L - R: Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Photo: Universal
(172 mins, 15, in cinemas from today)
Nolan is the box-office-friendly auteur behind mind-bending sci-fi (Interstellar, Tenet), superlative superhero flicks (the Dark Knight trilogy) and high-stakes psychological drama (Insomnia, Memento). In 2024 he also picked up two Academy awards (for Oppenheimer, the film got seven in total), and a knighthood, yet it’s The Odyssey which will stand as his masterpiece. At least until the next one.
Even if you don’t know the story, you know the story: the archetypal adventure narrative of Odysseus (Matt Damon), the brave warrior-king who leaves behind his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), in Ithaca. He spends 10 years waging war with Troy, then another 10 years waylaid by all manner of natural and supernatural phenomena, as he tries to get home again. But you can never go home again.
To tell the greatest story every told – and, with apologies to fans of the 1965 George Stevens biblical epic, this is absolutely it – is an awesome undertaking. And it’s one which Hollywood has largely shied away from. There was a 1950s sword-and-sandals effort with Kirk Douglas, a slightly shoddy 90s miniseries, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which the Coen brothers cast George Clooney as “Ulysses Everett McGill” and shifted the action to Depression-era Mississippi.
Matt Damon (frame left, with bow) in The Odyssey. Photo: Universal
Not much, when you consider how foundational Homer’s Odyssey is to the western canon. But also understandable, when you witness the drubbing this film has already received for perceived historical inaccuracies. Better, perhaps, to displease Zeus and all his monstrous progeny than risk incurring the wrath of one huffy classicist with an internet connection.
Nolan was not to be put off, however. There is a sense of culmination – of a film-maker finally reaching the summit of his own artistic Mount Olympus – in The Odyssey and its echoes from previous Nolan films. The famous Trojan horse, often depicted as an oversized rocking horse on wheels, is here a smooth-surfaced equine vessel, part-submerged in beach sands, much like the grounded trawler in 2017’s Dunkirk. Only this one contains half-drowned Achaean soldiers instead of half-drowned Allied ones. Then there’s an image from much later: a close-up on our hero’s face, the flickering flames of the world he’s just burned reflected in his eyes, as he realises the enormity of what he’s done … If you’ve seen Oppenheimer, in which Cillian Murphy starred as the inventor of the atomic bomb, you’ve been haunted by that image before, too.
It won’t only be the huffy classicists whose ears twitch at the flat American vowels, but such quibbles are easily crushed by the narrative’s colossal stride
Most of all, The Odyssey’s pre-technological-yet-supernatural setting gives Nolan the ideal forum for his “tactile realism”, a film-making which, wherever possible, eschews studio sound stages and CGI for location shoots and in-camera effects. At minimum, this adds to the story’s immersive beauty, but occasionally it attains a kind of richly believable magic. Many of the seafaring scenes were actually shot at sea, for instance, and the swell of the waves looks magnificent on 70mm Imax. Tactile realism extends to the casting too, in that we’re allowed to see wrinkles and bald spots, and the general diversity of human bodies. Kenyan-heritage actor Lupita Nyong’o makes a radiant and regal Helen of Troy, in defiance of the pseudo-historians, whose only source is the whitewashed Hollywood period dramas of yore.
L - R: Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus in The Odyssey. Photo: Universal
Such is Nolan’s directing skill, in fact, that his screenwriting brilliance is often overlooked, but The Odyssey doesn’t drag – even at 2 hours 52 minutes – and it finds thematic relevance in the most dusty and indecipherable of ancient preoccupations. Xenia, the Greek concept of hospitality, opens the door for the modern concept of trauma to blow in, like Poseidon’s vengeful wind. That Homeric thing for testing a wife’s loyalties becomes a mediation on the limits and benefits of long-term monogamy – and in this telling, even antiquity’s ultimate side-chick, Calypso (Charlize Theron), urges Odysseus to go easy on the lotus-eating and get home to his Penelope. (Nolan’s own Penelope, incidentally, is his wife, Emma Thomas, who has produced every feature film he’s directed since 2000’s Memento.)
Sure, it won’t only be the huffy classicists whose ears twitch at the flat American vowels, or the use of “party” as a verb, but such quibbles are easily crushed by the narrative’s colossal stride. The Odyssey unites the classical cinematic virtues of Wisdom, Excitement, Emotion, Awe and Beauty into one truly five-star film. It is the epic affirmation of cinema’s storytelling supremacy.
Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025