The Odyssey (2026)
Christopher Nolan (2026)
The original is hardly short, and Christopher Nolan is a prolix filmmaker. All things considered, The Odyssey, clocking in at 173 minutes, isn’t as long a cinema journey as you might have expected. That’s what I kept telling myself as I watched the film, but to no avail. Nolan encourages audience participation of an unusual kind, proving again here his talent for making viewers interrogate the nature of time. Wristwatch-watching rather a lot, I could swear that, around halfway through The Odyssey, the hands on my watch moved backwards once or twice – which trumped the Interstellar (2014) experience of time standing still. In that earlier picture, Matthew McConaughey’s spacecraft lands on a planet subject to ‘gravitational time dilation’; each hour on the planet’s surface equates to seven years on Earth. In The Odyssey, when Matt Damon’s Odysseus asks Charlize Theron’s Calypso how long he’s been lotus-eating on her island, her answer is also seven years. Odysseus is astonished that he’s been there such a long time. Sitting through Nolan’s film of Homer provides the reverse experience.
In Oppenheimer (2023), the character played by Damon, Colonel Groves, did the audience a service by summarising J Robert Oppenheimer’s supposed psychological profile, which you couldn’t infer from Cillian Murphy’s opaque interpretation of the father of the atomic bomb. This time, Damon has the lead but there’s no one in Nolan’s cast of thousands to help in the same way; and though Matt Damon is a better actor than Cillian Murphy, he can’t tell us too much about Odysseus. As we know from the classicist and translator Emily Wilson’s piece on the film in the London Review of Books (one of a small minority of negative reviews to date), writer-director Nolan has said publicly that he drew inspiration from the first line of Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey, ‘Tell me about a complicated man’. Damon’s grizzled and weatherbeaten Odysseus makes an impressive image, but he delivers most of his many lines with minimum tonal variation. This may be meant to signal how deep in complex thought Odysseus is, and Damon looks as though he’s thinking, but that’s about as far as it goes.
This Odysseus does somehow, though, come across as, in modern political terms, a liberal – perhaps just because the actor playing him is well known for his liberal views. At any rate, spurious modernising is one of Nolan’s ways of shaping The Odyssey for a twenty-first-century audience. He casts a Black beauty (Lupita Nyong’o) as Helen of Troy (and her twin, Clytemnestra), a trans actor (Elliot Page) as the Greek soldier Sinon, and so on. It’s harder to say if having Robert Pattinson play Antinous, the sneaky standout among the suitors of Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is part of the same tactic. The effect is essentially the same, because Pattinson, as a screen presence, is ineradicably present-day – though to be fair, he has more life and variety, facially and vocally, than any other man in this film. A further aspect of Nolan’s modernising is putting a rather snobbish distance between his Odyssey and the Hollywood classical epics that most people now seem to enjoy (and some people probably always did enjoy) as entertaining camp. Nolan is at pains to have his hero, particularly, withhold conventional emotion. When Odysseus admits that his men are convinced that he has offended Poseidon, it’s not enough for Nolan to pass on visualising the god’s anger through a paroxysm of stormy seas: Matt Damon’s line reading makes it sound as if he’s upset a touchy work colleague rather than an Olympian. When the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) turns his companions into pigs, Odysseus doesn’t bat an eyelid.
The latter underreaction is more understandable because those companions are a dull lot; to be honest, I was mildly disappointed when Odysseus prevailed on Circe to turn the pigs back into men (though Zeus sees to it they don’t survive much longer). Both among this contingent and in the royal courts of Ithaca and elsewhere, there are capable actors with strong camera faces but, like Matt Damon, they must have been asked to perform in a set way – they sound intense but offer no characterisation. In this set-up, it’s apt enough that Tom Holland, as Odysseus’ son and heir Telemachus, is a cross between Damon and all the others (except Robert Pattinson): Holland combines mechanical intensity with a mostly quieter voice, presumably hinting at Telemachus’ potential to follow in his father’s complicated-man footsteps. Except for Zendaya, a glazed and uneasy Athena, the distaff side of the cast make up for their small numbers with more distinctive portraits: Anne Hathaway, at least until Penelope’s tediously noble finale when Odysseus returns home; Mia Goth as a perfidious maidservant in Penelope’s household; and, especially, Samantha Morton, whose Circe is always surprising and vivid.
Nolan’s ‘modern’ dialogue has come in for a bit of stick (from more than Emily Wilson) so it may have helped that I couldn’t make out everything, to start with anyway. I did stub my ears a few times, though, as when Calypso tells Odysseus, ‘You have been happy here, but your heart was always somewhere else’. (In what sense, happy, then?) But Nolan’s chief means of revitalising Homer for today’s audiences is through technological spectacle. There are some eye-catching highlights – the strangely leaning Trojan horse, certain shots of the cyclops Polyphemus, early stages of Circe’s porcine transformations – and I guess that huge numbers of viewers must be sustained by the regular supply of pyrotechnics, though the overall effect of these is wearingly bombastic. Nolan allows himself a rare would-be emotional moment when Odysseus’ loyal old dog Argos recognises his master, who has returned in disguise. Argos’ last movement, before he dies content, is a cute twitch of his CGI tail.
There’s fighting, fighting, and more fighting: as in 2025, what’s shaping up as the year’s big event in cinema is One-Battle-After-Another, this time more literally. There are also vast amounts of flickering flames on the screen for the photophobic to contend with. These, in alternation with waves of enervating indifference, led me to close my eyes every so often. I never dropped off, though, thanks to the soundtrack. Pounding crescendos reliably culminated in a colossal, startling bang – followed, just as predictably, by a burst of contrasting silence, broken only by the relieving whirr of Curzon Richmond’s nearly adequate air-conditioning. I know that a lot of what I’ve written here is frivolous, but somebody has to treat Christopher Nolan’s Very Important Pictures with the lack of seriousness they deserve.
29 July 2026