The Odyssey Review: Christopher Nolan's Loudest, Most Human Epic Yet
- Sahndra Fon Dufe
- Aug 23
- 12 min read
Nearly three hours, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, and built on a poem composed roughly 2,700 years ago. Here's what actually lands, what doesn't, and why the sound alone is worth the ticket.
Somewhere, presumably, Homer is watching his own 2,700-year-old poem cross $1.3 billion at the global box office, get a Travis Scott cameo, and spawn a Spider-Man salary comparison, and he hasn't seen a single dollar of it. No royalty check, no producer credit, not even a "story by." Whether he has any descendants out there who could theoretically cash in is genuinely unknowable, scholars still can't agree Homer was even one person rather than a name attached to centuries of oral storytelling. But if any bloodline of his is out there somewhere, they picked an extraordinary millennium to finally see a payday.
We covered the box office records and the cast paydays behind this run to Lupita/box office feature piece earlier this week. Now, the actual review.
I saw The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm at Regal Atlantic Station, the way Christopher Nolan built it to be seen. At just under three hours, it's not a small ask. It's also, for long stretches, genuinely one of the best theatrical experiences of the year.
This isn't just a box office story. The Odyssey has emerged as an early Best Picture and Best Director frontrunner for the 99th Academy Awards, with some prognosticators already predicting it could challenge Sinners' record 16 nominations from earlier this year. It would also be Nolan's back-to-back shot at Best Director following his Oppenheimer win, something no director has done with consecutive films.
The Black Film Wire Star rating for The Odyssey is ★★★★☆ (4/5).
The Sound Is the Whole Argument for Seeing This in 70mm
If you're deciding whether the format upgrade is worth it, let the sound answer for you. This isn't a film you just watch, it's one you feel in your chest. Ludwig Göransson's score leans on heavy percussion and unexpectedly moody synthesizers, and when it's paired with the sound design instead of covering for it, the effect is overwhelming. This is his third Nolan collaboration, after Tenet (2020) and Oppenheimer (2023, which won him his second Best Original Score Oscar, after Black Panther in 2019). Where Tenet's score leaned murky and unstable to match that film's backwards-forwards logic, and Oppenheimer's built tension through spiraling strings tracking one man's unraveling mind, The Odyssey goes bigger and more physical, built for a story that's about survival at sea and in battle, not psychological interiority.
The creak and groan of the ships during the sailing sequences puts you on the boat with the crew. The Cyclops's roars land as genuine, visceral terror. Even the sirens sequence, where you never actually hear what the sirens are singing, does its storytelling through sound alone, watching Matt Damon in agony while restrained, hearing something the audience isn't allowed to.
Here's the sirens moment explained simply, since it trips a lot of people up, myself included, on first watch: Odysseus wants to hear the sirens sing because he's the one character in the whole epic obsessed with knowing things, he'd rather suffer and survive with the knowledge than play it safe and never find out. So his men plug their ears with wax so they can't hear the song and steer the ship into the rocks, and Odysseus has himself tied to the mast instead, so he can hear everything but physically can't act on it no matter how badly he wants to. It's not a plot hole, it's the one moment in the film where his curiosity and his recklessness are literally the same thing, restrained by rope. The film shows you his suffering clearly. What it doesn't do quite as clearly is show you why he wanted this in the first place, which is the one piece worth knowing walking in.
The Cyclops, and the Rest of the Creature Work
Polyphemus (played by Bill Irwin, who previously worked with Nolan voicing and operating TARS in Interstellar) is genuinely one of the film's best creative swings. This isn't the bloated, cartoonish Cyclops of past adaptations, including the 1997 miniseries. Nolan's version is lean, muscled, and demonic, and the scene where it grabs a handful of men at once and eats them together is as gross and unsettling as it should be.
