By taking one of the oldest stories and finding new meaning within it, Christopher Nolan has created the most timely film of his career, asserts Mayur Sanap.
Key Points
- The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s most poignant love story yet.
- Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen has sparked endless online discourse. Much of it misses the point.
- A story written nearly 3,000 years ago feels painfully relevant today, speaking eloquently to the world we live in.
Christopher Nolan’s last film Oppenheimer ended with one of the bleakest images ever put on screen. The irreversible nuclear arms race turns humans against one another as fire engulfs our planet. The scene acts as a metaphor for J. Robert Oppenheimer’s looming dread, with his guilt becoming the film’s final note.
There is something about guilt that keeps finding its way back into Nolan’s films. It haunted Leonard Shelby in Memento, Will Dormer in Insomnia, Bruce Wayne throughout The Dark Knight trilogy, Cobb in Inception, Cooper in Interstellar, and now it consumes Odysseus in The Odyssey.
Based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic, the film takes an inward look at what victory actually means when the cost is your humanity. The story is a perfect fit for Nolan’s style, where he places a deeply personal journey inside a much larger story.
In many ways, The Odyssey serves as a companion piece to Troy, which was based on Homer’s Iliad and was once a film Nolan was briefly attached to direct. While the 2004 epic was about the spectacle of war, this story explores its aftermath and the journey that follows.
As an adventure film, The Odyssey has everything audiences expect from a story of this scale. There are gods, goddesses, monsters, creatures, and breath-taking IMAX imagery that absolutely demands the biggest screen possible.
But beneath all that spectacle lies an intimate story about human guilt that war and violence leave behind.
What’s remarkable is that a story written nearly 3,000 years ago feels painfully relevant today, speaking eloquently to the world we live in.
The Odyssey‘s Classic Tale
The story begins years after Troy has fallen.
Eighteen years have passed since King Odysseus (Matt Damon) sailed away from Ithaca to fight the Trojan War. Back home, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) has spent nearly two decades waiting for a husband everyone else believes is dead. Her palace is filled with opportunistic suitors who refuse to leave.
The literal embodiment of these corrupt men is Antinous (Robert Pattinson), who hopes to marry Penelope and claim Ithaca’s throne for himself.
Odysseus’ son Telemachus (Tom Holland) has grown into adulthood without ever truly knowing his father, only hearing stories about him from their faithful blind servant (John Leguizamo).
Far from home, Odysseus continues his treacherous journey with his few men. The voyage becomes an endless test of endurance as the wrath of the gods, terrifying monsters and supernatural forces continue to challenge Odysseus’ return home.
Nolan’s Most Accessible Work
Unlike Troy, where the Trojan War was the main event, The Odyssey treats it as a ghostly memory.
The strongest aspect of this adaptation is the way guilt takes physical form throughout Odysseus’ journey. The film depicts that lingering trauma through Zendaya’s mysterious presence. She appears again and again, almost like conscience. Whether she is a goddess, a hallucination or simply the voice inside his own head hardly matters, it remains something Odysseus can never outrun.
Odysseus’ journey moves between the past and present in a non-linear manner as Nolan refuses to spoon-feed the audience, while introducing timelines, geography and mythology. But this isn’t another puzzle-box like that familiar loop-within-loop storytelling from his usual sci-fi dramas.
Here, the structure is less about challenging the audience and more about serving the emotional journey of the character.
That’s what makes The Odyssey feel surprisingly grounded despite its larger-than-life setting. The spectacle is always in service of the emotion. If you have read Homer’s poem, there is no trouble following where the narrative is headed. Even if you haven’t, this is probably Nolan’s most accessible screenplay.
Nolan’s Most Poignant Love Story
The Odyssey is also Christopher Nolan’s most poignant love story yet.
We have seen him explore romance before. Cobb and Mal in Inception, Cooper and Brand in Interstellar, even Oppenheimer’s complicated relationship with Jean that ultimately leaves him devastated. But here, love isn’t a subplot.
It is treated as the reason the story exists.
Odysseus is a man fighting against impossible odds to return to his homeland. To his son. To his kingdom. Because that’s the promise he has made to his wife.
Penelope is waiting for a man she doesn’t even know is alive. Years pass. Hope fades for everyone else around her, but not for her.
Much like the ache of Veer Zaara, here too, love is measured by the faith that one day you will find your way back to each other. That faith becomes the emotional crux of the story.
There are some beautiful moments where Nolan completely trusts the performances to carry the emotion.
An Acting Showcase
Matt Damon delivers one of the finest performances of his career. His Odysseus isn’t the swaggering warrior pop culture has conditioned us to expect. He is tired. Haunted. And ridden with unspeakable guilt.
But as a man determined to find his way back home, he is astute enough to rely on his intelligence and find his way through impossible situations.
Looking back at his career, it almost feels like this role was inevitable for Damon.
From Saving Private Ryan to Dogma to The Martian and even Interstellar, his filmography is a collection of reluctant heroes trying to return home. This feels like the culmination of that recurring screen persona. The man is top-notch in the role.
As amazing as Damon is, Anne Hathaway walks away with my absolute favourite performance in the film. Her Penelope is not written as someone waiting to be rescued. She plays patience as an act of resilience. Hathaway shows her a powerful emotional strength beneath Penelope’s restraint, making both the quiet moments and the bigger dramatic scenes equally effective.
