Christopher Nolan does not make small films, and The Odyssey may be his clearest demonstration yet of what happens when that ambition is paired with a story about survival. Shot across the world using IMAX film technology in a way never attempted before, the film is enormous without feeling like spectacle for spectacle’s sake.
Every frame has a purpose, from the ocean swallowing an entire ship to the quiet interiors of Ithaca. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema give the film an overwhelming physicality, but beneath all that scale is a much quieter story about what war leaves behind.
What is striking, and perhaps even more impressive given the scale, is how much Nolan built for real. Scylla’s attacks on Odysseus’ crew were staged with an actual ratchet rig that yanked stunt performers off the deck, while Charybdis’ whirlpool was created on location using jet skis before digital effects were added.
The Cyclops, Polyphemus, was not entirely a digital creation either. The production built a 60-foot puppet and hauled it into the Greek foothills, giving the actors something physical to perform against. CGI is used to augment rather than replace what was filmed, continuing Nolan’s preference for making the impossible feel tangible.
But the film’s most impressive quality is not its scale. It is what The Odyssey has to say about war.
Adaptations of Homer, and war stories generally, tend to fall into two familiar lanes: the glory of battle or the tragedy of it. You either leave feeling stirred by the heroism or devastated by its consequences. Nolan is more interested in what happens after both feelings have faded.
Matt Damon’s Odysseus is not a triumphant returning hero, nor is he simply a broken man. He is something harder to categorise: a man the war refuses to release even after the fighting has ended.
Troy follows him across every island and every storm. The violence may be behind him, but its consequences remain present in the man trying to find his way home.
Nolan is patient enough to let that discomfort sit rather than resolve it into a tidy moral. There is no simple scene where Odysseus finally heals and everything falls back into place. Instead, the film leaves him carrying the weight of what he has done, what he has lost and what he may have become.
That makes Damon’s performance particularly effective. He plays Odysseus with restraint, allowing exhaustion and regret to sit beneath the character’s authority. It is not a performance built around constant declarations of pain. Much of it exists in what Odysseus does not say.
The nonlinear structure may test some viewers early on. The opening 30 minutes ask the audience to move between Odysseus’ journey home and the world he left behind, where Penelope and Telemachus are holding Ithaca together while suitors begin treating the absent king as a dead man.
It does not unfold as one clean line, and for that first stretch, you may find yourself working to understand where and when you are.
But the structure is intentional, and it eventually begins to reward that patience. By the second half, moments that initially appear disconnected start speaking to one another. A violent encounter at sea can suddenly echo a quieter moment of grief in Ithaca, separated by years but placed beside each other for emotional effect.
The result feels less like watching a straightforward plot unfold and more like memory itself: fragmented, repetitive, and often shaped by what refuses to disappear. It is an approach that suits a story about a man caught between the life he left behind and the person the war has turned him into.
Time, memory, and love constantly pull Odysseus in different directions. He is trapped between the man who left Ithaca and the man who returns, between the home he remembers and the home that has continued without him.
Then there is the cast, and it is difficult to imagine a more stacked ensemble. Damon leads alongside Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Robert Pattinson as Antinous and Lupita Nyong’o in dual roles as Helen and Clytemnestra.
The supporting cast includes John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton as Circe, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus and several other familiar faces. With this many stars in one film, strong performances are almost the baseline expectation.
What is more impressive is how completely they disappear into their characters.
Hathaway gives Penelope a stillness that never reads as passivity. You understand why she has managed to hold off an entire hall of suitors through little more than intelligence and will. Holland brings weight to Telemachus, a young man defined by the absence of his father while trying to understand the man he is expected to become.
Theron makes Calypso genuinely unsettling rather than reducing the character to the familiar seductive figure. Across the ensemble, the performances feel less interested in reminding audiences who is playing whom and more committed to making Homer’s world believable.
The film is not flawless. Its nonlinear structure may alienate some viewers before it wins them over, and Nolan’s density occasionally comes at the expense of breathing room. There are sequences that could stand to exhale, particularly when the sheer scale threatens to overwhelm the quieter human story underneath it.
But these are relatively small complaints against a film that is this ambitious and this carefully constructed.
Nolan’s greatest achievement with The Odyssey is not making Homer’s epic look bigger than it has ever looked. It is finding the human cost underneath all that mythology.
This is a story about a man who survives a war only to discover that surviving is not the same thing as coming home.
Release Date: July 17, 2026
Runtime: 172 minutes
Streaming Platform: Cinemas
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, Jon Bernthal, Elliot Page, Benny Safdie, Corey Hawkins and Mia Goth