One of the film's most quietly devastating performances belongs to John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, Odysseus's loyal old servant, played as blind, a choice that's actually Nolan's invention, not Homer's; in the original poem Eumaeus can see fine. Leguizamo reportedly wore opaque contacts on set for up to 14 hours a day to get the physicality right, and it shows. He's also the film's quiet protector of Telemachus, badly beaten defending him when suitors' men come to kill him, and the raiser of Argos, the dog Odysseus chose as a puppy before leaving for war. Two decades later, it's Argos who recognizes his disguised master first, before any human does, and that recognition is what finally convinces Telemachus the ragged stranger really is his father. Nolan has called this "the ultimate dog story" and cited it as part of what drew him to adapt Homer at all. It's one of the most talked-about scenes in the whole film.
Circe (played by Samantha Morton), the witch who turns Odysseus's men into pigs out of disgust at their untamed appetites, is another standout, unhinged in the best way, and it's Damon's Odysseus who ultimately talks her into turning them back.
Calypso (Charlize Theron) gets a quieter, stranger arc: she nurses Odysseus back to health after his ordeal, falls for him, and the film folds in a lotus-eating device that keeps him from remembering his family for seven years before he finally does and heads home.
Watch The Trailer
Performances: Everyone Is Doing the Work, Even the Villain
Robert Pattinson is excellent as Antinous, leader of the suitors circling Penelope, which is worth calling out specifically: he's playing the film's villain, a man trying to take another man's wife and kill his son, and he's still one of the most charismatic people on screen. That's a real trick to pull off.
Tom Holland plays Telemachus, Odysseus and Penelope's son, with real heroism and charisma, though his character's fighting doesn't quite match the training he's supposed to have, a small logic gap in an otherwise strong arc and performance.
Anne Hathaway is the film's quiet powerhouse as Penelope, making sharp, specific performance choices throughout, her devotion to Odysseus never reading as passive even while an entire hall of suitors circles her. Damon anchors it all as Odysseus, and the combat in the film's final stretch, when he single-handedly turns on every suitor in his home, is some of the best in the film.
The journey itself is relentless: the wrath of the sea gods, Circe's island, a multi-headed sea monster picking off men one by one, a stretch in Hades confronting the men he couldn't bury properly. There's a recurring, almost ritual image of the crew running for their ship, whether they're fleeing giant, silent-killing warriors, Circe, or the dead. It works as a structural heartbeat for the whole film.
Zendaya plays Athena, Odysseus's protector and guide, in a role with limited screen time that still lands as one of the film's most talked-about elements.
The rest of the ensemble backs that up. Damon leads as Odysseus, Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, leader of Penelope's suitors, Odysseus's protector and guide, and Charlize Theron plays the enchantress Calypso. The ensemble's geographic and cultural range runs deep: Nyong'o and Zendaya anchor two of the story's most pivotal roles as Black women, while South African-born Theron plays one of the film's most memorable supporting figures.
And two casting choices are doing quiet, deliberate work for Black representation beyond Nyong'o. Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton, In the Heights) plays Polybus, one of Penelope's suitors. And Travis Scott, making his acting debut, appears as the Bard, the first voice heard in the film. Nolan cast him deliberately, drawing a direct line between the oral tradition that carried Homer's poem for centuries and the lyricism of modern rap. Scott also co-wrote and performs the film's end-credits track.
The Genre Has Cast Black Women Before. It Has Never Cast Them Like This.
As we wrote when we first covered this film: in 1954, Kirk Douglas's Ulysses gave the world an all-white, Mediterranean-exoticized vision of Homer. In 1997, NBC's two-part miniseries cast Vanessa Williams as Calypso, the enchantress who waylays Odysseus on a single island for a single stretch of the story, a supporting role in a story that was never hers to carry.
Nyong'o isn't a stop on this journey. She's the axis it turns on. Helen is the reason the Trojan War happens at all, and Clytemnestra is the sister whose fury reshapes what comes after it. Nolan's film uses that dual casting to strip away the myth's flattest read of Helen, the idea that she is merely beautiful and therefore blameless or guilty by default, and Nyong'o is doing that work in two bodies at once.
