The Odyssey

THE ODYSSEY   ***

Christopher Nolan

2026

IDEA:  Following the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men go on an arduous journey to return home to an Ithaca in ruins.

BLURB:  With his version of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan whittles the epic poem into one of his favorite stories: the brilliant but morally conflicted man whose work estranges him from his family, and his humanity. The filmmaker’s fixation on this brooding archetype has become as expected as his predilection for nonlinear cross-cutting and cacophonous soundscapes, but what is surprising is how richly it fits into Homer’s text. Nolan’s Odysseus — played by Matt Damon in a register much closer to morose than vainglorious — undergoes a modern reframing as a reluctant, guilt-stricken hero burdened by postwar trauma. His conscience flares in soul-sick visions of Athena and slivered flashbacks to the chaos of the Trojan War (among the places where Nolan’s fractured editing works best), culminating in a stirring, plangent third-act catharsis that recontextualizes the war through Odysseus’s profound shame and regret. As per usual, Nolan wants to ground even the most fantastical of ideas in a sense of realism, so the modern psychology applied to Odysseus is echoed in set pieces and other characters that are brought down to human scale (pointedly, none of the gods appear). In some ways, this feels like a symptom of Nolan’s paucity of visual imagination; he still seems indifferent to the concept of mise en scène, preferring spartan locations and quick, static close-ups of actors over more epic-friendly wide shots composed in depth, and his color palette remains mostly limited to dusky blacks, blues, and browns, with yellow highlights. Yet the aesthetic does end up suiting this grittier, sepulchral Odyssey, particularly in such standout scenes as the invasion of Troy and the visit to Hades, which are given an equally haunting moral weight (and in the latter, a killer monologue from Elliot Page, second only to Anne Hathaway in bringing real theatrical fire to the film). Ludwig Göransson provides a reliably robust, eclectic score, and Nolan’s incessantly loud sound mix, for once, feels well modulated around his actors. When Odysseus returns home, so does The Odyssey bring home its thesis of how powerful men poison society with self-interest and ignobility, and how easily we enable them. It’s a not-so-subtle lament that rings out a resounding cry in a retelling acutely tailored to our modern times.