Another standout performance comes from Samantha Morton. She creates a feeling of genuine unease as Circe, whose power over Odysseus’ men becomes one of the film’s eeriest stretches.
Tom Holland performs capably as Telemachus, although the screenplay leaves him slightly underdeveloped compared to the central relationship between Odysseus and Penelope.
Elliot Page plays the Greek soldier named Sinon, who convinces the Trojans to bring the wooden horse inside their city walls. The character is a creative liberty, but it works well as he adds a human element to the story.
Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen has already sparked endless online discourse. Much of it misses the point. Great stories have always evolved through re-interpretation, as long as the changes serve the story. Denzel Washington has played Don Pedro in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing and later portrayed the titular role in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. We have an example of Ben Kingsley playing Mahatma Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.
In this story, Helen isn’t simply ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. She is an idea. A symbol powerful enough for kingdoms to destroy themselves over. Nyong’o’s character represents that burden. Whether her casting matches everyone’s idea of Helen matters less than what her character brings to the story.
The way Nolan has approached it makes any complaints feel like nitpicks for this narrative. And Nyong’o, as watchable as she always is, is striking in a brief role.
That said, not every supporting performance lands with the same impact.
I couldn’t help imagining someone like Charlize Theron bringing even more mystique to Calypso, the immortal who keeps Odysseus trapped on her island for years. But the character isn’t given enough time or depth to truly make her presence memorable.
Likewise, Robert Pattinson is reliably entertaining as Antinous, but the character never develops enough menace and often feels more like a caricature as a result.
Unlike Troy, which killed off Menelaus, this film reimagines him as a sadistic figure played by Jon Bernthal. Himesh Patel makes the most of his limited role as Odysseus’ commander. Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon, under all the heavy armour, is little more than a footnote.
Dialogue Stumbles
If there’s one area where The Odyssey occasionally falls short, it’s the dialogue.
Nolan deliberately avoids the faux-Shakespearean style that we often hear in western historical epics, and that is understandable. The decision to use modern language makes the film more approachable, especially for audiences unfamiliar with Homer.
But at times, the dialogue feels a little too plain for a story of this scale. The ideas are profound, but the words expressing them don’t always carry the grandeur you would expect from one of literature’s greatest epics.
Considering how visually and emotionally ambitious the film is, the dialogue occasionally struggles to reach the same heights.
Fantasy That Needed More Wonder
For me, the biggest excitement surrounding The Odyssey was, of course, seeing Christopher Nolan finally step into full-blown fantasy.
Unlike the Ralph Fiennes-starrer The Return, which bypassed Homer’s mythical and supernatural elements, Nolan fully embraces them. The one-eyed Cyclops, the giant Laestrygonians, the six-headed sea monster Scylla, the deadly whirlpool Charybdis — it’s all there. But they don’t fully achieve the overwhelming sense of awe or wonder. Some encounters feel almost muted such as The Sirens, whose songs put the voyagers to death.
These fantastical elements feel annoyingly restrained because Nolan seems determined to not indulge in fantasy as visual excess. That’s a bummer because it’s like imagining Dune while barely showing the sandworms.
The technical achievement with practical effects is there, but these scenes remain surprisingly brief and don’t leave the strong impression they should.
I just kept wishing they had gone one step further.
Nolan Assembles His A-Team
If Oppenheimer felt like the culmination of Nolan’s long-standing creative partnerships, The Odyssey proves that the team he has assembled around him continues to operate at their optimum.
Composer Ludwig Goransson is a madman! I am still in the haze from last year’s Sinners soundtrack, and I already feel like I need The Odyssey‘s OST after the remarkable work he has put up.
The score during the Trojan Horse sequence is heart-pounding, and later in the quieter moments between Odysseus and Penelope, it feels almost spiritual. He elevates every scene, big or small, with magnificent score.
At this point, calling him Hans Zimmer’s successor almost feels unfair because he has carved out a voice that is entirely his own.
The most unexpected composition comes with Travis Scott (who previously created The Plan for Tenet). The film opens and closes with his presence, using his vocals in the form of oral poetry, mixing up an ancient form of storytelling with something modern. It is a bonkers idea, but it makes perfect sense once you see it come together by the end.
Nolan’s frequent collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema somehow finds new ways to outdo himself.
The practical photography makes all the difference. When waves crash into Odysseus’ ships, you feel their enormous force. Every journey across the sea feels terrifyingly real, and that physicality is something very few modern blockbusters still manage to capture.
As the centerpiece action sequence, the decisive Trojan War battle inside Troy City’s walls is easily one of the film’s highlights. The importance of this scene looms large over the story. Nolan builds the tension with patience before it explodes into absolute chaos. It is exhilarating filmmaking. The final 30 minutes elevate everything that comes before.
In some of the film’s most powerful moments, Nolan delivers a climatic stretch that neatly ties the film’s politics, themes and emotional core to great effect, creating the most complete and beautiful ending of his career.
By taking one of the oldest stories and finding new meaning within it, he transforms it into a film that feels timely for the world while also remaining hopeful.
The man who defied the gods was Odysseus. The filmmaker who who keeps redefining what modern cinema can be is Christopher Nolan.
