It’s a BIG movie day, movie buffs! The latest from Christopher Nolan, THE ODYSSEY, has hit theatres in many different viewing options. Both Paul & myself got to see the movie in our respective cities and we have our respective (and somewhat different) reactions below! Read on.
About: Twenty years have passed since Odysseus left for Troy (ten years at war, ten years lost at sea). Back in Ithaca, a mob of arrogant suitors has overrun his palace, consuming his wealth and courting his wife, Penelope. His son, Telemachus, is helpless against them until the goddess Athena intervenes. Disguised as a mentor, Athena encourages Telemachus to travel to Pylos and Sparta to seek news of his father, which gives him the confidence to stand up to the suitors.
Paul’s Reaction: Christopher Nolan is the cinematic master of time. From Memento (a film told in reverse chronology) through Dunkirk (with multiple story lines about the famous battle being jumbled in terms of when events occur), Nolan has used the medium of cinematic story-telling to shuffle classic narrative timeline elements in fresh and revealing ways. And so it is with this summer’s most anticipated original epic. Not only does Nolan go back in time to adapt a three thousand year old Homeric poem to comment on the continued moral transgression of waging war, he does it through the use of flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks. This is not inconsistent with the source material, which is probably the oldest bit of narrative storytelling on record, which famously utilized a narrator and then switched to Odysseus himself to tell his epic tale of trying to find his way home following the ten-year Trojan war in flashback (you know the one, where the conquerors hid inside a large horse presented as a gift in order to invade and massacre the residents of Troy). During the twenty years since departing for war, Odysseus’ wife, Queen Penelope, has been fighting off suitors and watching her son grow, ready to claim the throne of Ithaca. Along the lengthy way back from battle, Odysseus encounters man-eaters, a cyclops, sirens and Circe, who turns his crew into pigs. But the tone is not Ray Harryhausen/Jason and the Argonauts gee-whiz special effects. In fact, the film generally eschews CGI effects and goes for more realistic puppetry and in-camera effects, in keeping with the film’s overall dark and somewhat lugubrious tone.
Unlike Oppenheimer, which built momentum as the race to come up first with a nuclear bomb to end WWII, propelled the narrative into a fast-paced three-hour biographical epic, The Odyssey is much more deliberately paced, as Nolan carefully sets up the narrative pieces that will pay off in the film’s final payoff. But this film does feel three hours long, not because of inept editing, but because Nolan is trying to convey the existential ennui experienced by the diminishing number of the faithful, awaiting the King’s return after twenty years of absence. Every generation gets the epic filmmaking that reflects the values of its era, and it is often not a flattering mirror to what mass audiences will go out to support. The racist legacy of slavery in the 1910s’ Birth of a Nation, a country torn apart through civil war in the 1930s’ Gone With the Wind, traditional Judeo-Christian biblical beliefs in the 1950s’ Ben-Hur, colonialist exceptionalism in the 1960s’ Lawrence of Arabia, the limits of human chutzpah in the 1990s’ Titanic, etc. The Odyssey, despite being the oldest classic template for the homecoming quest storyline, has now been served up as a serious rumination not on the folly of war per se, but how the type of wars we are now engaged in (Middle East, Iran, Ukraine) transgress against the moral rules of the gods. The Odyssey is therefore time well-spent, despite its pacing, especially in IMAX.
Rating: 9 out of 10
Jason’s Reaction: There is always a sense of excitement and overall movie-lover when a new Christopher Nolan movie arrives in cinemas. IMAX tickets are sold far in advance, there’s talks about theatres selling out and as he’s a favourite filmmaker of many, his films are almost always put on a pedestal as an event not to be missed, and even sometimes to be seen more than once. Even I raved about just heading out to see the movie on my weekly CFAX radio show and I too was geeking out in seeing his latest movie on my favourite movie screen in Victoria.
And then I finally went to see the movie on that same quiet Thursday afternoon, and my heart sank as his latest movie played out. To say that THE ODYSSEY is a disappointment might be too strong; I was just…watching it and wondering why this isn’t working well as some of Mr. Nolan’s previous movies. Going in and expecting one of the best movies of 2026 was probably a little too high as I know I have mild issues that have plagued his movies for the last several years (hard to follow storylines, bad dialogue, sound mixing issues), and all of them are very much present in this presentation. It kind of hits with a dull roar, never recovering, but nothing BAD. Just…THERE.
There’s a part of the storytelling here that starts out pretty good. We’re almost thrown right into the action on Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his journey and all of the many characters and era that I won’t get into here. As per tradition in Mr. Nolan’s films, he jumps all over the time frame without being too forward about it; you usually have to just figure it out by characters’ hair being more grey than in another scene. This isn’t as bas as in something like Nolan’s TENET, which expected you to remember what a Temporal Pincer was without very much explanation, or when one character says a sentence early on and you have to remember that pay off 90 minutes later.
For all of the heyday about filming in IMAX and hoping for massive vistas, I felt very little of that actual format being utilized. Most of the movie takes place with people talking in rooms, walking down dirt roads also talking, or when there are supposed to be bigger battle sequences there were just a few people moving around. Where IS everyone? A lot of what I felt should be “bigger” and grand sequences just felt….empty. I also noticed this in DUNKIRK where only some sequences had a lot of people waiting around on the beach awaiting rescue even though the actual number was much higher. There weren’t enough extras available, I suppose.
And what I felt should be “big set pieces” also feel truncated. A portion of the Trojan Horse sequence climaxes to what feels about a dozen troops eventually getting in through the doors feels really weak. There’s another sequence a very dangerous whirlpool and yet I never felt that much danger aside from a few fleeting shots of the outskirts of the water and less of any actual fear of a ship possibly falling in. These are just a few examples of where I wish Nolan wouldn’t be so stubborn and actual employ some visual effects work or get more into the action.
Many of the casting decisions here vary. Damon is outstanding here as Odysseus and I also quite admired Tom Holland as Telemachus and I could tell both of them really understood the assignment. John Leguizamo (aka. Bob Trevino Forever) as Eumaeus also quite works here in roles over varying age and also solid work from the likes of Robert Pattinson, Zendaya and Charlize Theron just to name a few. And yet several casting choices that previous criticism like Lupita Nyong’o and Elliott Page are featured so little here that you can overlook them. The most bewildering one to me was Mia Goth who plays the maid Melantho, a maid-servant, who looks like she dropped into these times via cosplay and has some baffling lines and reactions, one of which was so bad that I was this close to yelling out loud “THAT is the take you’re going with, Nolan? REALLY?”
With all of this, THE ODYSSEY isn’t a complete failure and is what I feel like a step backwards for an otherwise strong filmography for Mr. Nolan. Perhaps it’s also just the genre and type of storytelling that also isn’t my favourite either, but I still was very underwhelmed. I still encourage you to go out and see this and come to your own take on this movie, especially if you are near a really good theatre screening this one.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Boring Tech Notes: This movie was shot entirely in the IMAX film format, yet there aren’t terribly many great examples of the format actually AT use and even one major technical error in the movie involving a bad focus pull between two characters. I watched this in a traditional auditorium in the widescreen format, and as this movie is also composed for the “scope” format I prefer to watch movies this way if the option is there. If you have a really good theatre that has good presentation quality, just go for it.
