I knew from the trailers that I wasn’t going to love Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I hoped I’d like it, and I did.
The film has moments I thought were excellent, some choices I found interesting, and a few scenes I’ll happily watch again, but I also found it slow for long stretches, emotionally distant, and, despite its obvious ambition, strangely average. In the end, my central reaction is that I wanted to believe in it more than I did.
I’m probably not the target audience for this movie, and many of the things I enjoyed and critique here likely won’t matter to most viewers. I’m not a scholar, but I am a polytheistic Pagan who loves the Greek gods. I’ve been reading and studying Greek history, mythology, and religion for nearly 40 years. I don’t expect perfect archaeological reconstruction from a Hollywood film, but I do want to believe in the world the film creates, and I never entirely believed in this one.
Homer’s Odyssey is a 3,000-year-old poem, so I think the statute of limitations around spoilers has expired, but Nolan’s film can still be spoiled. I avoid doing that for most of this review. Towards the end, I include a spoiler section for anyone who’s already seen the film or doesn’t mind them.
When adapting a story, filmmakers make choices. Does Nolan depart from Homer? Yes. Nolan isn’t adapting Homer’s Odyssey alone. He draws more broadly on the Trojan tradition, pulling in figures and events from later authors as well as from Homer himself; Sinon (Elliot Page), for instance, who appears in Virgil but not in Homer. The abduction of Helen itself isn’t dramatised in Homer’s poem either, only referenced after the fact, since the Odyssey begins once Helen is already back home in Sparta. Greek mythology, too, was never a single, authoritative canon. Ancient writers constantly reworked inherited stories, and filmmakers today are free to do the same. The question isn’t whether Nolan departs from Homer; it’s whether those departures serve the film.
One departure earns its keep: explanation. Ancient audiences arrived already knowing this material; today’s may not, so some explanation is unavoidable. Between visions, retellings, and Odysseus’s own narration, a viewer who’s never read Homer could follow why the war began and how it ended.
He’s more sceptical of gods than monsters, but I appreciated that Nolan doesn’t abandon Greek religion altogether. Modern adaptations often seem embarrassed by it. The gods become metaphors, psychology, weather or coincidence, as though today’s audiences couldn’t possibly accept that the ancient Greeks believed divine beings acted in the world. And, some people still do!
Nolan doesn’t go that far, of course, but he doesn’t escape it entirely either. These aren’t literary devices to me, so I noticed every place where “the gods acted” softened into something more like “the weather happened”, and it isn’t a neutral choice, even when I understand why he made it. The film allows the gods to exist, but only Athena remains an active presence, and it tends to translate Greek religious ideas into concepts that feel more familiar to a contemporary audience, with varying degrees of restraint.
The Underworld gets called “hell” once or twice, not constantly, and I can live with that. It’s a shorthand; it registers instantly, no further explanation needed, and Nolan doesn’t lean on it, but I question whether it’s necessary at all. “Zeus’s law” is a bigger swing; the film returns to it again and again, and defines it early on in language close to the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. Xenia, the actual concept underlying that phrase, is the sacred, reciprocal obligation between host and guest, specifically protected by Zeus in his role as Zeus Xenios, not a general ethic of niceness. Something is lost in the compression: hospitality violated is what starts the Trojan War, and that’s a thread the film struggles to pick back up once the concept has been reduced to a single repeated line.
Yet I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a big-budget Hollywood adaptation to sit with a term like xenia on its own terms, unglossed, for a general audience who has never encountered it. Some translation was always going to happen, and “Zeus’s law” is a reasonable attempt. There’s also something I actually like about the choice, even with its flattening: putting a version of the Golden Rule in the mouth of a Bronze Age Greek polytheist, backed by Zeus rather than any Abrahamic god, is a quiet correction to an assumption a lot of people carry without examining, that this kind of ethical thinking arrived with Christianity. It didn’t. Reciprocal moral obligation is older than Christianity by a very long way, and a mainstream film putting that idea in a pagan mouth and crediting it to a pagan god is doing something useful, even if the specific texture of xenia gets lost in the process.
