© Universal Pictures
Matt Damon in the Odyssey (2026)
Matt Damon in the Odyssey (2026).
Tell me, Christopher Nolan, which Muse whispered in your ear? A $250 million production of an ancient epic poem is almost as daring, in your profession, as the journey undertaken by the warrior protagonist at the heart of The Odyssey. In 2026, they say no one reads poetry anymore, ancient or otherwise (unless it fits on a Hallmark card); they say that everyone’s attention span scarcely extends beyond Instagram length. Despite a running time of three hours, your Odyssey is already a blockbuster. Like Odysseus, you beat the odds.
Ascribed to the legendary poet Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged from stories told around the hearths of ancient Greece about an already long-ago war between the Greeks and Troy, a powerful city on the coast of Asia Minor. The Iliad concerns the war and The Odyssey the aftermath. In the latter, Odysseus, king of Ithaca, departs from the ruins of defeated Troy with his crew of fighters. Instead of going straight home, he decides, as Nolan’s screenplay puts it, “to raise sail and follow the southern wind.” Odysseus wants “to see some of the world,” he tells his men.
And it’s a big mistake, even if you are Matt Damon in an ancient Greek helmet. Eight years pass without a word of his whereabouts, and almost everyone, except his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland), assume he’s dead. Penelope is having a hard time fending off suitors who want to marry her to claim the throne and in this man’s world, she’s doing her best. Bound by oaths to choose her next husband after weaving a shroud, she’s taking her time at the loom. Telemachus has many Hamlet moments as he eyes those men with hostility. Ithaca castle, perched atop a rocky summit, is filled with the raucous hangers-on of those disagreeable suitors. They are parasites. Spoiler alert: they will get their comeuppance.
Unlike altogether too many Hollywood epics set in ancient times, whether Ben Hur or Cleopatra, Nolan’s The Odyssey succeeds because the words sound natural in the mouths of his cast. His screenplay doesn’t force feed contemporary actors with faux-archaic dialogue. Telemachus refers to his father as “dad”—and it works. Armed with Nolan’s script, the actors perform at a high level. Damon plays Odysseus as forceful but capable of reflection. Hathaway’s emotionally determined and powerful performance will surprise anyone who knows her only from The Devil Wears Prada. Holland captures the growth pains of youth as Telemachus navigates a sea of treacherous adults.
Nolan is perhaps the most remarkable director of his generation, capable of showing war from an unseen angle (Dunkirk), reinventing a superhero (The Dark Knight) and plumbing the ethical complexities of science (Oppenheimer). Working outside the norms of shoddy Hollywood product and rough-spun artisanal indies, Nolan films on film, shooting The Odyssey in 70mm for a panorama of sea and sand; intimate closeups alternate with wide horizons, and everything is made vivid by his use of sound. When Odysseus unfurls his long boat’s sail, the flapping canvas fills the screen. It’s Lawrence of Arabia with better scenery, a good reason to see The Odyssey in theaters before it streams.
Nolan cited two cinematic sources for his Odyssey. Andrei Rublev (1966) by Soviet-era Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky for intelligently reimagining the past, Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion monsters populated Jason and the Argonauts and all those Sinbad movies from the 1950s through the ‘70s. Working with cinematographer Hoyt van Hoytema, Nolan does a great job with the monsters Odysseus encounters on his long journey home. Nolan introduces the Cyclops inside a cavernous lair filled with his heavy breathing. A giant hand is glimpsed, reaching from the shadows, snatching one of Odysseus’ startled, screaming soldiers. Little by little, the man-eating Cyclops becomes visible, searching for the intruders with one lopsided eye somewhere near the center of his hairless head. Seizing on that vulnerability, Odysseus blinds the creature while it sleeps. He didn’t stop to think that the Cyclops is the son of Poseidon, ruler of wind and waves.
And so it’s tough seas ahead as Odysseus’ flotilla hops from island to island, their numbers thinning from the deadly encounters along the way. They have a close call with Circe, the proto-feminist sorceress who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs because, well, she insists, that’s what most men are. Odysseus convinces her to reverse the spell. Among the many places visited on the way to Ithaca is the entrance to Hades, where Odysseus meets the men who died under his command, as well as his master, Agamemnon, the Dark Vader-ish king who started a war that should never have happened.
In Nolan’s telling, Odysseus knew from the start that the war with Troy would not be easy. He told Penelope that the real reason was not that Agamemnon’s wife Helen left him for the Trojan prince, but for economic advantage. By the way, we meet Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) in the aftermath of the Trojan War, and man, she is bitter.
Why is The Odyssey still being told 3,000 years later? For one thing, it’s the archetype of a million stories to come. That cornerstone of American literature, Huckleberry Finn? Although Odysseus rides a long boat on the Mediterranean, not a raft down the Mississippi, the concept is the same. And think of “Star Trek” and all those Hollywood road-pictures and action-adventure tales. It’s also a love story and a family story and a saga about the complexity of human nature. Odysseus adhered to a code which he sometimes violated. He did a lot of bad things, sometimes for good reasons. Nolan presents the story creatively without violating its essence. For another excellent recent take on The Odyssey, try Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024) starring Ralph Fiennes as an introspective Odysseus.
