‘The Odyssey’ movie review: Christopher Nolan’s epic palimpsest of destiny and design finds its way home

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The Oscar-winning filmmaker’s most expansive blockbuster also proves to be his most revealing, folding three decades of recurring obsessions into the story that may have inspired them all

Published - July 16, 2026 04:42 pm IST

A still from ‘The Odyssey’ | Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

It remains one of literature’s longest-running debates whether Homer was ever a person at all, or simply the accumulated voice of generations of storytellers gradually refining the same epic homecoming across centuries. Three thousand years since their time, one of the most defining storytellers of the modern age has finally found his way to that very tale, bringing with him a film that feels, in every conceivable sense, like the cumulative expression of everything his career has been converging upon. The Fates conspired to bring Christopher Nolan to The Odyssey. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, it is difficult to imagine a filmmaker better equipped to shoulder Homer’s poem into the 21st century.

The acclaimed Academy Award-winner has now reached the rarefied cultural tier where every one of his major motion picture events arrive pre-canonised in the cultural consciousness (nowhere more fervently than in India). But his adaptation of the age-old homecoming epic does something almost perverse for his most loyal bhakts, peeling away much of the conceptual self-regard that has defined most of his work and discovering a version of himself that feels calmer, more reflective and surprisingly modest. It may be his biggest film, yet it also feels like his least interested in reminding you of the fact.

Based on the foundational Greek epic traditionally attributed to Homer, The Odyssey follows the legendary war hero Odysseus on his arduous decade-long voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, as monsters, gods and his own fatal flaws repeatedly frustrate his return. Nolan adapts Emily Wilson’s more digestable translation of the poem with Matt Damon as the wily king of Ithaca, alongside Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as his steadfast wife Penelope, and a sprawling ensemble that includes Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Himesh Patel, John Leguizamo and Samantha Morton.

Nolan opens the story at the end of another. Troy has fallen, the victors have long since sailed home, and Odysseus remains marooned somewhere between myth and memory after twenty years away from Ithaca. His return unfolds through a fractured chronicle of terrors, temptations and old sins, while back home Penelope and Telemachus struggle to hold together a kingdom slowly being consumed from within by opportunistic suitors.

Looking back at his filmography, it’s difficult to decide whether The Odyssey represents a departure for Nolan or the oldest film he has ever made. He has spent the better part of three decades making films about men simply trying to get home. Sometimes that journey cuts through fractured memory, sometimes through dreams, black holes, collapsing timelines or history itself, yet it almost always circles the same anxiety that whatever waits at the end may no longer recognise the person returning to it. So the deeper Homer begins infiltrating his adaptation, the harder it becomes to shake the feeling that his filmography has been reverse-engineering this story for years.

A still from ‘The Odyssey’ | Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

The richness of this adaptation is in its double act of translation. Nolan renders the epic startlingly prosaic and his instincts repeatedly tug Homer toward modernity. He domesticates the ancient poem into something emotionally legible for contemporary audiences, though deciding whether that amounts to translation or sanitisation proves considerably more rewarding than litigating fidelity to Homer.

Matt Damon ultimately carries that reinterpretation through one of the strongest performances of his career. Homer’s favourite epithet for the titular hero Odysseus, was polymetis (the man of many wiles), which in hindsight feels custom-built for Damon. Be it Jason Bourne, Tom Ripley, Colin Sullivan, Dr. Mann, or even Will Hunting; he seems drawn to men who survive by cunning and deception, and The Odyssey finally gives that screen persona its patron saint. Nolan exploits that accumulated screen history beautifully, allowing us to project those earlier performances onto an Odysseus whose brilliance repeatedly condemns both himself and everyone unfortunate enough to trust him.