The Current Debate connects the dots around a topic of the critical conversation.
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026).
It is early into Godard’s Contempt (1963) when Fritz Lang—playing himself as a director helming a big-screen adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey—clashes with an American producer (Jack Palance) incensed by early rushes. The film is not shaping into the grand Hollywood spectacle the unscrupulous suit had in mind; the script is too obtuse, and the “clash between individual and the circumstances,” which Lang sees as the cardinal problem for the Greeks, too difficult for people to understand. Worse still, Odysseus is hardly the hero a contemporary audience might relate to, and while the American bullishly tries to force his modern values onto the myth, Lang insists on the mysteries of Homer’s world. “I think it’s stupid to change the character of Odysseus,” he tells a screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) who’ll be hired to rewrite the movie. “He isn’t a modern-day neurotic. He’s a simple, daring, resourceful man.”
I kept flashing to this sequence during Christopher Nolan’s own monumental take on Homer’s poem, not just because it spoke to the frictions between art and commerce that a $250-million behemoth must inevitably confront, but also because it seemed to speak to a major concern in the director’s attempt to modernize the text. Like several of its predecessors, The Odyssey (2026) straddles the macro and the micro; as seen by The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, “it unfolds in that odd dual register of grandeur and intimacy that Nolan has been busily making his own.” The director “is essentially concentrating this epic poem into a domestic drama writ large,” David Fear echoes at Rolling Stone. “Strip everything away, and it’s a story about a family reunion. Nolan wants that intimate notion of a desperate husband, a hopeful wife, and a son seeking answers to be the baseline. Everything else is just sound and fury.”
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026).
To be sure, the spectacle is nothing short of majestic. “A genuinely grand, gutsy vision, The Odyssey thrills generously for the bulk of its near three-hour running time,” Guy Lodge writes at Variety. “Every few minutes, it seems, it throws at its audience another mighty set piece that, in almost any other summer studio spectacle, would be a climactic standout.” Shot by Nolan’s regular Hoyte van Hoytema entirely with IMAX cameras—the first film ever to do so—The Odyssey kicks off twenty years since Odysseus (Matt Damon), the king of Ithaca, left his native island to lay siege to Troy. The war lasted ten years, with Troy only falling after our hero hid inside a massive wooden horse with a few of his soldiers and opened the gates to the city once it was hauled inside it. That’s all in the past: By the time we first see Odysseus, he is a castaway who’s lost his men and bearings and spent the last seven years high on lotus flowers offered by his captor-cum-therapist, the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron). So addicted to the amnesia-inducing lotus is our man that the incredible feats he’s witnessed on his way home from Troy come to us as hazy flashbacks. We follow him and his warriors over a series of fatal encounters with mythical creatures—a cave-dwelling and man-eating cyclops (Bill Irwin), ironclad Laestrygonians, ravenous sirens, the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton)—which Nolan intersperses with a parallel drama back in Ithaca, where Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) fend off throngs of suitors led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson). The gods, so prominent in Homer’s version, are conspicuously absent here—save for Athena (Zendaya), watching over Odysseus as he sails his way across the Mediterranean. “Nolan structures the journey through flashbacks, parallel plots, stories within stories, and elliptical shards of recollection, all brilliantly assembled by editor Jennifer Lame,” Rodrigo Perez notes at The Playlist. “The approach turns the familiar myth into something dreamlike and unstable, as though Odysseus is reconstructing his life from wreckage.”
The temporal somersaulting and intricate scaffolding won’t surprise anyone familiar with the director’s oeuvre, but it’s the thematic continuity between Nolan’s latest and its immediate predecessor that carries the biggest weight. It isn’t much of a stretch to see The Odyssey—“another somber epic about a man who dares to defy the gods,” per IndieWire’s David Ehrlich—as a sequel to Nolan’s portrait of the “father of the atomic bomb,” Oppenheimer (2023). “Provocatively, The Odyssey shares with Oppenheimer grave misgivings about humanity’s penchant for warfare,” Tim Grierson suggests at Screen Daily; “the two films fear the unimaginably destructive consequences of unchecked bloodshed. In a sense, Odysseus’s journey home is a protracted attempt to make amends for the carnage he has unleashed—not just in defiance of the gods but also against the societal norms that were torn asunder by his soldiers’ pillage of the known world.”
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026).
Grierson is hinting at the Greek word xenia—“Zeus’s law,” in Nolan’s film—an institutionalized form of hospitality that could be roughly translated as an ante litteram Golden Rule: a plea for basic decency. “In the director’s eyes, the Trojan horse, a deceitful sacrifice filled with soldiers poised for slaughterous ambush, should be considered as much a violation of that decency as the suitors who plague Odysseus’s home,” Clarisse Loughrey argues at The Independent. It bears noting that the events chronicled in The Odyssey supposedly take place in the Late Bronze Age, which wrapped with the collapse of many civilizations across the Mediterranean. Nolan sees that cataclysm as fueled not by wars or financial crises, but as a direct result of the transgression of that sacred tenet. It’s a singular reading—one that brings Odysseus’s belligerent world unnervingly close to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s own war-prone America—but it also highlights Nolan’s troubling flattening of Homer’s epic and the multifaceted hero at its center.
