Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026): A Review

[The following review has spoilers for Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey.]

Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds—some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians—not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other. ¹

I watched The Odyssey earlier today, so here's my review. It might seem counter-intuitive that I begin a review of an adaptation of Homer's poem with a quotation from Herodotus instead. After all, both works belong to different worlds. At the most basic level we see that Homer writes in verse and Herodotus writes in prose; depending on how much originality we attribute to Homer, he is either a nameless redactor of a vast oral tradition or he is a great poet who deliberately selected and re-arranged this material for the sake of a broader artistic vision. Herodotus, on the other hand, speaks in his own name and his personality comes through his work. We read Herodotus and at times it is as if the Father of History is yammering in our ear as we walk through Greece, spinning up tall tales and telling us about all sorts of marvels from other lands. Herodotus is working in the shadow of the poets; his interest is in submitting the tales of the poets, as well as the oral traditions of the people he visits, to a kind of rational inquiry, so he can come up with a narrative explanation that he can judge to be more plausible than the alternatives.

I have not read Homer, although I have read Herodotus, so I cannot judge the accuracy of Christopher Nolan's adaptation. At the same time, I think that Herodotus is a good frame to look at what Nolan has produced, because the film dramatizes a transition from mythology to history (at least, quasi-history). Nolan's adaptation sharply reduces the role of the gods in the Homeric epic. The only exception is Athena, who appears only to Odysseus and is implied to be a post-traumatic hallucination, since she resembles a young priestess of Athena who was killed by his men. In the ending it is revealed that the sack of Troy led to the shattering of what in Nolan's film is called "Zeus's law" (xenia, or guest-friendship). The returning Greeks are the "Sea Peoples" who have been raping, looting and plundering, destroying trade routes and threatening the whole of civilization.

Nolan clearly has the Greek Dark Ages and the Late Bronze Age Collapse in mind. This leads to some astoundingly clunky dialogue, especially in the ending. Matt Damon's Odysseus even says "Our age of bronze is ending," which is an astonishing anachronism for a hero in Mycenaean Greece. Lines like this give the prequel-era George Lucas a run for his money. This is less meaningful from a mythological point of view, since Hesiod distinguishes the Bronze Age (the third age) from the Heroic Age (the fourth age), because the former is full of endless warfare and the latter is that of the Greek demigods. Still, one gets the impression that Nolan is trying to detach himself from myth and to give his film a quasi-historical patina, which is why I am reminded of Herodotus' own attempt to revise and go past the tales of the poets.

What Herodotus shares with the poets, as his initial lines bear out, is a fascination with "great and wonderful deeds." Nolan clearly shares Herodotus' hope "that human events do not fade with time" and this comes through clearly in his ending. However, we see comparatively little of the great and wonderful. Or, to put it in a similar idiom, we see comparatively little of the strange and wonderful. Herodotus shares with the poets a fascination with the strange and the wonderful, whether as products of imagination, stories heard from others, or visions witnessed by the writer himself. Nolan's version of the Odyssey shares far less of this interest, because of how stripped-down it is. As I have already remarked, the gods are absent, and Nolan shows a grim interest in the grime and mud of the Trojan War and the journey. We are told that the famed Trojan horse was partly submerged in water, drowning some of the Greek soldiers, and that it was full of the urine and waste of the soldiers waiting inside. Nolan's sharpness is in bringing out this grubbiness of the war and this is what makes some of his vision so striking.

At the same time, this is connected to a general de-mystification of the mythological material, which has the effect of making his film rather flat. The landscapes are all the same, all vaguely pastoral, and there is nothing strikingly strange or unusual about the islands of Polyphemus, Circe or Calypso. Strikingly, Nolan prefers not to name any of his islands, or the monsters like Polyphemus or the Laestrygonians. We see Odysseus and his crew washing up on various islands and getting out rather quickly. Even though the film is two hours and fifty-two minutes long, it felt much shorter to me, since it seemed that our heroes entered and left their way-stations rather quickly. There is none of the extended plotting or cunning that Odysseus is well-known for; he resembles a grizzled stoic soldier from a twentieth-century war film more than he does the cunning and somewhat amoral strategist of mythology. I remember being sharply disappointed by how Nolan quickly dispatched Polyphemus in what seemed like a matter of a few minutes, and without even the famous trickery around "Nobody" that is all that most know about the Cyclops.

