Review by Adeleke Babatunde

A moviegoer’s full takedown of The Odyssey (2026)

There is a particular kind of hush that falls over a cinema when a three hour epic starts with a man standing on a table telling a story that is not, in fact, the story you paid to see. That is how Christopher Nolan opens The Odyssey, and it is the first sign that this is not going to be the Odysseus movie audiences think they know.

I have sat through most of the previous attempts at bringing Homer to the screen, and I walked into this one carrying all of them like ballast. What follows is my honest, unsparing account of what Nolan changed, what he kept, and whether the new Odyssey actually earns its place at the top of that long and uneven lineage.

The lineage this film is up against

Homer’s poem has been dragged onto film and television for more than seventy years, and almost none of those attempts agree on what kind of story it is.

Kirk Douglas got there first in 1954 with Ulysses, a handsome, stagey Italian production that plays like a filmed opera. It is remembered as one of the more faithful feature length versions, but it is also creaky, full of painted backdrops and a hero who recovers his memory in tidy, expository chunks.

The 1997 NBC miniseries went the other direction. Given nearly three hours across two nights, Armand Assante’s Odysseus gets room to breathe that no single film could offer, and the production leaned on Jim Henson’s Creature Shop for its monsters. The result has genuine mythic sweep, but the creature work has aged into something closer to a fever dream muppet show than the terror Homer intended.

Then there is Troy in 2004, which barely counts as an Odyssey adaptation at all since it stops at the fall of the city, but Sean Bean’s Odysseus became the template every subsequent film has quietly copied: a weary, relatable warrior who just wants to go home, stripped of the gods and the magic entirely.

What connects all of these is a kind of nervousness. Every previous version either leans so hard into fidelity that it becomes inert, or it strips out everything strange and divine to make Odysseus into a relatable action hero, essentially reducing him to an ancient version of a hardened everyman soldier.

What Nolan actually does differently

Nolan’s Odyssey refuses both of those exits.

The most immediate shock, and the thing every review has fixated on, is the dialogue. These characters do not speak in stilted, faux archaic English. They talk like modern people, and for the first ten minutes of the film that choice feels almost like a mistake, jarring against the armor and the ships. Then it stops feeling like a gimmick and starts feeling like the point: this is a story about people, not museum pieces, and Nolan wants you to feel their fear and their pettiness as immediate rather than antique.

The structural choice is even bolder. Rather than opening in the middle of Odysseus’s journey the way Homer does, Nolan frames the entire film as a story being told after the fact, with a bard played by Travis Scott narrating the Trojan Horse sequence from a banquet hall. It is a film about how stories get told and retold, and how the telling itself can distort or preserve the truth. That is a very different animating idea than anything the 1954 or 1997 versions were interested in.

Nolan also inverts the domestic politics of the poem in a way that has generated its own share of noise. In Homer, Telemachus repeatedly puts his mother in her place, ordering her back to her weaving. The film reverses that dynamic entirely, giving Penelope the sharper tongue and the greater resolve, while Telemachus is the one who needs to grow up. It is a significant departure from the text, and depending on who you ask it is either a shrewd modernization or an unnecessary rewrite of one of the poem’s more uncomfortable but historically honest dynamics.

And then there is the matter of practical scale. Where every prior adaptation was hemmed in by budget, whether that meant painted sets in 1954 or rubber monsters in 1997, Nolan shot the entire film on IMAX cameras with real locations and practical creature effects. The transformation sequence with Circe’s men, where hunger slowly turns soldiers into beasts through practical prosthetics rather than a CGI dissolve, is the kind of image that simply was not achievable for any of his predecessors, and it lands with a physical unease that no earlier version could manage.

Sitting in the theater with it

As a moviegoer rather than a classicist, here is what actually registers in the seat.

The film is enormous without feeling bloated, at just under three hours it moves with more urgency than the 1997 miniseries ever did across its far longer runtime. Ludwig Goransson’s score does a lot of quiet work holding the tonal whiplash together, since the film swings between domestic drama in Ithaca, war flashback brutality, and genuinely uncanny horror on the monster islands.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus not as a swaggering hero but as a man who is competent at violence and increasingly uneasy about what that competence has cost him, which is a more interesting choice than Kirk Douglas’s grinning adventurer or Sean Bean’s wry soldier. The ensemble around him, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, and Lupita Nyong’o, is stacked deep enough that some of them barely register beyond a single striking scene, which is my honest complaint rather than a compliment dressed up as one.

The anachronistic dialogue is the single biggest gamble in the film and it does not land cleanly for every scene. Some exchanges feel like they wandered in from a contemporary drama and forgot to change costume, and Nolan never fully resolves whether that friction is intentional commentary or simply a choice he did not smooth out in the edit.

What was Right

Every previous Odyssey picked a lane. The faithful ones felt like homework. The loose ones threw away everything that made the poem strange in favor of a relatable action hero. Nolan’s version is the first to actually risk being both faithful to the poem’s weirdness and legible to a modern audience, and largely it succeeds, which is why it has become the best reviewed film in his catalogue among major critics.

It is not a flawless epic. The ensemble is overstuffed, the tonal pivot into modern speech will not work for every viewer, and the domestic role reversal between Penelope and Telemachus will read to some as a genuine improvement and to others as sanding down something Homer meant to be uncomfortable.

But measured against Douglas’s stagey Ulysses, Assante’s rubbery monsters, and Bean’s demystified soldier, Nolan’s Odyssey is the first version that actually feels like it understands the poem is about the terror and wonder of the unknown, not just a man trying to get home. That alone makes it worth the three hours and the IMAX ticket price.