The same tension shows up at the level of individual lines, and there it’s harder to defend. Penelope’s suitors refer to Odysseus as “daddy”. Regarding his heroism, Sinon tells Odysseus to “feel free to add some stuff”. This is a retelling made for today’s audiences, and some updating of language was always coming with it, but updating a register and flattening it entirely aren’t the same move, and this drifts into the second more often than a film this careful about its Mycenaean daggers should allow.
The visual world had a similar effect on me. This surprised me because parts of the film were shot in Greece, including locations closely associated with Odysseus’ homeland. Yet I rarely felt I was looking at the Mediterranean. The landscapes are beautiful, and one of the reasons I wanted to watch the film on the big screen, but the overall aesthetic never convinced me. The armour draws on Mycenaean archaeology in places, then suddenly looks almost medieval. Nolan has said the blackened, unornamented look was a research-based choice, and I don’t doubt the research happened. But research into individual techniques doesn’t add up to a coherent world. The ships never quite felt right, and the palace interiors are so dark and austere that they bear little resemblance to the colourful Late Bronze Age world archaeology has uncovered.
The film has an all-star cast of Hollywood darlings and Nolan favourites, and performances were good across the board, though none are unforgettable. I didn’t mind the diverse casting, and I don’t think a film like this needs to treat ethnic accuracy as a straitjacket. But I would have liked to see more Greek actors somewhere in this, in a story this specifically, insistently Greek. It’s a small thing against everything else the film gets right about wanting to honour its source, but it’s the kind of small thing that would have been easy to fix and wasn’t.
Matt Damon is perfectly capable as Odysseus, but I was always aware that I was watching Matt Damon. Realistically, Odysseus should feel weathered by twenty years of war and wandering. He should look like a man shaped by grief, loss and the Mediterranean sun. Damon grows a beard. For comparison, Ralph Fiennes played Odysseus in a different, much smaller 2024 adaptation, The Return directed by Uberto Pasolini, and he looked the part in a way Damon doesn’t: scarred, weathered, sun-damaged, genuinely worn down by two decades away from home. It’s not a fair fight given the two films have completely different scales and ambitions, but it’s the version of the physical transformation I kept wanting from this one. It’s worth noting that Homer’s Odyssey insists that Odysseus is unchanged by his adventures because of divine help. Pasolini strips the gods from his adaptation. Nolan keeps the magic when it suits his story.
Zendaya was one of my favourite casting choices. As Athena, she says relatively little, yet conveys intelligence, judgement and disappointment through expression alone. Charlize Theron brings real presence to Calypso, though the film never really tells us who she is, more a stage in Odysseus’ journey than a character with a story of her own. Samantha Morton is captivating as Circe, and Nolan takes a bold, debatable approach to his interpretation of her, but explaining why would give away plot, so I’ll come back to her below. The Sirens are handled cleverly too, and that’s a rarer thing than it should be in adaptations of this story.
The pacing was difficult to ignore. At nearly three hours, there were stretches where I found myself admiring individual scenes more than becoming caught up in the story itself. The final hour is by far the strongest. It finally has the urgency that much of the earlier film lacks. The moment that affected me most wasn’t a battle or a speech, but Argos recognising Odysseus after twenty years. It’s a brief scene, but one of the few that landed with emotional force.
Spoilers
Nolan is trying to do something with The Odyssey beyond telling a great story. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but exploring it requires revealing plot points that go beyond the Trojan tradition and are specific to this film. Stop here if you want to avoid spoilers. The sections that follow discuss those plot points in detail, so come back after you’ve seen the film if you’d rather not know them.
If you’re reading this by email, please note that collapsible sections aren’t supported. Spoilers begin below.
The biggest character work happens with Odysseus and Athena, but I’ll start with Circe, since she gets a real reinterpretation of her own.
Circe is generally depicted as a beautiful divine or semi-divine sorceress with vast knowledge of potions and herbs. Sometimes, Circe is described as a witch, and Nolan leans into body horror and a more grotesque trope. It’s a polarising decision. I love what actor Samantha Morton brought to the role. The transformation of Odysseus’ men into swine was very cool. I like good dark and dirty witchcraft on film. This Circe, though, is vulnerable, afraid, and disempowered. She is not Homer’s “dreadful goddess with lovely hair” or the goddess with “flashing golden eyes that shot out rays of light” as Apollonius tells us. Odysseus and Athena get an even bolder treatment.
