War, Trauma and Memory in The Odyssey (2026)

It’s fitting that Christopher Nolan, perhaps the foremost myth-maker of our time, would adapt one of the oldest epics in the Western canon. Based on Homer’s tale of a grizzled general finding his way home after surviving the Trojan War, this is the first time Nolan has genuinely made me feel something. Whereas his earlier work often seemed to privilege spectacle over substance, what surprised me about his take on this ancient tale is how intimate it is. Nolan's primary focus isn’t Cyclopes or sea monsters. They’re certainly present, but the film is ultimately about what happens when a society betrays the very ideas it purports to be founded upon—when people discover the empire they built has transformed them into the very enemy they imagined.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzw2ttJD2qQ

         The Odyssey famously begins in medias res, with Homer relying on detours and extended flashbacks. That temporally destabilized structure lends itself perfectly to Nolan’s style, which has always been fascinated by fractured chronology. But unlike the gimmicky convolution of Inception (2010) or Tenet (2020), the nonlinear storytelling finally feels purposeful here. Odysseus is trapped on Calypso’s island, trying desperately to remember the life she’s made him forget, and that preoccupation with memory reverberates throughout the other storylines; his wife, Penelope, struggles to let go of her husband’s memory while his son, Telemachus, longs to know a father he has never met. Just like memory, time and perspective refuse to move in straight lines. Editor Jennifer Lame cuts in and out of each POV with impressive fluidity, making its nearly three-hour runtime fly by. A big part of what makes that work is how each new revelation subtly recontextualizes what came before. For once, Nolan’s formal experimentation serves character rather than overshadowing it.

         Matt Damon is fantastic as Odysseus; portraying him as a man so wracked with regret over the Trojan War that he can’t bring himself to face his own family. It’s beautifully restrained, with Damon conveying decades of guilt through subtle facial expressions and slight shifts in his voice. While Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland both give somewhat wooden performances as Penelope and Telemachus, the screenplay develops their characters well enough that their motivations remain convincing, even when several line deliveries fall flat. For a movie so rooted in the epic tradition, much of the dramatic weight here comes from the fragile relationships between its characters and the constantly shifting power dynamics among them. Robert Pattinson is gloriously slimy as Antinous, whose naked ambition is thinly masked, and he shares a great chemistry with Mia Goth’s Mélantho as the two scheme their way toward the throne. By surrounding the royal family with opportunists and only a handful of loyal servants—like John Leguizamo’s quietly affecting Eumaeus—the film makes Ithica’s moral decay feel tangible instead of symbolic. These emotional undercurrents are reinforced by nearly every formal choice Nolan makes.

         I don’t know what goes into creating a handheld shot using an IMAX camera, but I imagine it’s not easy. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema does a wonderful job at balancing lush wide shots that capture the majesty of the landscapes with handheld camerawork that gives the battle scenes a more kinetic, immediate feel. The lighting is pretty much flawless, too. Whether it’s the soft light filtering through a wintry forest or the foggy darkness of Hades, the location photography does a great job at setting tone and reflecting Odysseus’ internal journey as well as his external one. I do think a lot of the practical effects looked a bit unfinished, and there’s a sea monster that has some of the worst CGI I’ve seen in a while, but you have to appreciate the commitment to using real sets and tangible creatures. In a world where AI has become a big part of the conversation, that commitment feels like the antidote. While the score has gotten a lot of praise already, I actually wasn’t a fan of it, especially in moments where James Blake’s vocals or Travis Scott’s production ideas created an almost anachronistic feel with what’s onscreen. It works when Luhrmann does it, but in a film so committed to evoking the period it’s set in, here it feels misplaced.

         In a way, this movie almost feels in conversation with Nolan’s last effort, Oppenheimer (2023). While both center around a man reckoning with his role in the horrors of war, I think The Odyssey is ultimately more effective because its structure carefully traces how trauma, war and memory can become journeys in and of themselves. Sure, it would’ve been interesting to see the story from the perspective of the conquered instead of the conqueror, but that’s probably beyond the scope of both this movie and its source material. As it stands, this is a striking reflection on the present moment, arriving onscreen when many are questioning the violence carried out in their name, when society is beginning to recognize in itself the very thing it was taught to fear.