Where Nolan succeeds is in his ability to inspire disgust and terror, which I wish he could have worked on more. What makes his Polyphemus fresh is the creature’s monstrous presentation and the film’s sense of how it would appear to an ordinary human. The same goes for the visit to Circe's island. While Nolan does not make the island especially enchanting or unusual, he nevertheless has a delightfully unsettling sequence with Odysseus's men that I consider the highlight of his movie. Circe invites them to a meal, and the food looks absolutely disgusting, and yet all the same the men slurp it all up like pigs. Circe then goes to each of them and as they eat, somehow shapes their faces and bones with her hands to turn them into pigs. The entire sequence where she takes a head and she (almost lovingly!) forces it into a porcine shape without the man's protest is the closest thing to sensuality in the entire film.

The lack of sex in the film is not a complaint unique to me: both Emily Wilson and Mary Beard have made statements to that effect. It's especially troubling how Nolan handles Calypso in the film, since he gives her little screen time and makes her out to be a kind of Florence Nightingale to Odysseus. He washes ashore, she tends to his wounds, and then feeds him the lotus flower because she likes tending to him, and ends up keeping him there for seven years. She claims to love him but we aren't given a reason why. There is also no allusion to Calypso forcing Odysseus to sleep with her. There is very little angst about her drugging him for seven years; leaving that aside, there's very little sensuality about their interactions. She doesn't come off as a nymph or the daughter of a Titan, and neither do we get the impression that she is sleeping with Odysseus. It's glaring because for better or for worse, the difference between Penelope and Odysseus is that he's not as sexually faithful to her as she is to him, and that this comes down to the double standards the Greeks had about infidelity. The only interesting suggestion that Nolan makes is that Odysseus might be unwilling to return home, but all of this is surprisingly convenient for him (he is sent astray by the wind, he is drugged and kept by Calypso for seven years...) Instead, we have the modern figure of the suffering male hero who oscillates between violence and a desire to be taken care of.

There's a broader sense of an aesthetic narrowness in Nolan's film. The film implies that civilization is identical to the following of "Zeus's Law" of guest-friendship, and that all this has fallen and the Sea Peoples are going to destroy civilization. I understand that it is possible that Mycenaean Greeks were part of the original Sea Peoples. Regardless, our very notion of the Sea Peoples come from ancient Egyptian records, for instance from the time of Ramesses III. Homer and Herodotus were both aware of the wider Near East, including Egypt, since Herodotus devotes a large portion of his Histories to Egypt and Odysseus claims to have raided the Nile Delta. There is a broader interest in "other peoples," even if these other peoples were imagined, or Greek caricatures or projections. The one and only Peli Grietzer has a funny tweet about this in Homer:

My favorite thing is how The Odyssey has 50 verses about the Cyclopes being hermit pastoralist with no technology or civic institutions but then the Laestrygonians chapter is like 'this island did have tech and civic institutions but again, man-eating giants'

This is my own bias speaking: when I read Herodotus I was less captivated by the narrative of the Persian Wars and more fascinated by the stories and anthropological data that Herodotus passes on. Herodotus loves talking about the various customs of different people; it probably is the case that many of these apparent customs were based on misunderstandings or mistranslations, but even so we see an interest in what is strange and wonderful, not only about the natural world but the customs of men. Herodotus is xenophilic enough to approve of some of the strange "barbarian" customs he hears about; it's like how Descartes's philosophical work was preceded by his experience as a traveller and soldier coming across all sorts of strange and unusual customs.

There is very little of this sociological imagination in Nolan's film. It is not that Nolan was supposed to give us a long rambling discussion of "the customs of the Spartans" or something like that, but we are denied any understanding of the societies that we come across. The Trojans are given no points of view; I don't even mean that the Trojans have to be humanized or that "there are people on both sides," since Odysseus' angst comes from the carnage inflicted upon them. But they are simply victims and I wish that we could have had some characterization of the Trojans as anything other than faceless soldiers or suffering civilians (this, I think, is why Nolan's movie is sometimes called a "shoot-and-cry" flick). Of course, this does not translate neatly into a movie and I can respect that. But then we come to the absurd point where there is little difference between the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians, other than that there are more Laestrygonians and they all wear armour.

I wish that Nolan had shown us a larger world, because his geography is very claustrophobic. The Sea Peoples are only known through rumour, and the only scene alluding to them is very short; some of his crew visit a shoreline and the inhabitants think that they are the Sea Peoples, which puzzles them. There is a subtle inconsistency since all of Odysseus's crew died before he reached Calypso's island Ogygia (and he stays there for seven years) while they are considered a pressing threat back in Ithaca. The implication maye be that the barbarism spread outward from Troy, but we are frustratingly not given any details about this. The Mycenaean cities were famously burned down, and Nolan could have shown us sequences where cities are put to the torch instead of making this a purely verbal fear. Nolan could also have made the cattle of the sun-god look fantastical; in his continuity they belong to Apollo (not Helios, for some reason) and perhaps a god's cattle and their grazing grounds might look suitably strange.

