The Odyssey (2026) Review - Christopher Nolan at His Best
The word “epic” gets used so casually in the vocabulary of film promotion that it has been drained of almost all meaning. But make no mistake, Christopher Nolan knows exactly what epic means.
The Odyssey is the most purely ambitious film Nolan has made in a career defined by ambition – a three-hour adaptation of one of the oldest adventure stories in literature that arrives not as a museum piece or a classical exercise but as something genuinely alive, formally daring, and emotionally devastating. It is brutal and beautiful and more than a little unhinged, and it earns every one of its three hours by understanding that Homer’s poem is not a single thing but a container for several kinds of story simultaneously: war film, family drama, monster movie, body horror, maritime catastrophe, psychological investigation, and something approaching a meditation on what it means to be a man who has done terrible things in the name of returning home.
Nolan, working from his own screenplay and photographing the film with his characteristic visual formalism pushed into stranger and more expressionistic territory than anything in his previous work, has made what is not merely one of his greatest films, but the best film of 2026 thus far and one of the finest adaptations of classical literature ever committed to screen. That claim may seem extravagant, but it is the only one that does the film justice.
The film’s structure is characteristically Nolan – non-linear, interlocking, trusting the audience to assemble the chronology from the fragments provided. We enter the story eight years after the fall of Troy, with Odysseus’s reputation already the stuff of legend on his native Ithaca: the warrior king who conceived the Trojan Horse and won a war, the husband and father who has not come home in nearly twenty years. His wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway with an impassioned intelligence that makes her waiting something active rather than passive, has spent these two decades fending off the suitors who eye her throne. Most prominent among them is Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson with the particular kind of oily confidence that makes you want to see him destroyed specifically and in detail. Penelope’s son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland in a performance that strikes an emotional chord across the film’s full length, has grown up in the shadow of a father he has never known – and goes searching for news of him with the specific desperation of a young man who has inherited a legend he does not know how to live up to.
Meanwhile, Odysseus himself is stranded on an island with the sea nymph Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, slowly and painfully reconstructing the memory of his journey home. It is in these reconstructed episodes – the fall of Troy, the cyclops, the witch Circe and her terrible transformations, the navigating between a whirlpool and a sea monster, the descent toward the underworld – that the film most fully demonstrates both its ambitions and its achievements.
Matt Damon’s performance as Odysseus is the film’s absolute center, and it is the work of a great actor at full command of his instrument. Damon has always been at his best playing intelligence under pressure, and Odysseus gives him a version of that quality pushed to an extreme the actor has never previously attempted – a man whose cleverness has been both his greatest gift and his most consistent moral failure. The film is honest about its hero in ways that sanitized classical adaptations typically are not. That Damon makes this man sympathetic – that you want him to succeed, to get home, and to be worthy of the family that has been waiting – is the exact sort of achievement that acting awards were invented to recognize.
What Nolan understands about The Odyssey is that it is not primarily a story about adventures. The cyclops and the sirens and Scylla and Charybdis are not the point. They are the cost – the specific, escalating price that Odysseus pays for each poor decision, each moment of pride, each instance of cruelty or shortsightedness. The film is about the casualties of war not only on the battlefield but in the years afterward, when the warrior returns home changed in ways his family cannot fully understand and he cannot fully explain. It is about the stories soldiers tell themselves about what they did and why, and the harder, quieter truths that live underneath those stories.
The climax – which those familiar with the original tale will anticipate, and which the film executes with kinetic ferocity – is as rousing as anything Nolan has put on screen. It is also, in the film’s most striking accomplishment, simultaneously cathartic and morally complicated: a moment of violent triumph that the film refuses to allow to feel purely triumphant. Odysseus has come home. He has earned it. He has also left two decades of bodies in his wake, many of them his own men, and the homecoming cannot fully redeem the journey.
The production design and costume work are extraordinary, the visual palette consistently surprising, and getting to see it in IMAX 70MM made the entire experience as immersive as anything in Nolan’s career. Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon, glimpsed in a helmet that belongs in cinematic mythology, is the kind of detail that a film of this confidence throws away almost in passing.
The Odyssey is the work of a filmmaker at the peak of his powers making the film he has clearly been building toward his entire career – a story about the oldest human need, which is the need to come home, and the oldest human discovery, which is that home is never quite what you left behind and you are never quite who you were when you left it.
Three thousand years after Homer first told this story, Christopher Nolan has told it again.
And made it feel, somehow, like the first time.