At the end of the movie, we learn that Athena presents herself to Odysseus as a Trojan priestess killed during the sack of Troy. The film never names her; she’s simply a priestess in Athena’s temple as the city falls. That detail aligns with tradition: it’s Ajax’s assault on Cassandra in Athena’s temple that turns the goddess against the Greeks in the first place.
Odysseus tells those around him that Athena appears to him, and they believe him, which is enough to establish her as real within the film, not just the shape his guilt. The choice to have her appear in disguise is true to the goddess. Athena spends the whole of Homer’s poem shifting shape: a vulture, an owl, the old family friend Mentor, a young man on a beach, a little girl carrying water, whatever a given moment calls for. But every one of those disguises serves a practical purpose: guidance, testing, persuasion, and none of them are chosen to embody a victim or make a moral point.
That’s where the departure actually sits. Homer’s Athena responds to the temple’s desecration with more violence than conscience: she’s the one who works alongside Poseidon to scatter and wreck the Greek fleet on its voyage home. Her fury is for herself, her own honour, and her own temple violated, not sympathy for the priestess who died there. Homer is blunt about this elsewhere too: Athena loves violence, and manipulates events to maximise her own pleasure in battle. A goddess who takes on her own victim’s shape to prompt someone else’s guilt is working from a different logic entirely, closer to a god who suffers alongside humanity than to the honour-bound deity Homer actually gives us.
In Nolan’s The Odyssey, Athena is less the divine strategist of the war and more the moral conscience, reminding Odysseus of its cost. The same uncertainty runs through Odysseus himself. Damon plays him as visibly shocked by what he witnesses during the sack of Troy and then wracked with guilt. That’s Nolan’s usual territory: individual moral responsibility for unleashed forces. We’ve seen it in Insomnia (2002), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight (2008), and, of course, Oppenheimer (2023). Robert J. Oppenheimer builds the bomb, then spends the rest of the film (and, in the myth of the man, his life) wrestling with the fact that he has unleashed something he can’t take back or fully control. But the throughline is less convincing in The Odyssey.
Odysseus is a man who has spent ten years fighting outside Troy, sacking neighbouring towns, killing men and enslaving women and children. Homer is blunt about the brutality of war. The film, by contrast, is not. There are no infants thrown from the walls, no women dragged off and hanged, none of the specific atrocities the tradition doesn’t flinch from. I’m not asking to see that in graphic detail on screen. Yet if the argument the film wants to make is that the sacking of Troy was uniquely horrifying, different in kind from ten years of ordinary warfare, it’s a case that only works on an audience who doesn’t already know what those ten years looked like.
Nolan also brings a new interpretation to the Wooden Horse. Odysseus comes to believe that the treacherous gift ended the sacred practice of xenia. He realises he and his men are the feared Sea Peoples, pirates who do not obey “Zeus’s law”, and bring on the Late Bronze Age collapse.
In Greek tradition, the Horse is certainly a deception, but it’s also Athena’s deception. Odysseus’ metis, his cunning intelligence, is one of his defining virtues rather than an ethical failure. The traditions that criticise the Greeks usually focus on what happens after the Horse: sacrilege, broken oaths and outright brutality committed during the sack itself. Nolan treats the Horse as the original sin that brought an age to its end.
I’m still not sure what to make of the lines near the very end about forgetting and repeating patterns. They gesture toward something larger, a comment on cycles of violence, maybe on the present as much as the past, but the film never earns them. It reads like a message added late, without a clear enough throughline to make its point instead of just implying one. I don’t object to a film like this having something to say about now as well as then. I just don’t think this film decided what that something was before it said it.
And, finally, Nolan gives his Odysseus a happier and more romantic Hollywood ending than the Trojan tradition does, but it’s a more fitting and satisfying conclusion for a Hollywood film.
Where the movie leaves me
The Odyssey is a beautiful film in places, and unafraid of Greek religion in a way many modern adaptations flinch from. I was invested through the final hour. But the anachronisms kept pulling me out of a world I wanted to believe in: the muted palette, the ships that never quite felt right, the armour that drifts from Mycenaean to medieval and back. Some of Nolan’s boldest interpretive choices, too, don’t fully earn the weight he’s asking them to carry.
I hoped I’d like this film, and I did. I just wanted to believe in it more. A well-grown beard wasn’t quite enough.