Christopher Nolan’s thirteenth film has to be, by some distance, the most anticipated release of the year, competing for that title against a new Spielberg, a new Toy Story, a new Spider-Man and a Christmas Avengers film, which is no small claim. It is also the first feature shot entirely on IMAX cameras, something Nolan is said to have wanted to do since he was around sixteen, when he first encountered the format.
Between the scale of the production and the size of its cast, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya and Charlize Theron, among many others it would be easy to talk about this film purely in terms of size. But what’s more interesting is what Nolan chooses to do with a text this old, this well-known, and this thoroughly adapted before him.
On the backlash, and what it misses
Two objections tend to attach themselves to a project like this before anyone has actually seen it. The first is casting; in this case, a fair amount of derision aimed at Matt Damon taking the lead. It’s a reaction that’s hard to square with the actual body of work: Damon has carried the Bourne films and The Talented Mr Ripley, among plenty else, and is a capable enough actor to carry this one start to finish. The suspicion is that he’s simply become a figure people enjoy mocking rather than a genuinely weak choice, the sense that had a Brad Pitt been cast instead, nobody would have blinked, despite Damon arguably being the better actor of the two. Alongside this, the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen has drawn a separate strain of criticism from far-right corners, unhappy at a Black actress taking on a figure so often depicted as the archetype of white beauty in Western art.
The second objection is stranger: complaints about historical inaccuracy, armour that doesn’t match the period and so on. But The Odyssey was never a historical document to begin with, it’s a story built from Cyclopes, sorceresses and gods who turn men into animals, invention from the start. Expecting it to be historically faithful misunderstands what kind of text it is. Classics have always had artistic license built in; without it, you’d simply get the same story told the same way, over and over.
Guilt, power, and what makes someone human
Underneath the spectacle, this is a film about regret. About the guilt of a man who got his own men killed, who started a war over an abduction and ended it with a horse — shown here not from the familiar angle of gates swinging open to let the horse through, but from inside the horse itself. It’s a film about the madness of power, and about the line between being human and being someone who has stopped caring what happens to other people. Odysseus is tested against that line throughout; put in positions close to a trolley-problem dilemma, forced to choose who lives and who dies, and what keeps him human is that he never stops being troubled by those choices.
That same idea shapes how the film handles the gods and all the supernatural aspects of the story. Rather than staging literal interventions from the gods, one figure is represented in a way that ties much more closely to how Odysseus sees himself and the people around him than to a goddess handing down judgment from above. It’s less about praying to Athena or Poseidon and more about a man reckoning with what the war made him do, the deaths, the pillaging, and rethinking how he views war and revenge as a result.
Nolan has described the breakthrough in the script as finding a way to treat even the mythical material with naturalism, which, notably, is the same instinct he’s brought to genre material before, the Batman films included.
The women holding the story together
Penelope is besieged for years by suitors who assume she’ll eventually remarry and hand Ithaca to a new king. She refuses — not just out of blind faith that her husband is alive, but on the basis that she alone is enough to hold the kingdom, and that no one has proven him dead. The tapestry trick, familiar as it is, still lands: she promises to marry once the weaving is finished, then quietly unpicks each night’s work so it’s never done. It’s one of the film’s quieter, smaller moments, and it’s more affecting than most of the larger set pieces around it; nAnne Hathaway plays it with a naturalism that avoids the trap of looking too modern for the period, which epics cast with contemporary actresses often fall into.
Circe, played by Samantha Morton, is one of the strongest turns in the film. It is closer to a woman’s revenge against men in general than a straightforward villain, her disgust with a group of starving soldiers who arrive assuming they’re owed hospitality curdling into something that plays almost as dark comedy in its horror. Charlize Theron’s Calypso works differently: rather than menace, she offers comfort, keeping Odysseus fed and deliberately unmoored from the memory of a wife and son, less seduction than erasure.
Zendaya’s Athena, goddess of wisdom, warfare and handicraft, is a smaller but notable presence. Lupita Nyong’o, playing the dual role of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, is the film’s clearest case of underuse — a stacked cast inevitably means someone gets less time than they deserve, and it’s her.
A director not fully bought, still delivering
Nolan hasn’t been a director whose last few films land unreservedly. Tenet was enjoyable and impressive without being one to revisit. But that kind of reservation shouldn’t curdle into the reflex some critics have with any director who’s achieved enough — measuring every new film against an earlier high point and finding it wanting, the way people once did to Hitchcock, and even Kubrick. What’s heartening about The Odyssey is that it feels like a project Nolan has been circling for a long time, made with the confidence of someone who has mostly worked in science fiction or historical material finally letting himself do the classics, and doing them big rather than cautiously.
The clever thing about the screenplay, in the end, is that none of this; the guilt, the refusal to remarry, the choice between who lives and who dies; depends on the audience buying into gods and immortals to feel it. Even wrapped around Cyclopes and sorceresses, the themes hold up against ordinary life. That, more than the IMAX cameras or the size of the cast, is what makes the adaptation worth the noise around it.
