The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026)

Christopher Nolan has been a filmmaker I have respect for, but whose work I haven't been able to summon unbridled enthusiasm for. To date The Prestige and The Dark Knight Trilogy have been the films of his I've most enjoyed. There's an emotional distance to his filmography, and though I recognize the technical skill and ambition, the lack of emotional impact resulting from that distance has always caused me to look askance at the legions who've been heaping claims of genius with each new release. Oppenheimer was an example of a film I found interesting, and again, the skill at work is clear, and yet even the Oscar winner for Best Picture left me a bit cold.

Like so many storyteller's, Nolan has pet obsessions. He's returned to films involving the way stories we tell (or we are told by others) about ourselves are central to our identities. He's also clearly interested in the question of myth, what makes it, and the toll it takes on the people who are its foundations, and he has a penchant for exploring the way perception plays into both of those. One thing that can be guaranteed when sitting down to watch a Christopher Nolan film is that everything on screen is considered. There's an exacting nature to what he decides to show or not show an audience, and his understanding of how to create a sense of a physical reality in the least realistic of worlds is impressive.

After seeing The Odyssey, I can say I do believe Christopher Nolan is capable of genius. I'm not sure there are people who are geniuses, but I do believe we occasional produce things we can properly call genius. Clocking in at two hours and fifty-three minutes, at no point does this film feel like a slog. I was engaged and compelled by it, throughout the run time. It's first half plays out as a series of vignettes, and even then, it never lost me from the end of one section to the next. This is the first of Nolan's films that makes use of emotional distance in a way that contributes to the film and its protagonist, instead of feeling like a barrier to them. Some of the credit for this goes to Matt Damon, who is excellent as Odysseus. He subtly weaves in the weight of responsibility of care in his various positions, as general in Agamemnon's army, commander to the troops who've followed him from Ithaca, and Ithaca's king. This is the first of Nolan's films I can say I found genuinely moving. Part of this is the motivation it gives for that distance. It isn't the kind of hackneyed cliche of the "price of obsession" or "the cost of doing what everyone says is impossible." It's a distance born of a profound, layered sense of regret.

The other reason this is is most moving film may be due to the fact that Nolan has something to say with The Odyssey. He cares about what this film is trying to say, where so much of the passion of his previous films has been in the passion for film as a medium. It's not an exercise in illusions. It's not an intellectual dissembling of mythical storytelling or perception. It takes all of what Nolan has learned about those various obsessions in his career and uses them to create mythical storytelling, effectively employ illusions, along with his understanding of perception, in service of something he clearly cares about saying. Since it was announced, I've been rather uninterested in a Christopher Nolan directed version of The Odyssey. Even given the stellar cast I'd have otherwise been salivating to see working together, that spark of interest, the curiosity about what Nolan might cook up, just wasn't there. In seeing he chose this story for his adaptation, how he's chosen to tell it and how that relates to the place Homer's epic has in Western literature and culture, I can't help but admire and respect the vision of its conception and the skill of its execution. He clearly didn't just decide to adapt The Odyssey simply because it's such an important text in Western culture. He chose it because he wanted to use it to say what he's saying with it right now, and the profundity of what he has to say is only enhanced by doing so with such a foundational text. The quality of the execution, that it is profoundly moving, along with the boldness of these choices, does raise The Odyssey to the level of being a work of artistic genius in my estimation.

Nolan and Damon have a cadre of collaborators in achieving this. Anne Hathaway is as good as she has ever been as Penelope. Tom Holland may won't need to prove there is more to him than likable, everyman of Peter Parker again. Robert Pattinson demonstrates yet again that he's one of his generations great talents. This is a big cast, and not every character gets the screen time Damon, Hathaway and Holland do, but every one of them is impactful. Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Samantha Morton, Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong'o, Charlize Theron and John Leguizamo are doing some of the best work of their careers. The Odyssey is worth the time for the performances alone. I expect come awards season time, The Odyssey will be filling the nominations in the acting categories, because it's kind of astonishing to get a cast this size, with all of them delivering performances of this quality, delivering the impact they all have. This isn't an ensemble cast in the traditional sense, and its remarkable that all of these actors are able to create the impact they have, without the structure that has made ensembles the gold standard for demonstrating the power of a group of actors dedicated to working together. I could go through, layering praise and expressing my admiration for each of these performances that would be the length of this entire review, if not longer. That sense of dedicated collaboration isn't just a matter of giving the film strong performances, it contributes to what it has to say, and deepens the impact that makes it so moving. I can't leave out that this is some of the best work of Leguizamo's career, and I genuinely hope it inspires more people to look back on that career, as he is among the most under appreciated actors of his generation. I hope directors and casting agents see this and come to the realization that at this level of experience and talent, given material to match, he can produce some legendary performances.

On an aesthetic level, there's a part of me that would have liked a little more lyricism to the cinematography. There are a few scenes, impressive in their conception and understanding of how to use the camera to convey emotions, sense of space and action. Otherwise, Nolan's staunch attachment to realism prevents the kind of visual majesty I enjoy in films of this epic scale, especially with the kind of locations it uses. Mind you, I say this with some bit of hesitation, because it may have subtracted from the impact in the end. Part of why it succeeds in achieving the impact it does, is how grounded in realism it is. At the same time, I'm not sure a few more painterly compositions leaning into the epic nature of the story, from a cinematographer as talented and skilled as Hoyte van Hoytema, would have hurt either.

Maybe the thing I appreciate most about The Odyssey is that Nolan's interpretation undermines every aspect Western culture's instinct to portray war, and the war makers, as the production and containers of glory and greatness. War, and the desire to achieve the domination it reifies, are the ultimate undoing of the Greek empire in Nolan's interpretation. He deftly demonstrates how this reification of domination and deification of its makers, have consequences far beyond the battlefield, not least of which are for the people the culture that values domination would suggest are free from or uplifted by those consequences. He does this without the narrative becoming a polemic. In its structure and focus, this becomes a natural conclusion, self evident, and I appreciate this so much because it does represent the self evident nature of this cycle in human existence, and by contradiction exposes the rousing, swash buckling, chest pounding of so much storytelling about war is meant to help obscure how corrosive war and its . I appreciated his choice not to portray Oppenheimer as a figure of glory, and instead as a kind of obsessive intellectual, whose obsession crowded out the ability to consider the consequences, but the film Oppenheimer, wasn't interested in tangling itself in those consequences. The Odyssey is about those consequences, their cost, and not just to the protagonist, but to the Greece the protagonist sites his sense of loyalty, identity and responsibility in.

Christopher Nolan understands the power of storytelling, and he's clearly always had a near worship of it, but this is the first time he's been able to so effectively evoke it. I found The Odyssey profoundly moving, in part because of what it has to say to us now, in combination with the understanding that what it's saying is timeless, and not something Nolan chose to impose on it. It's just one aspect he chose to highlight. This is one of those incredibly rare instances of the right filmmaker, at the right moment, with the right story, as well as being a film that is probably going to have impact for future generations too.