The Odyssey (2026)

Watched 7/17/26 (theater)

SPOILERS BELOW

The Odyssey is often a breathtaking saga of sound design, set design, music, location work, and IMAX cinematography. It’s easy on the eyes and ears for much of its runtime. Nolan clearly had and executed on a vision. Unfortunately, both due to the story’s limitations and the writer/director’s obsessive fascinations, I just couldn’t get on board with any of the technical aspects that this movie gets so right. It’s surely something to behold, a full-throated use of the well-deserved, post-Oppenheimer budget, but even the sightseeing dulled for me by the third hour of the journey.

Matt Damon is Odysseus, respectably acting like a boring captain of a ship. He makes lots of decisions that people get pissed about, but no consequences ever really come of his decisions. He almost gets mutinized, almost gets sirened, almost gets turned into a pig, but none of it happens and that’s part of the problem I had here. By far my biggest complaint of the film is that absolutely none of the characters will stick with me. Chief among those perpetrators are Damon and his crew. there is zero sense of camaraderie, humanity, or chemistry. These guys have allegedly been fighting together for 10 years and I don’t think anyone asks another a single personal question or makes a humorous comment the entire film. I couldn’t tell you a single one of the crewmembers’ names.

And like I mentioned before, that character issue for me didn’t stop with the crew. If Tom Holland is going to continue playing a 17 year old into his thirties, he’s going to need to keep doing the Spider-Man thing where he gets to be more talky, because I just didn’t buy him in a costume drama for a second. Anne Hathaway is given the shortest stick, forced to play one of two famous Nolan female archetypes. No, not the dead wife…but the asshole wife with nothing to do but complain about her husband! Previously, the most recent victim of being wasted in a thankless Nolan female role was Emily Blunt, another terrific actor. I was annoyed with that. So watching Anne Hathaway have to whine her way through this was unbearable. They make her look old and decrepit and she just has to complain the whole time. It’s brutal… I have no idea why these great actors are saying yes to these Nolan wife roles; it’s bullshit.

And same goes for other actors here. Bernthal is in one scene (really wish he had been on a boat with Damon maybe as the first mate…he could have provided some levity and humanity that this movie really needed). Charlize Theron, who has legitimately never looked better, is somehow completely disregarded, both by Odysseus and the movie. I understand that Nolan is taking cues from the book but why cast someone like Charlize and give her so little to do. I hate that. Plus who the fuck leaves that island where you just hang out in your underwear with Charlize Theron all day?? Hard to watch a guy fumble so bad. And Pattinson did nothing for me. He was just a little bit mean for no good reason? Never really did anything to make me hate him since I didn’t really like Telemachus, who was kind of a bitch. Pattinson could have killed him and I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. Instead, Pattinson is just there doing nothing. He accomplishes nothing during the 3-hour runtime. Zendaya’s another waste. Basically another dead Nolan wife.

So yes, part of the problem for me is that none of the actors are given any room to be charismatic or have any real chemistry with each other. It’s tough. Think back on The Dark Knight, or Interstellar, or The Prestige. People take breaks from the plot to have personal conversations with each other. It helps break up the monotony in addition to getting you closer to the characters and making them feel more real.

And the number one cause of this lack of character is the dialogue. The dialogue and editing style that accompanies it in this movie are the exact same as that of Oppenheimer. The propulsion of the editing is too fast here. In Oppenheimer it worked because you’re constantly being taught or watching problems be solved or watching a court hearing. You feel like part of the team in a way that is satisfying. In The Odyssey, there is nothing to learn—it’s not that kind of movie. The breakneck editing mixed with lines that only serve to drive plot or wax mildly poetic, and the pacing is just so awkwardly rushed as a result. The entire movie felt rushed to me, and it doesn’t help that there’s just too much plot for one <3 hour movie.

So let’s get into the plot and my two biggest gripes with it. The biggest gripe is that Nolan’s non-linear narrative style completely destroyed any sense of suspense or adventure. There is no feeling of danger because nearly everything until the end is being recounted as a story. We know who lives and who isn’t around for the storytelling. It’s a terrible trap to get sucked into for the minute-to-minute of your movie, and it completely destroyed much of the intrigue even for someone like me who didn’t remember everything from reading The Odyssey back in school. I’m no genius, but if someone is telling a story, it means they are alive. And if the people in the story aren’t present for the storytelling, I am guessing they died. Sure enough, in this movie, I was right! So that was a bummer.

And then there’s the actual plot mechanics. So much of this movie deals with going island to island and running into adventures along the way. Mostly bad guys who seek to destroy Odysseus and his crew. Odysseus and the boys show up to each of these islands with cool boats, sick armor, swords and shields and bows that are just some of the neatest looking things you’ve seen in a movie this year. This movie and its costume design look incredible. But, unfortunately, every time they go to an island and run afoul of something evil, they just run away! They don’t even really try to kill these villains. It’s so frustrating.

