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Film School: The Odyssey (2026)

The Odyssey (2026) The Odyssey (2026)

From Odyss-A to Odyss-Z: our lessons from Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic.

For the many criticisms I have shared in previous entries, I find three undeniable positives across the films of Christopher Nolan: they are thrillingly propulsive; they look and sound beautiful (the commitment to going the extra analogue mile wherever possible palpably pays off every time); and no matter how grim or austere they insist on being, they are never cynical. Nolan is at least interested in questions of personal responsibility and compassion for others, even if his convoluted explorations of these things usually become muddled and incoherent, and he, tellingly, tends to focus more on guilt than responsibility or (despite what the director has claimed) consequences for others (which… more on that later).

Overall, The Odyssey is everything it promises: an expansive, thrilling epic. Contrary to what the reactionary internet will tell you (we touch on that below), for the most part Nolan finds a balance between modern sensibilities and “period” aesthetics (or at least, what reads cinematically as period… again, we’ll get into that) which is effective and affecting. As with all his films, considerable suspension of disbelief, and just not thinking about it too hard, is required to enjoy what’s presented – and if you’re game, The Odyssey delivers a whole lot. The story is episodic, and some episodes work far better than others. Some episodes find inspired, breathtaking, and even visceral ways to interpret and portray the mythology:

“never get out of the boat” indeed.

Other episodes find the least cinematic or engaging ways to communicate their intent or meaning – and this stands out in such an immersive film, particularly being the first film shot entirely in IMAX.

It helps to bring knowledge of the mythology with you into your viewing of the film – like watching a cover band take liberties with a song you already know, skipping a verse here, altering the melody there – knowing the bones of the thing helps anchor moments perhaps not communicated as clearly or realised as fully as they could be. One example (not a spoiler): in Homer’s telling, Calypso frees Odysseus not out of compassion, but because she is ordered to by Zeus. Nolan’s adaptation chooses not to show the gods literally, which is a valid interpretive and aesthetic choice: it makes the drama of choices and consequences more psychological. So in each scene where Calypso refuses to let Odysseus go, we hear distant thunder, and Calypso is clearly shaken – a wonderfully cinematic portent of dread and the theme of violating Zeus’ law. However, these moments culminate in exposition – so much exposition, in fact, that it makes paying attention to more subtle, purely audiovisual elements feel like a mistake, as though that isn’t the frequency on which you should be engaging with this film. It’s the Christopher Nolan tell-don’t-show approach to film-making: if everything will inevitably be explained to us in the least cinematic way, then why should your brain engage any deeper, or your eyes and ears search for more?

If you’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s other movies, you’ve seen this one: The Odyssey shares their DNA – even their director concedes as much. From The Prestige (2006) and Inception, to Interstellar (2014) and of course, Oppenheimer (2024), this is the story he has told over and over again: a remarkable, tortured man, probably dealing in secrecy and/or deception, just trying to get home. At first blush, all of Nolan’s films are thrilling, beautiful looking and sounding spectacles, and it’s only once you begin to think about them that they begin to unravel. There’s nothing wrong with a movie being silly – some of the greatest movies are deeply, gloriously silly. There is an incoherence, however, to films which traffic in heady concepts and yet don’t stand up to intellectual scrutiny… and here I am, falling into that trap. So instead, I’d like to focus on lessons from the film, the filmmaking, and its reception. Like The Odyssey, our lessons are many and episodic – but rather than non-linearly, they are arranged here in alphabetical order.

