The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) adapts Homer's epic as a 173-minute action fantasy about Odysseus (Matt Damon), king of Ithaca, who survives the Trojan War only to spend years lost on a hostile sea. Monsters, gods and enchantresses stand between him and his kingdom, but the film treats each of them less as an obstacle course than as a test of what a man is willing to become in order to survive.

Back on Ithaca, the story runs on a second clock. Penelope (Anne Hathaway) holds a household under siege by suitors who have decided her husband is dead, while their son Telemachus (Tom Holland) — a young man who has never met his father — begins a search of his own. Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, the most dangerous of the men waiting in Odysseus's hall; Lupita Nyong'o appears as Helen, Charlize Theron as Calypso and Zendaya as the goddess Athena.

Nolan spans roughly eighteen years, from the departure for Troy to the return, and folds the war back into the voyage so that memory becomes the film's real narrative engine. Shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film, it was released on 17 July 2026 and became one of the year's largest commercial successes, grossing over $1.5 billion worldwide.

Nolan's central move is to ask what a hero owes to the people he killed and the people he left behind. Critics have identified the film's governing question as what human beings owe one another — a preoccupation new to Nolan's work, and one that reframes Homer's tale of cunning as a story about accountability.

Beneath the sea monsters is the portrait of a traumatised veteran of a bloody and ignoble war. The film's crux, as reviewers describe it, is the moment Odysseus understands why he has wanted to forget his own heroic deeds: because the glory and the guilt are the same memories. Ingenuity that wins a war is still ingenuity that kills a city.

Homecoming, then, is not a reward but a reckoning. To be recognised by his wife and son, Odysseus must first stop being the legend the bards sing about and consent to be seen as the man who did those things — and Nolan grants him a resolution Homer's poem withholds, insisting that the debt can be acknowledged without destroying the debtor.

The redemption reading. Nolan explicitly gives Odysseus and Penelope a happy ending that Homer's poem withholds. Taken straight, the film argues that a man can carry unbearable guilt, name it, and still be received back — that recognition by the people who love you is a real form of absolution.

The Odyssey arrived as a test case for whether the theatrical event film could still be built on classical material rather than franchise IP — and it passed spectacularly, turning a reported $250 million budget into roughly $1.553 billion worldwide and earning an extended IMAX run into September 2026, two months after release.

Its technical legacy may prove the more durable one. As the first narrative feature shot from start to finish on IMAX 70mm film, made with a purpose-built camera ("The Keighley") developed with Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema, it functions as a proof of concept that the largest photochemical format in existence can carry an entire three-hour drama, dialogue scenes included. That has obvious consequences for how ambitious directors will pitch large-format work.

Culturally, the film sits at the intersection of a wider Homeric revival — Emily Wilson's translations, the fandom around Epic: The Musical whose audience seized on the trailer — and Nolan's own post-Oppenheimer preoccupation with men who invent catastrophes. Religious and mainstream critics alike engaged with its treatment of divine law and human obligation, and its reframing of the Trojan Horse as a weapon of mass destruction gave commentators a ready-made lens for reading ancient epic as a war-guilt narrative.

Overwhelmingly positive. The film holds a 95% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes from over 400 reviews, with the consensus praising how Nolan imbues myth with primal human feeling through majestic sweep and the work of a colossal ensemble. Audiences went higher still: a 97% audience score that set a record for Nolan, surpassing both The Dark Knight and Memento at 94%.

Most praised: the IMAX 70mm photography and sheer scale — the near-universal audience refrain was that it must be seen on the biggest screen available; Damon's interiorised, guilt-heavy Odysseus; the ensemble depth; and a screenplay several critics called Nolan's strongest to date.

Points of friction: the 173-minute runtime and the deliberate, memory-driven structure test viewers expecting a monster-of-the-week adventure; some purists object to the departure from Homer, particularly the softened ending Nolan gives Odysseus and Penelope; and the celebrity-dense casting — including Zendaya as Athena and Travis Scott as a bard — drew scepticism before release and remains divisive.

Verdict: a rare case where the blank cheque was well cashed — a technically unprecedented spectacle that most viewers found emotionally serious rather than merely enormous, and a commercial phenomenon at over $1.5 billion.