Worth being precise here too: Nyong'o, born in Mexico City and raised in Kenya, and Theron, born and raised in South Africa, are both African by nationality. Zendaya, who anchors Athena, is Black American, not African. All three are part of what makes this cast's Black representation genuinely significant, but the "African" distinction specifically belongs to Nyong'o and Theron.
Who Got Paid What
Reported figures for the cast: Damon topped the sheet at $15 million as the lead. Holland took home roughly $10 million for Telemachus, on top of the Spider-Man payday we covered in our last piece. Theron earned an estimated $5-6 million as Calypso, and Zendaya around $5 million as Athena. Hathaway negotiated $4-5 million as Penelope, and Pattinson reportedly landed between $1.5-3.5 million as Antinous. (Nyong'o's individual film salary hasn't been publicly reported, separate from her broader net worth, which we covered in our last piece.)
The real story, though, is Nolan's own deal. After his split from Warner Bros. following the studio's 2021 day-and-date HBO Max decision, Nolan signed with Universal on a first-dollar gross arrangement, meaning he and producing partner (and wife) Emma Thomas take a cut of box office revenue from the very first ticket sold, not just after the studio recoups costs. With the film's $250 million production budget (roughly $375 million including marketing) now pushing past $1.3 billion worldwide, that deal could make this the single largest payday of Nolan's career.
Lupita Nyong'o plays a dual role as Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, and it's worth being precise about what that relationship actually is, since it's easy to walk out of the theater without fully grasping it. Mythologically, the two are usually described as half-sisters, both daughters of Leda, but Helen fathered by Zeus and Clytemnestra by the mortal king Tyndareus (some older tellings call them twins hatched from the same egg, which is where that confusion comes from). Helen married Menelaus. Clytemnestra married his brother, Agamemnon.
Here's the actual chain that connects them, and it's the emotional core the film is quietly built around: Helen leaves Menelaus for Paris of Troy, which starts the war. To sail for Troy, the Greek fleet needs favorable winds, which a prophet says requires Agamemnon to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia. He does it. Years later, when Agamemnon comes home from the war, Clytemnestra kills him for it. One sister starts the war. The other pays for it, and avenges it. That's a genuinely devastating throughline for one actress to carry in two bodies, and it's a sharper way to think about the casting than "twins."
That said, Nyong'o's actual screen time is limited, less than the marketing around her casting might suggest. Zendaya and Theron both have noticeably more time on screen than she does.
Behind the Camera: Where This Sits in Nolan's Career
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has crossed $1.3 billion at the global box office, officially making it the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time and the biggest movie of Nolan's career, ahead of 2012's The Dark Knight Rises. It is still climbing. China opens later this month.
This is Nolan's biggest film ever at the box office, ahead of even The Dark Knight Rises, but creatively it's a genuine departure. Unlike his usual nonlinear, puzzle-box instincts (Memento, Tenet, Dunkirk), The Odyssey is surprisingly linear, arguably even more linear than Homer's original poem. Where the film gets its "Nolan-ness" is in how it cuts into flashback mid-conversation, as if memory itself is interrupting the characters as they speak.
The cinematography, from longtime Nolan collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema (Oscar winner for Oppenheimer), is being called some of the best of his career: a deliberately desaturated, almost apocalyptic palette that strips away any "golden age of myth" glow. It's a choice, not a limitation, though some reviewers found certain sequences shot in heavy darkness disorienting on non-IMAX screens.
Fashion: Loud on the Carpet, Quiet on Screen
One thing that genuinely surprised me: the film isn't nearly as fashion-forward as its press tour was. The Odyssey press cycle was one of the loudest style moments of the year, Zendaya alone mixed high jewelry from Chopard and Messika with Grecian-inspired sandals and headpieces, and the tour got compared to Barbie's pink takeover and Challengers' tennis-core moment. On screen, costume designer Ellen Mirojnick (also Oscar-nominated for Oppenheimer) went the opposite direction entirely: mostly handmade, deliberately unglamorous, built to do narrative work rather than deliver an iconic look. Penelope's pleating signals structure held under pressure. Calypso's linen signals she exists outside time. It's a real contrast to a film like Dune: Part Two, where the press tour fashion and the on-screen costuming reinforced each other. Here, it's the opposite: glamorous off-screen, deliberately de-glamorized on-screen. Impressive up close, but nothing that lands as an instantly iconic image the way the red carpet did.
