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. As Emily Wilson, whose Odyssey translation Nolan drew from, said in her review, the film is both grandiose and superficial. 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 draws heavily from Wilson’s translation, but he 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, 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 the gods than of monsters, and he abandons religion altogether, but I appreciated that Nolan retained some key aspects of Greek belief. 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 is visibly present, 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 leads to its destruction, 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 making it sound overly casual 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. Nolan told Empire Magazine he wanted to approach the mythological elements “in a sort of real-world way”, and on those terms I expected Odysseus to 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. By comparison, Ralph Fiennes, who played Odysseus in the much smaller 2024 adaptation The Return, directed by Uberto Pasolini, looked the part in a way Damon never quite does: scarred, weathered, sun-damaged, genuinely worn down by two decades away from home. It’s not an entirely fair comparison, since the two films have very different scales and ambitions, but it was the kind of physical transformation I kept wanting from this one. Homer insists Odysseus remains unchanged by his adventures because of divine intervention. Pasolini removes the gods from his adaptation. Nolan keeps some elements of the poem’s divine framework while abandoning others.
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. She becomes 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 her character, but explaining why would spoil the film, so I’ll return to it below. Nolan opts for the now-familiar mermaid interpretation of the Sirens rather than the bird-women of ancient Greek art, but the sequence is handled well. I also enjoyed the consultation with the dead.
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.
Before I get into my critiques of the film, I want to defend some of Nolan’s choices.
I’ve seen comments online from viewers disappointed that Nolan omits the famous “No Man” episode with Polyphemus. In Homer, Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is “No Man” (Wilson’s translation), so that when the blinded giant cries out that “No Man” is attacking him, the other Cyclopes leave him to his fate. It’s one of the poem’s most memorable demonstrations of Odysseus’ cunning. Yet I understand why Nolan cuts it. His Odysseus is defined less by ingenious trickery than by endurance and the consequences of his choices, so the episode no longer serves the same purpose.
I’ve also seen viewers lament the absence of the Phaeacians. As much as I would have loved to see their remarkable city on screen, it’s a sensible adaptation. In Homer, Odysseus recounts his adventures to the Phaeacians, who then carry him safely home to Ithaca. A film has no need for that framing device. It can simply show us the adventures themselves.
My reservations lie elsewhere. More than any omitted scene or compressed episode, they stem from a shift in the story’s emotional centre. Homer is writing about the grief of war and the struggle to find one’s way home after it. Nolan turns that into a story about guilt. It’s an interesting reinterpretation, but one that ultimately reshapes the film’s treatment of Odysseus, Athena and the Wooden Horse in ways I found less convincing.
Before getting there, though, it’s worth looking at Circe, who receives a striking reinterpretation of her own.
Circe is generally depicted as a beautiful divine or semi-divine sorceress with vast knowledge of potions and herbs; Homer calls her a goddess. 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.
The gods are still present in Nolan’s world, but mostly at a distance. Polyphemus calls on Poseidon after being blinded. Odysseus’ crew slaughter the Sun God’s sacred cattle (Apollo instead of Helios). Calypso appears, though she is never explicitly identified as a goddess, while Scylla and Charybdis become physical dangers rather than the terrifying mythic beings of the tradition. Athena alone appears openly as a goddess. That marks a significant departure from Homer. In the epics, the gods are not simply invoked or associated with natural forces but are active participants in the story, appearing in person, arguing among themselves, taking sides and repeatedly intervening in human affairs.
Nolan also brings a new interpretation to the Wooden Horse. Odysseus comes to believe that the treacherous gift ended the sacred practice of xenia, that he and his men are the feared Sea Peoples, pirates who do not obey “Zeus’s law,” and that they usher in the Late Bronze Age collapse. It’s a bold reading, one that reaches for something larger: a comment on cycles of violence, perhaps on the present as much as the past. I like the ambition of it, though the film never quite earns the reach; it reads more like a message added late than an idea followed all the way through.
That reinterpretation is also, I think, why the gods have been pushed so far into the background. This is more than modern scepticism. Nolan’s argument depends on the Horse being a purely human choice. It can only become the defining violation of xenia, the act that ends the age, if the gods had nothing to do with it. 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, the brutality of the sack itself. Nolan shifts the moral weight onto the Horse itself.
Athena is the exception, and Nolan gives her his boldest treatment of all. At the end of the movie, we learn that she 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.
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 of his guilt. The choice to have her appear in disguise is true to the goddess. Athena spends the whole of Homer’s Odyssey 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. In the Odyssey, she is primarily Odysseus’ patron and guide. Every one of those disguises serves a practical purpose: guidance, testing or persuasion. None is chosen to embody a victim or make a moral point.
That’s where Nolan’s Athena departs from Homer’s. Homer assumes his audience already knows why Athena is angry after Troy’s fall, alluding to the story rather than retelling it, while the broader Trojan War tradition makes clear that her response to the desecration of her temple is retribution. By taking on the face of one of Troy’s victims to confront Odysseus with the human cost of the war, Nolan gives Athena a moral role Homer never does. She becomes not simply Odysseus’ divine patron but the film’s moral conscience.
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. It’s a familiar Nolan preoccupation: people confronting the consequences of what they have unleashed. 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.
Homer is interested in the psychological cost of war. Odysseus weeps repeatedly throughout the Odyssey, and Menelaus, Nestor and others remember the terrible losses suffered at Troy. Modern readers may recognise symptoms we would today associate with trauma. But their grief is directed towards fallen comrades, years of suffering and the long journey home, not towards the destruction of Troy itself. Nolan shifts that emotional centre of gravity from grief to guilt.
But guilt for what, exactly? Odysseus is a man who has spent ten years fighting outside Troy, sacking neighbouring towns, killing men, enslaving women and children. Homer is blunt about the brutality of war; the film is not. There are no infants thrown from the walls, no women raped, none of the specific atrocities the tradition doesn’t flinch from. I’m not asking to see that in graphic detail on screen. But if the film wants to argue that the sacking of Troy was uniquely horrifying, different in kind from ten years of ordinary warfare, that argument only works on an audience who doesn’t already know what those ten years looked like.
Nolan does eventually make the case explicit. One scene shows villagers fleeing at the sight of the Greeks, setting fire to their own homes rather than face the feared “people from the sea.” Penelope speaks of marauders terrorising the coastline, and Odysseus eventually realises that he and his men are them. Nolan’s message seems to be, “We’re the bad guys.” The problem is that the revelation arrives too late. The Greeks have already spent a decade raiding and plundering and that doesn’t end when they depart Troy. Homer never hides that reality; Wilson’s translation calls Odysseus a pirate. The Horse may mark the moment Odysseus recognises, in hindsight, what he has become, but the behaviour prompting that recognition is hardly new. The film changes the setting, from besieging Troy to terrorising the seas, but not the underlying reality. That’s why the revelation never convinced me.
Finally, Nolan gives Odysseus a happier and more romantic ending than the Trojan tradition does. In doing so, however, he omits one of the Odyssey’s most famous scenes: Penelope’s test of the immovable marriage bed. In Homer, the reunion is not simply emotional but intellectual, as Penelope confirms her husband’s identity through the secret only the two of them share. It’s a wonderful moment, and I missed it. Even so, it’s a fitting and satisfying ending for the film Nolan chose to make.
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.