To directly answer a question that matters: is The Odyssey (2026) a good movie? A movie that captivates, that honors Homer's masterfully intricate, time-jumping epic, that you must go see, and that you will want to rewatch? My answer is: yes.
[Editor's note: see also Kyle Logan's review for another opinion.]
The Odyssey is, alongside the Mahabharata, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Old Testament, one of the world's foundational tales. It has everything that makes a story this long, compelling, and timeless: action, impulsiveness, resourcefulness, love, hate, conflict, gods and mortals, life, and the mortality of man.
3D Chess with an Epic
The lines of Homer’s Odyssey, recorded some 27 centuries ago, with all their jumps in time, also resemble a complex screenplay. Due to all the flashes back and forward, all the plots and subplots, mythical creatures, and brave, fearful, and relatable people, the Odyssey, also because of its recurring stylistic devices, is something suited for a filmmaker who loves three-dimensional chess.
Filmmakers like Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain, 2003) or before him Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, 1941) were such men, as were Stanley Kubrick or David Lynch. Plus, for example, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, 1999). But especially someone like Christopher Nolan, who previously made Following (1998), Memento (2000), and Interstellar (2014), among others.
None of those, however, tells such a famous story from world literature as the Odyssey. Everyone who had previously heard about Nolan's project realized that this fame and weight, alongside all the tentacles of the story, were also a major obstacle to filming this tale.
Filming a part of the epic, as Uberto Pasolini did with The Return (2024), or using pieces of it as inspiration for your own story, as in Cold Mountain, is not the same as taking on the entire epic and giving it a realistic visual interpretation to the letter, as Nolan envisioned. He wanted to keep the literary original, with all its hardships, sirens, and rosy-fingered dawns, intact at the same time.
Following the massive success of his earlier films, Christopher Nolan also had the credibility and the resources to pull it off. Nolan's films, including Oppenheimer in 2023, brought in dozens of nominations and seven Academy Awards, as well as a cool six billion dollars. But if film history teaches us anything, it is that money and talent are no guarantee of a film's success. After all, Nolan was exploring how he could visually adapt a rich story like the Odyssey, with all its dimensions, as literally as possible.
Exposed on Its Side
Part of that literal adaptation involves the technical execution. The film was shot entirely in the analog IMAX format, the ultimate form of 70mm. Because the film stock is exposed on its side, you get an image with a resolution of around 12 to 18K. The downside is that the number of theaters capable of showing this true IMAX is limited; there are only 41 left worldwide. The film reel for The Odyssey weighs over 250 kilograms and is shipped in sections, which are spliced back together in the IMAX projection booth.
There are a few other disadvantages during filming. The camera is extremely noisy; much like in the early days of sound film, a special soundproofing housing must be mounted around it. An unexposed film reel is so large and heavy that it can only record for three minutes at a time. This requires meticulous planning from the creators and patience from the actors, especially during action scenes.
Yet The Odyssey is filled with action scenes, and a bulky camera in a heavy enclosure is no advantage there. The Odyssey begins with the words: "Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways."
It is the start of roughly twelve thousand lines in which Odysseus needed more than just cleverness, but also the help of gods favorable to him, above all Athena, to survive. To capture that and more, Nolan and cinematographer Hoyt van Hoytema, particularly in action scenes, had to draw on all the experience gained from their previous IMAX film Oppenheimer to compete with Homer and his protagonist Odysseus in his adventures.
Gods and Mortals
Everything revolves around Matt Damon's Odysseus. The actor must have been possessed on set during the long shooting days that left the crew exhausted. Odysseus was a possessed man. In Nolan's film, Odysseus realizes better than anyone what he caused with his Trojan Horse; how it opened the gates to the fury of the Greeks, who had camped before the walls of Troy for ten years and spared nothing and no one.
Unlike Achilles, around whose revenge on Agamemnon the Iliad centers, Odysseus sealed the outcome of the Trojan War. This allowed Agamemnon and the Greeks to return home after their destruction of Troy, while for Odysseus, that journey home to his beloved Ithaca would take another ten years.
The sea god Poseidon, whose wrath Odysseus incurred by blinding his son, the man-eating Cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin), makes the story's hero and his men a personal target. Before Odysseus ultimately ends up all alone under the spell of Calypso (Charlize Theron), Poseidon sends him through many wanderings, precisely filmed and sometimes beautifully rendered by Nolan: from the land of the giants and the island of Circe (Samantha Morton) to Scylla and Charybdis and the revenge of the sun god Helios. It is during the latter that Odysseus loses the last of his crew.
All the more reason he needs the goddess Athena (Zendaya), who is visible only to him. Eventually, the gods, led by Zeus, persuade the reluctant Poseidon to allow Odysseus to return home.
Homecoming
The story of Odysseus's wanderings and eventual homecoming after the fall of Troy must have been told thousands of times, and read millions of times in later eras. It inspired thousands, from Virgil and Dante to Shakespeare, Joyce, and Picasso.
And then comes 2026 and Christopher Nolan, creator of films like Memento (2000) and Inception (2010), with his partly, almost literal rendering of The Odyssey. He does so with an overwhelmingly precise modulation that knows when to stop at just the right moment.
And once again, as in his film Oppenheimer, it is the story of a man who determined the outcome of a war. Even if Odysseus's remorse over the victims of Troy is primarily an addition by Nolan and of our time.