London premiere. None of those numbers are the point. The point is whether an ancient oral epic survives Nolan’s nonlinear brain, Hoyte van Hoytema’s weather, and a cast big enough to look like civilization itself. Spoiler for anyone who has ever been lost: the journey still hurts. The house still waits. The sea still owns the receipt.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus — lean, bearded, carrying the inventiveness that burned Troy and the remorse that will not wash off. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope holds Ithaca like a fortress made of patience. Tom Holland’s Telemachus goes hunting for a father who might be a rumor. Zendaya’s Athena is the rare god who steps into frame; most divinity stays off-screen as weather, omen, and consequence. Robert Pattinson’s Antinous smiles like a coup dressed as a feast. Around them: Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton’s Circe, Charlize Theron’s Calypso, Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon, and a supporting army that makes the poem feel like a planet, not a classroom.

Homer, rewritten in Nolan time

Nolan begins where the poem begins: Ithaca, overrun. Suitors feast. Penelope weaves. Telemachus leaves. Only then do we catch Odysseus on the water — white-bearded, southern-coursed, already paying Poseidon’s tax for cleverness. Flashbacks stitch Troy, the horse, Agamemnon’s shadow. The structure is not a gimmick; it is the poem’s own delayed entrance for its hero, filtered through the editor who made Tenet feel like a prayer and Oppenheimer feel like a trial.

Faithfulness is selective and smart. Argos gets more room. Odysseus and Telemachus share more air. Circe is unsettling and human instead of a Halloween witch. The gods’ power is real; their faces, mostly not. Nolan’s creative breakthrough — gods as natural phenomena once read as magic — keeps the film earthy instead of Marvel-Olympus cosplay. When Zendaya’s Athena appears, she lands like a confidant, not a VFX reel. That restraint is why the horror beats hit: a giant hand from shadow, shades rising from Hades soil, Sirens that feel like the sea inventing a new way to lie.

The Trojan Horse sequence is the flex Nolan has been saving since he nearly made Troy two decades ago — sand, wood, fire, the night the cleverest plan in Western literature becomes a war crime with a bow on it. Damon sells the aftermath better than the triumph. This Odysseus is Oppenheimer’s cousin by another ocean: genius that works, body count that stays.

The IMAX argument (and why it wins)

Entirely IMAX 70mm is not a marketing sticker here. It is the grammar. Longships rock the Mediterranean and your peripheral vision rocks with them. Storms fill the frame until “epic” stops being a genre word and becomes a weather report. Van Hoytema and Nolan have always been best when elements bully the camera — Dunkirk’s water, Interstellar’s dust. The Odyssey floods that instinct for nearly three hours and somehow never feels slow. Jennifer Lame’s cut keeps the episodic island-hopping from dissolving into a mythic playlist.

Ludwig Göransson’s score is the film’s second ocean: ancient texture under modern pressure, pulse when the plot thins, sorrow when Damon remembers what inventiveness costs. Over two million feet of IMAX stock were burned to get here. You feel every reload pause in the craft even when you never see one — scenes that look continuous because the ambition refuses to cut for comfort.

Performances: the Everyman and the siege

Damon is the right Odysseus for this century — amiable enough to be anyone, sharp enough to be dangerous, haunted enough to make homecoming feel like a sentence. Hathaway’s Penelope is steel without speeches; the throne is hers long before the bowstring proves it. Holland’s Telemachus carries the son’s panic without turning the movie into a young-adult side quest. Pattinson’s Antinous is sleaze with a strategy — the best kind of suitor, which is to say the worst man in the room.

The ensemble is the political statement. Casting a mythic story across a wide spectrum of faces is not “woke Homer”; it is the only honest way to film a tale that was always meant to be retold by whoever held the lyre that night. Nyong’o’s Helen / Clytemnestra dual presence, Morton’s Circe, Theron’s Calypso — each stop on the map gets a human center, not a cameo sticker. When Elliot Page’s fallen soldier or John Leguizamo’s Eumaeus lands, the past stops being a museum.

What scrapes

Episodic myth is episodic myth. A few island chapters feel sketched — dazzling set pieces connected by salt and guilt more than by a single dramatic engine. If you need every suitor subplot and every Homeric digression intact, you will feel the action-movie compression of the ending’s hall melee. Gender politics are examined and also, occasionally, upheld in ways that will start arguments in the lobby. That is fine. Foundational stories should start arguments.

And yes: Nolan has already made films about men trying to reach family through mind-warping distance. Calling that a flaw is like blaming the ocean for repeating waves. The Odyssey is the source code. Interstellar was the remix. Seeing them rhyme is part of the pleasure — and part of the slight freshness tax that comes with urtexts.

Who it’s for

Anyone who still believes theatrical spectacle can be craft, not noise. Nolan completists. Classics kids who want their poem loud. Date-night couples who can survive nearly three hours without checking the runtime. People who will travel for real IMAX 70mm and mean it.

Pause if you only want gods throwing CGI lightning from Olympus, if nonlinear storytelling gives you a headache before the credits, or if you came for a clean hero without a body count. Odysseus is complicated. The film refuses to sand that down.

The verdict

The Odyssey is Nolan at home in the oldest story he has ever told — earthy, existential, occasionally clunky, mostly transfixing. It is a ripping adventure and a guilt machine. It is the definitive big-screen Homer we were missing, shot on cameras that make the screen disappear. See it as large as geography allows. The poem waited three thousand years. Your living room can wait one more night.

Score: 8.9 / 10 — the journey still owns the destination, and the destination still owns your chest.

Now playing — Universal Pictures / The Odyssey.