Nolan’s Odyssey: A Classicist’s Criticisms

Odysseus carries the unpardoned weight of his own misdeeds with him so agonizingly that the king and trickster are almost buried beneath the haunted penitent. One of the strangest of the film’s contradictions is how it is almost utterly devoid of the religious qualities of its literary source while somehow replacing them with an historically foreign variety of religious guilt.

Hendrick van Balen the Elder, Odysseus as Guest of the Nymph Calypso, oil on canvas, ca. 1616. (Image: Wikipedia Commons)

This article is the first in a series of reviews of and reflections on Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey. Reviews do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.

Christopher Nolan is by now nearly the last major filmmaker whose latest work arouses equal interest and adulation among both professional critics and general audiences. He has long since given up on the small and cerebral noir films with which he established his reputation in the early aughts, and for the past two decades his name has become synonymous with grand spectacles whose recurring lead is an intelligent and morally suspect type of hero thrust into the intimidating dimensions of an unfamiliar and unhopeful world. His new opus, already a great commercial success, is an ensemble version of Homer’s Odyssey, a story that naturally supplies him with certain of his preferred building blocks: the spaciously perilous world of Homer’s poem presents a canvas on which Nolan’s hand might have moved with ease without slipping. Its protagonist is the ancient prototype of nearly every sharp rogue and versatile adventurer on page and screen, from Reynard the Fox to the tattooed avenger in Nolan’s early Memento. Such a combination of director and story might have guaranteed, if not a masterpiece, at least a vivid and capable tribute to Homer’s immortal imagination and our earliest tale of high adventure and hairbreadth survival.

Instead of this, Nolan has given us an unshapely muddle. At the bottom of his Odyssey’s failure is the halting and stagnant dialogue the director has composed himself. This is strange and surprising, as Nolan is a practiced screenwriter who has written or co-written the scripts for nearly all of his previous works. Here his ear fails him in nearly every scene: neither his men nor his women, his soldiers nor his peasants sound even remotely antique regardless of their situation. Nolan appears to have been determined to avoid hollow and stilted formality in his lines, which determination is perfectly understandable; but he has fallen into the opposite and equally fatal error of a too-contemporary and largely flavorless colloquialism (“Ten years on this f**king beach”). He has likewise provided his characters with too keen an awareness of their historical situation and made them at moments given to describing it in terms both dull and sententious (“Our Bronze Age is collapsing”). The influence of Kurosawa’s late epic Ran, a free adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, is obvious in certain of The Odyssey’s visuals. It may be that Nolan further aimed at capturing the terse flavor of Kurosawa’s writing and stumbled in the attempt. The aphoristic mode is a style that does not admit of a middle excellence: there can only be definite perfection or visible ungainliness. Here unfortunately is an instance of the latter.

“At the bottom of his Odyssey’s failure is the halting and stagnant dialogue the director has composed himself.“

Burdened with such poorly written material, there is not much hope for the actors at work here, whatever their other qualifications. Odysseus, here played by Matt Damon with a permanent look of troubled bewilderment, appears confused and bereft of device or resource from the film’s opening almost to its end. None of the cunning, foresight or curiosity with which the hero’s name is virtually synonymous appears in any marked fashion. Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, is equally cheapened, being never permitted to show any emotion other than careworn exasperation. Tom Holland’s Telemachus is an unconfident and awkward freshman shoved around and bullied by arrogant older peers. As for the divine and semi-divine personalities, the film’s makers appear to have felt so embarrassed by their presence as to subtract as much of it as might be compatible with a narrative whose source was at least still dimly recognizable. Calypso, daughter of Atlas the Titan and one of Odysseus’ amorous distractions on his journey home, is refashioned according to Nolan’s vision as an understanding healer who cares for Odysseus in the manner of a sympathetic if somewhat bored physical therapist at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Athena is less the divine patron and protectress of Odysseus than the embodiment of his wounded and skeptical moral conscience, which is sensitive to a degree difficult to conceive in the world of Mycenaean Greece. The same may be said of several other characters who point with differing degrees of moral urgency to the criminal enormity involved in the sack of Troy, which is represented as an irreligious violation of “The Law of Zeus.” This expression, which is Nolan’s shorthand for the Greek religious code of guest-friendship, is repeated so often that we may wonder whether he doubted his audience’s capacity to grasp the concept. A wiser means of defining this principle would have been simply to show instances of its observance or its breach, which could have been accomplished without departing from the poem itself.

A reasonable evaluation of how Mr. Nolan has adapted an epic of 12,000 lines should allow that retaining the whole of it was never a possibility. The whole of the Phaeacian episode has been removed, as has Telemachus’ visit to the household of the elderly Nestor. Apart from Athena, none of the Olympian gods appears anywhere. Some of these omissions are more defensible than others. But the film’s more obnoxious faults appear most in what has been added. Nolan, perhaps not finding Homer’s account of the Trojan War thorny enough to suit his purpose, has inserted a few additional complications into his version of that struggle. The elopement of Helen and Paris is only the war’s pretext, its real cause being Agamemnon’s envy of Troy’s economic supremacy. Antinous, chief of the aristocratic suitors, schemes his way out of the draft (mass conscription being another aspect of the Nolanized conflict) and arranges to have a poor substitute sent in his place. During the destruction of the city, Greek warriors decapitate statues of the gods and murder priestesses. The greater effect of these several alterations is to represent this war as exceptionally savage and criminal in its outrages, and that the sensibility of the civilized world recoiled at the report of it. In a bizarre speech, the witch Circe rebukes Odysseus for his and his men’s depredations during the war and the piratical marauding that followed it.

Odysseus carries the unpardoned weight of his own misdeeds with him so agonizingly that the king and trickster are almost buried beneath the haunted penitent. One of the strangest of the film’s contradictions is how it is almost utterly devoid of the religious qualities of its literary source while somehow replacing them with an historically foreign variety of religious guilt.

For all its poor conception, this Odyssey has been shot with an encouraging minimum of computerized effects, and hopefully this will serve to remind other directors that the triumph of ubiquitous CGI is not inevitable. The North African filming locations, standing in for their Greek counterparts, are well-chosen and visually striking. And as the viewer’s eye has so much to feed on, it’s a great sadness that the voice and the heart of The Odyssey should prove so thin and hollow.