It's a sharper split than genre norms too: Black Panther proved a Black-led epic's on-screen costuming could become the cultural moment itself, spawning New York Fashion Week collaborations and an "Afrofuturism" movement, while Gladiator leaned into deliberately stylized, non-historically-accurate Roman armor precisely because audiences wanted spectacle, and The Odyssey went the opposite way on purpose, choosing narrative accuracy over either kind of iconic image-making.
How Close Is This to Homer, Actually?
Closer than the internet outrage cycle around the trailer suggested, and closer than you'd guess from how much creative liberty Nolan clearly takes. Structurally, nearly every major stop from the poem shows up on screen: Polyphemus, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis (the sea monster and the whirlpool, combined into the multi-headed creature sequence), Circe, Calypso, and even the trip to the edge of Hades. Nolan also kept Homer's nonlinear structure, the poem itself starts near the end of the story and fills in Odysseus's journey through memory, which happens to line up naturally with Nolan's own directorial instincts.
Where it departs is in the deeper texture: Homer's Circe is a dangerous, morally ambiguous enchantress, while Nolan's version reframes her as a woman radicalized by the trauma of war, using magic as revenge rather than mischief. The gods are largely stripped out or reduced (no Athena physically intervening every few chapters the way she does in the text), and the film leans into a real historical theory, that the Bronze Age Greek world Homer describes was actually collapsing under invasion from the mysterious "Sea Peoples," giving the whole story a doomsday undercurrent that isn't explicit in the original poem.
Compared to prior adaptations: the 1954 Ulisse and the 1997 NBC miniseries both aimed for straightforward, tunics-and-monsters fidelity to the text, with mixed results (the '97 version's Jim Henson-designed creatures reportedly landed somewhere between mythic and Muppet). Nolan's version is the first big-budget English-language adaptation to treat the poem less like a monster-of-the-week adventure and more like a war-trauma narrative, which is a real and useful upgrade if you're looking for a version of this story with emotional stakes rather than just spectacle.
The Ending
By the time Odysseus makes it home, disguised, watching his own house before he acts, there's real regret sitting underneath the triumph. The film ultimately frames the glory of the Trojan War as something that clashed with how Odysseus actually experienced it, tied to the idea that the war itself began by breaking the old ways, trade, hospitality, trust, disguised as "a gift to Athena" that was really a trap.
Verdict
★★★★☆ (4/5)
The Odyssey is not a perfect film. The writing has real gaps (Telemachus's arc chief among them), and the visual choices won't work for everyone in every format. What keeps it from a 5 isn't ambition, it's execution in a few specific places: some sequences shot in heavy darkness lose clarity outside IMAX, Nyong'o's screen time doesn't match the weight the marketing put on her casting, and a few emotional beats (the sirens especially) trust the audience to fill in context the film doesn't fully provide.
What earns the 4: as a theatrical experience, especially in IMAX 70mm, this is one of the most physically overwhelming things in theaters this year. The sound design alone justifies the format upgrade. The performances are uniformly strong, even from actors playing the story's villains. And the ending earns an emotional weight that a lot of Nolan's colder, more cerebral work (Tenet, Interstellar) has struggled to reach. This is Nolan working at the edge of his range, mythic scale with genuine feeling underneath it, and it mostly lands.
The Odyssey is currently playing in wide release. Runtime: 2 hours 52 minutes. Rated R.
Read our coverage of the film's record-breaking box office run and the cast's massive collective payday here to Lupita/box office feature piece and follow the film’s journey on Instagram.
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