Accuracy

The online discourse regarding historical accuracy began months prior to the release of The Odyssey:

“Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.” Emily Wilson, whose popular and controversial 2017 translation of Homer’s original text was one of Nolan’s inspirations, criticised his interpretation at length in her essay in the London Review of Books (and on their podcast). Her review had its own equally vocal detractors. One of her many criticisms: that this film adaptation flattens the character of Odysseus to appeal to modern American audiences (clipped from the full interview with 92NY):

Casting

Folks were quick to debunk the wave of right wing bigotry cosplaying as “hiStOriCaL aCcUrACy“:

IMAX

Writer-director Christopher Nolan explains shooting on IMAX film (via 60 Minutes, CBS):

Matt Damon describes the mirror system developed for this production to allow the filming of standard shot/reverse-shot dialogue scenes with giant IMAX cameras:

Nolan’s championing of the IMAX format led to the development of a whole new camera, the Keighley (via In Depth Cine):

Jokes

The ‘but Nolan got jokes, see?’ replies prove the OP’s point. Nolan’s movies are oppressively grim, and tend to demand more of the viewer than they deliver in return, intellectually or emotionally. While Nolan’s films are populist, they’re also pretentious, elitist, and, as I’ve argued previously, irresponsible. He commissions new technology be invented for his movies, such as black and white IMAX film for Oppenheimer, or the blimp system for this film. He plants cornfields just so he can film a truck driving through them (and then collects profits from them)… I’m getting off track. The point is: the stakes are high, and serious. For films which aim for (and achieve) huge box office success, and are therefore designed for and marketed to the widest possible audience, the resulting “theatrical experience” Nolan champions is, ironically, exclusive: The Odyssey can only be ‘properly’ experienced in 41 theatres worldwide, half of which are in the US. All this in a medium traditionally characterised as much by innovation as by working within restrictions and creative problem-solving (think: the shark not working gave us Jaws), as opposed to always having the budget and resources to not merely move the goalposts, but to build an entire bespoke stadium… The odd cheeky line of dialogue here or there doesn’t do much to alleviate all that.

Music

Nolan limited composer Ludwig Göransson to using only Bronze Age instruments in the film’s score. This essentially turned a musical assignment into an archaeological thesis project (via Universal):

Practical Effects

The production teams for The Odyssey drew inspiration from the ship’s hull when creating the modern Trojan Horse:

The practical Cyclops, puppeteered on location by Bill Irwin:

And as for Circe and the pigs…

Sahara

By filming in Dakhla, “Nolan has basically become an accomplice to Moroccan occupation of western Sahara“, argue María Carrión and Abidin Mohamed Hamudi (via Democracy Now!):

Samantha Morton

Samantha Morton on inhabiting her performance as Circe and those amazing practical effects (clipped from the full interview, full of wild career revelations, with Josh Horowitz):

A bunch more interviews with Samantha Morton on the Circe sequence (via Vulture, Los Angeles Times, and The Hollywood Reporter):

Travis Scott

This is the second collaboration between the director and the rapper, who appears in The Odyssey as the bard. Christopher Nolan speaks here about why he worked with Travis Scott on his film Tenet (2020):

Spoilers (for a 3,000 year old tale)

Bilge Ebiri argues (much more favourably than I’m about to in the next section) that The Odyssey‘s final emotional revelation absolutely nails it:

Zendaya

We’re now well into spoilers – and not just for this movie, but also, in a way, most of Christopher Nolan’s filmography.

The Odyssey (2026)
The Odyssey (2026)

The reveal in the end that Zendaya‘s character isn’t Athena, but is actually one of the many people slaughtered by Odysseus, Agamemnon, and their men in their invasion of Troy, gives us an emotional moment, but deprives us of a far more emotional three hours that could have preceded it. Once again, it’s the director’s patented tell-don’t-show effect. Or, to put it in the director’s own terms, and paraphrase Ducard (Liam Neeson) in Batman Begins (2004):

Nolan sacrifices solid footing for a single shot.