There is no real reason for the movie to imitate the bourgeois novel. Films might be divided, roughly and unscientifically, into image-first and dialogue-first works. The brilliance of Stanley Cavell's famous "comedies of remarriage," all of which I love, comes from the flashy back and forth between the leads. We do not need Howard Hawks or George Cukor or Ernst Lubitsch to make their films "philosophical" by making their characters narrate their interiority, or by having them tell the audience faux-deep quotable lines about Love and Marriage. The image-first movie expresses its intelligence through the juxtaposition of stunning images. This is especially germane for SF&F movies. 2001 is excellent precisely because Kubrick let the camera run and could stitch together a breathtaking sequence of images that could express another kind of narration. ² Nolan rather wants to tell you the Great Guilt of his characters, their feeling of inadequacy; this is especially striking for Oppenheimer (2023). I still haven't decided if that was a good film or merely a kitschy paint-by-numbers adaptation of his biography.

With his budget, Nolan could absolutely have made his filmic landscape more surreal; for instance, by making Ogygia uncannily beautiful and pastoral, or by showing more plundered Greek cities. However, he ends up wanting to make a Big Point, which makes his dialogue oscillate between the absolutely banal and the faux-poetic, as in the speech that Odysseus, disguised as a beggar named Sinon, delivers to Penelope.

Odysseus: What if... when he left the belly of the horse... and opened the gates of Troy... he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night. We left them a gift in offering of peace that they took into their home... We violated all that's ever sacred between people... and turned the fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. Including his home. What if he knew, that very night as he walked through fires of anarchy and pain... And in the days of sweaty celebrations that followed, what if he knew exactly what he'd done?

Once again this is reminiscent of the George Lucas School of Writing Dialogue, but I wager much of this can be cut because the flashbacks to the sack of Troy are really that good. We see the carnage that the Greeks are inflicting on the Trojans, the male soldiers and the female civilians, and it's good that Nolan is focusing on this. It's not heroic and it is incredibly ugly and is a moral stain on Odysseus. I only wish that he had been able to resist turning subtext into text, and that he didn't have to make Odysseus narrate his own guilt and complicity. Even the flashback scene in Troy gives Odysseus a curious passiveness; we see him walking and observing all the carnage unfolding around him, once the walls are finally breached. This also makes him "clean" of the carnage's worst excesses: this is a defensible choice, but then I would have liked to see him explore what made him different.

Of course, Nolan is talking about the present with his mythological material. Odysseus is a modern-day soldier with PTSD and moral injury, with a modern sense of guilt and complicity, which makes him very similar to his depiction of Oppenheimer. Matt Damon reprises his role as the guy who finds it difficult to come home, so maybe it's really a far-out prequel to The Martian (2015). This has been critiqued in many quarters, though to be honest I don't care much for this response. The story of the Odyssey has been re-imagined countless times; and if Nolan had really tried to depict a Bronze Age mentality as-is, I don't think that he would have gotten much of an audience. Modern audiences do not generally want to see three hours of atrocities committed by the hero; we generally want to identify with the hero. It's easier to deal with alien mentalities in literature which is able to explore interiority in depth, while it's much harder in film. It would be nice for there to be a detailed "proper" adaptation of the Odyssey, though it would be a very expensive miniseries with a correspondingly smaller audience. Still, like I said, it would be nice even if it's possible that I wouldn't watch it.

I enjoyed this film and I'm glad that I paid for a ticket and watched it in a cinema. I was suitably entertained, as is the job of a good film. Watching it has also made me very sympathetic to Emily Wilson's extremely negative review of it in the London Review of Books. Matt Damon was able to pull off the brooding Odysseus, though I would have preferred Odysseus to be more like the 1930s roguish space opera heroes, like C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith. Anne Hathaway is good as Penelope and I liked Tom Holland as Telemachus, but my favourite of all was Robert Pattinson as Antinous, perfectly playing the manipulative scumbag.

I preferred Nolan not to have shoehorned his interest in the Bronze Age Collapse into the ending. It was nevertheless a fascinating inversion in making our heroes, the Greeks, the barbarian invaders. I would have liked for him to trust his material more and to have been more all-out with the wonders that would have appealed to Herodotus and Homer. The proto-horror and his emphasis on the disgusting aspects of the war (the waste, the pigs and the food) are the more interesting aspects of the film. I liked how he made his monsters actually monstrous and unsettling and cast a more critical light on the actions depicted in the original Homeric text, though this attitude is not particularly Homeric. I'm sympathetic to Emily Wilson's critique: "There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible." The correctness of the critique doesn't change what I enjoyed, so I'm willing to hold both. And I now really have to actually get a translation of the Odyssey so I can finally read the poem. Maybe I could also read Herodotus again.