As played by Damon, Odysseus is a PTSD-riddled war veteran who cannot overcome his guilt over the ploy through which he annihilated an entire city. In so doing, “Nolan reinvents the Homeric legend as a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion,” writes The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “an epic ordeal of anguish witnessed by the dead and presided over by capricious deities who participate on almost equal terms with the humans.” But Nolan’s Odysseus, per Katie Kadue’s astute take over at The New Republic, “is too simple a man to have a guilt complex.”
He straightforwardly regrets the consequences of his well-intentioned choices and wants to forget them. The Homeric characterizations of Odysseus—“wily,” “crafty,” “lying”—don’t easily stick to the open-faced Damon, and in Nolan’s version, they don’t have to. More than the much-discussed racially diverse casting of the film, what makes The Odyssey feel most like a product of the twenty-first century is its simplification of a character famously described as “polytropos”—“of twists and turns” in Robert Fagles’s translation; “complicated” in Emily Wilson’s—into a basically good guy who feels bad. He’s closer to the protagonists of Nolan’s previous films, or to someone you might meet in group therapy, than to the conniving storyteller, arrogant bully, and cheating husband of the ancient epic.
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026).
This isn’t to say that Odysseus isn’t haunted by the horrors he’s either witnessed or caused—only that guilt is not his single, defining trait. Homer’s hero is an arrogant, loving, horny, benevolent, vengeful warrior; in other words, a man of multitudes. Granted, “the fertility of the template keeps Nolan from writing himself into a ditch,” Beatrice Loayza notes at ArtReview, and Homer’s 27-centuries-old legend is not “above a commercial guise.” But if “psychologizing Odysseus like this lends The Odyssey a readily digestible modernity,” Richard Brody contends at The New Yorker, “[it] does so at the expense of the richness of detail and the societal complexity that makes reading Homer such a vital and immediate experience.”
The suppression of much of the story’s cruelty is more than mere bowdlerizing; it represents an effort to redeem Odysseus for modern times and to render him both sympathetic and tragic. The movie has no room for the Odysseus who, in Book IX of Homer’s poem, matter-of-factly tells one of his hosts about an earlier stop in his itinerary, “I sacked the town and killed the men. We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us.”
All the tormented speeches and regrets Damon’s Odysseus shares along the way sound less like Homer’s heroes than they recall Nolan’s—from the anguished amnesiac of Memento (2000) to Oppenheimer via Batman, his oeuvre is littered with tortured drifters stripped of wit and seductiveness. “Whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic,” Daniel Mendelsohn argues in a brilliant take over at The New York Review, “Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer.”
At the same time, isn’t it the director’s prerogative to adjust the myth to modern sensibilities—even at the risk of shedding some of its enigmas? In a 2025 interview with Empire, the filmmaker admitted he’d read Wilson’s translation, and in a coruscating essay for the London Review of Books published shortly after the film’s premiere, the classicist herself went on to flay the director’s adaptation: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026).
Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.
Wilson need not worry: Nolan’s dialogue, toggling between lyrical passages and more unadorned exchanges spiced with the occasional present-day expletive (“Ten years on this fucking beach,” Damon scoffs to his men after the fall of Troy. “Let’s go home.”), is most definitely not culled from her work. And she may well be right about some of her points, too. I wouldn’t go as far as to call the script “abysmal,” but the film is certainly not immune to its fair share of clunky, expository passages, and for an epic that features plenty of erotic interludes, Nolan’s chaste rendition can feel like a missed opportunity. Yet I cannot help but find it ironic that such scathing criticism should come from someone who—by trading the ornate vocabulary of previous Homeric translations for a simpler language—also sought to make the hallowed text more accessible to new audiences. “Like any other translation,” fellow classicist Theo Nash warns in a brilliant response over at Slate, Wilson’s “is an interpretation.” No one here is debating her understanding and knowledge of the text, “but too often she simply criticizes Nolan for deviating from it, as if the filmmaker’s choices were not also an act of interpretation.”
In a terrific conversation with political philosophy lecturer and doctoral student Zhong Shu, Nolan pushed back against the idea that his Odyssey embraces a Christianized reading of Homer’s poem, in which the hero must “atone” for his sins. If the film lends itself to such modern readings, he ventured, that’s not simply a function of his storytelling choices but of the interplay between those and the values a present-day audience might bring to the archaic source text. “When we create a heroic figure in a story as storytellers, we have to be mindful of the energy the audience brings to that story and the interaction between our intention and the way the audience receives it.” You could read that as a cop-out; to me, it speaks to the kind of tension that fuels Nolan’s entire cinema. After his earliest noir-tinged projects, his films have grown in size and ambition, cementing him as one of the very few Hollywood titans able to graft his idiosyncratic vision onto huge studio tentpoles. “Few directors close the divide between the art film and the blockbuster like Nolan does,” Manohla Dargis reflects at The New York Times, and “fewer still give the audience something to not simply look forward to but also be excited by.”
The most striking thing about this film, other than its being the first feature shot entirely in IMAX, is that it exists. It is an anomalous big-studio entertainment that Nolan has filled with stars—Matt Damon is Odysseus! Zendaya is Athena!—and polished to a high gleam, turning a 3,000-year-old poem into a smart, thoughtful film with Old Hollywood allure. It’s a throwback and of its moment, including in how it adjudicates the costs of war.
More than the IMAX-sized spectacle, the tactility of Nolan’s images, and his shake-’em-by-the-lapels approach, this is The Odyssey’s greatest merit: to have returned one of the foundational texts of Western literature to the spotlight, and invited new generations of viewers—and readers—to find themselves inside it