Nolan loves his late-stage twist-reveal toward the end of his films, a single line of dialogue which is supposed to reframe everything that came before it. You’ve seen this before: Talia in The Dark Knight Rises (2012); The Protagonist revealing who they’ve all been working for at the end of Tenet; Cooper’s epiphany in the fifth dimension in Interstellar. How effective or off-putting you personally find it, each twist-reveal is an intellectual moment cosplaying as an emotional beat. Beyond that, it deprives us of dramatic irony throughout the movie: of having this knowledge about the hero, which perhaps even they don’t have, and which adds layers of understanding and feelings about the hero’s choices and their consequences.

At intervals across the film’s three-hour runtime, we’re treated to several minutes of a fragrance commercial starring Charlize Theron, but not a single shot of the seven years of delirious happiness with Odysseus which she only tells him about. This man, who has been responsible for the horror and misery of so many others, and yet who has himself repeatedly escaped death and accountability, now insists on waking up from a dream he need never leave, to a living nightmare of the past he carries with him, and finally facing the fraught future that awaits him. That’s fertile ground for a rich redemption arc for a layered character to whom we were first introduced as an egomaniacal, bloodthirsty monster who has an existential crisis at the battle of Troy, as signified in the intercutting between the two beheadings: of Zendaya’s character, and of the statue of Athena. And yet, we are told, not shown – and the ripples of this approach are felt throughout the film.

The lack of dramatic irony means, for example, that when Odysseus asks his faithful Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), “So it’s mutiny?“, instead of a layered, potentially pivotal moment for the character, it’s a procedural question. Matt Damon delivers the line as it should be delivered: a mixture of hubris and relief, the arrogant leader wracked with guilt that he has broken every law, of gods and of men, and no longer deserves to be followed. But we, the audience, do not know that: the movie has not shown us what he is grappling with, and so it’s just a good actor moment, not an affecting story moment.

This same year, the feature debuts from young film-makers Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, Obsession and Backrooms respectively, are each powered by dramatic irony. They show us early in the story that the protagonist is flawed, perhaps even the villain, and the events which follow pay off the setup, over and over. Furthermore, we’re kept in their POV throughout the film, proving that audiences can indeed sit with complicated, unheroic, even villainous protagonists – and that this can be done to culturally and commercially phenomenal effect.

By saving the Troy reveal for the end, instead of sharing it much earlier in the film, we spend three hours not with a conflicted man about whom we have complicated feelings, but merely with a tired man to whom stuff just keeps happening simply because, hey, the gods be crazy.

Further Viewing

In this lovely interview by political philosophy lecturer and doctoral student Zhong Shu, Christopher Nolan elucidates his interests and intentions in his adaptation of The Odyssey, and addresses (or, as the interviewer puts it, drags) nitpickers like me (via 仲树 and Nolan Archives):

At one screening of The Odyssey, the power went out. So a history teacher in the audience told the story of Agamemnon – just as Homer intended:

@aneilnamedleya

Replying to @Adri | LV NAIL TECH

♬ original sound – neileyajones

A thread (no pun intended) exploring how Penelope could be weaving for three years (via Cora Harrington):

‘The women of The Odyssey‘ photographed by Norman Jean Roy and styled by Law Roach for Elle Magazine…

The women of The Odyssey | Elle Magazine | photographed by Norman Jean Roy

… based on Nolan’s concept for each of the four actress to represent one of the four elements:

So there was a promo spot featuring LeBron James:

Bret Deveraux‘s essay on The Odyssey seems to have gained attention:

Among all the online chatter, folks have shared other adaptations of Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ – including the more historically accurate (at least in terms of armour) The Return (2024), starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche…

… and Franco Piavoli‘s Nostos: The Return (1989), available in full for free on YouTube:

“To make something more immersive, there has to be limitations, because otherwise there are no stakes – and that includes the aesthetics of these worlds.” Prior to the release of the film, Lady of the Library explained the important distinction between mythology versus fantasy in film adaptations – in this instance, what aesthetic choices represent in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey versus Peter Jackson‘s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings:

Speaking of which, The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) made cinematic history in a number of ways – including sharing so many details of its incredible production:

Film School: The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)