I get it, the story of The Odyssey dictates this running away from everything. And in order to be faithful to the original text, Nolan stuck with the running. But, holy shit, it is so un-cinematic. I should be getting jacked up in a movie like this, feeling my blood pump as the action scenes heat up. Instead, you get blueballed every five minutes when the crew runs away. It’s literally the Monty Python and the Holy Grail joke of “RUN AWAY!” to a tee. It’s just so boring and repetitive. That is legitimately 2/3 of the movie. And they marketed the shit out of that fight scene with the giants. It was all over the trailers and the posters and now when you get in there you realize they just get there shit wrecked for 2 minutes before escaping onto boats and it’s so darn anticlimactic.

Then, when the combat does happen… Ugh, Christopher Nolan, why do you refuse to evolve? I mean, the third act has some SLIGHTLY better choreography and camerawork surrounding it, and there are flashes of brilliance during the breaching of Troy, but the pacing and breakup is so whack for the Troy battle that you can never fully enjoy it. We get part of it at the beginning of the movie and part of it toward the end. What we do see is getting better, there’s just not anywhere near enough to be satisfying for what is set up.

One of the problems inherent to the way Nolan stages the story, in his typically jumpy way, is that action setpieces can’t build upon each other. When you’re bouncing between a framing device and an action scene, you get pulled right out of the action. You keep being reminded that the narrator survives, and you keep getting monologues in place of letting the tension of a battle or chase layer itself. When I say layer, I mean layers of suspense. The Troy battle does well to build upon its bow and arrow and locked gate layers, but it’s only two layers.

To build truly memorable action setpieces, I believe movies must layer five or more of those “checklist items” on top of each other and give them time to breathe. For example, getting the Troy gate open could have the arrow shooting, the gate pushing, AND it could have someone’s hand getting stuck in the gate mechanism, AND it could have some of the men breaking off into extended hand-to-hand combat, AND it could have one guy taking his helmet off and using it as a weapon, AND it could have a guy jumping off the top of the gate to stab someone, AND it could have some enemies flanking unexpectedly from another side. It doesn’t help that so much time is spent on Odysseus telling the story, but between that and just how overstuffed with little sidequests this movie is, there’s just never enough time for Nolan to layer an action scene. They feel way too fast for me.

The Giant Island run/fight is a prime example of this. The giants show up, kill a couple people, Odysseus runs, he sees trees moving, a couple guys get trapped, Odysseus stabs one giant (in shaky cam with a blocked view! Why always shaky cam or a blocked view? Why can’t CN figure this out?), and then they go back to the boats and Odysseus shoots another guy. This would actually be good layering, but

1. It’s wayyyyy too fast

2. It’s unclear when people get killed

3. We dont have a connection to anyone so who cares if they are killed

4. We know through the framing device that Odysseus lives and everyone else probably dies

5. The giants are the one CG thing in this movie that don’t look so good. Took me out of it

6. No followup to the moving forest. Pointless

You have to let these things draw out to get people to white-knuckle their theater seats. I didn’t white-knuckle it once because Nolan gave away too much and never slowed down to build the tension anyways. That’s how I get jacked up by an action scene and I feel like they’re pretty fair rules. It’s the biggest thing I wanted from this movie and I didn’t get it. I also wanted a great boat-in-a-storm scene. And we did get a storm but nobody really did anything heroic. They just kind of sat there depressed…like me watching these action scenes.

I will say that Nolan did step up the choreography and general sweat in the third act. Unfortunately, the third act feels so small in comparison to the first two because you’re often locked in timy rooms or temples. The spectacle gets a bit lost. But the Odysseus versus suitors scene is probably my favorite action scene he has ever done. It’s far from perfect but it was a step in the right direction. Again, Telemachus is a bit silly, as is the guy dropping shields through the hole in the ceiling. But I like the “weapon hole” in the ceiling in concept (good layer!) and the first bow and arrow kill is electric. Pretty fun.

Finally, really mixed feelings on the whole “treat others how you’d like to be treated” thing. I agree. Let’s be better with each other. 100%. And I know at least America is largely made up of idiots who need that spelled out to them in their movies. That’s just a bummer. I don’t begrudge Nolan—I respect him trying to put an important message in his movie and hopefully rub off on some idiots who wouldn’t have understood if it had solely been in the subtext. I just hate how spelled-out and awkwardly modern it is…makes me feel like I’m watching a children’s film. I prefer my subtext to be subtext.

Anyways, respectable movie. I get it. And I get why so many are going to leave the theater impressed. But this version of The Odyssey is in direct conflict with so many of the things I care about, and I struggle to give it my stamp of approval as a result of those omissions.

P.S. why did they make Tom Holland wear that toga and funny little crown at the end? I would have said, “hell no.” There is no way I am wearing somethi g that dumb in the biggest movie of the year. It got an audible chuckle from me.

5.5/10