It is the same old story. A man tries to find his way home on a decade-long journey after a decade-long war. But then, there is not just what happened but how it is told. Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ (2026) depiction of Homer’s nearly three thousand years old epic is faithful to the source while still full of surprises. It keeps the story grounded, its themes relevant, while elevating the tale with cinematic techniques that the auteur is known for.
Minor spoiler alerts
The grounded realism of ‘The Odyssey’
If we talk about Christopher Nolan, many things that hype up his films are often ‘how things are done in real life’. Notoriously, he crashed a real plane into an airport for ‘Tenet’ (2020). People were joking, was he going to build a real atomic bomb for ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)? He made a smaller recreation for the effect instead.
However, with his latest historical epic these hopes gave way to criticism; the historically inaccurate armour, the modern-day dialogue, the casting of actors who are not Greek.
It seems that Nolan was especially targeted for these historical inaccuracies due to his reputation for realism. But people seem to forget that many of his films also lean into more ‘fantastical’ elements. Take ‘Interstellar’ (2014) or ‘Inception’ (2010), for example; these films have fanciful concepts but were told in a grounded way. ‘The Odyssey’ also feels like that, a fantasy story adapted in a grounded way.
The monsters and magic, glad he includes those, are made to feel like a part of the film world. The Cyclops, Polyphemus, felt threatening with no ‘nobody’ pun, unlike the poem. (A memorable part of the story but unlikely to translate well within the whole picture of the film). The Laestrygonians, man-eating giants, are portrayed as being very tall and strong people who are still brutally strong warriors, instead of as an actual giant. Circe transforming men into animals feels less magical than terrifying.
A great storyteller story told by a great storyteller
‘The Odyssey’ is a more subtle type of Nolan film. It is not ‘Tenet’, where you have a timeline going forward and another going backwards. It is not ‘Inception’, where you have different stages of a dream that time flows at different paces. It is more like ‘The Dark Knight Trilogy’ (2005 - 2012) or ‘Oppenheimer’, where they focus on a hero’s journey without a high-concept element of time and space bending.
Nonetheless, ‘The Odyssey’ still has that fast pacing and editing. It still refuses to tell the story linearly. Like the poem, the story begins in the middle (in medias res). The current timelines are Odysseus (Matt Damon) trapped on Calypso's island, and Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and Telemachus (Tom Holland) on Ithaca with the suitors. The Trojan War and Odysseus’s encounter with the monsters and magic are told of by our hero, as a recollection of past memories up to this point.
I think this framing of the story, although borrowed from the original poem, fits well with the tone of the film. This helps separate the more fanciful elements as flashbacks, while grounding the more realistic part of the story (the suitors and even Calypso) in the present. The effect of this is, it not only makes the adventure seem like a tale as the audience remembers, but also makes the suitors seem threatening and imminent.
This framing also links to the grounded fantasy tone previously mentioned. With the fantasy elements being a retelling, it is open to interpretation whether they actually exist.
The many forms of gods
This grounding of fantasy elements also extends to how the film portrays the Olympians. Throughout the film the gods are not physically portrayed, with the sole exception of Athena, the goddess of wisdom who is worshipped by Odysseus's family. The gods are portrayed as in the real world, where we can not see their physical presence but someone who believes will see the gods in everything.
For example, Zeus, being the king of the gods, extends his influence to many things, like how people fear him when thunder strikes, or how many characters had to welcome strangers due to Zeus’s law (Xenia). Actually, many events or plot points in the story derive from Xenia. This belief in gods affects the way the character thinks and behaves, proving how the gods are real enough in the film’s world.
The portrayal of gods here also ties into the tagline of the film, “Defy the gods”. This helps drive the question that has been pondered by our hero - whether his bad luck is pure chance or the consequence of his actions, inflicted by the gods. Showing a god, or confirming one, would undermine the message.
Major spoiler alerts
The goddess of wisdom
I especially like how they portray Athena. The film treats her almost like a subconsciousness of Odysseus, suggesting she is either an inner wisdom of the character or an actual goddess that can come and go as she pleases. It is later revealed that Athena’s physical form (Zendaya) was shaped on Odysseus' memory of an innocent priestess (I assume) who was decapitated at the same time as the head of the Athena statue was cut off, during their attack on Troy.
Throughout the film, we assume that is how the goddess looked. Odysseus is traumatised by the war, by being the one who came up with the plan to get into Troy. Thus, due to guilt, he conjures up Athena in his mind, and in the likeness of the priestess.
Still, regardless of whether she exists, Athena serves her function as godess of wisdom. Both ‘wake-up-call’ moments for Odysseus in this film are Athena-related. One is when he realises the brutality of war as the Athena statue's head is cut off. Another is when he recalls Penelope’s name after seeing Athena's pin. Again, this makes it feel as if although the gods do not physically appear, they still influence things from afar.
The cost of conquering
Another revelation occurs in the same scene as the revelation of Athena. Throughout the film, there are fears of ‘the men from the sea’ that shake Telemachus and Penelope in the absence of a ruler in Ithaca. They fear that these ‘men from the sea’, and we know nothing else about them, might come and take their home. It turns out, as our hero realises, that for the Trojans the Greeks were ‘the people from the sea’ all along.
Although the Trojan war was portrayed by the bards as a glorified legend, the film's portrayal of the actual event is less than glorious. Structurally, I like how the film employs scattered flashbacks of the Trojan war. Each time the war is shown it shifts the mood and tone, from struggling to survive inside the horse to an adrenaline-rushing attempt to open the gates of Troy, both making us root for the Greeks. However, the last major flashback on the Trojan war is disillusioning, showing the brutal slaughter of the Trojans, both warriors and innocents.
Another thing I think elevates this theme well is the design of the Trojan horse. From the outside, it has been compared to the version of Petersen’s ‘Troy’ (2004), how sleek and clean it looks. It does not feel like something the Greek warriors put together on a battlefield; it suggests more craftsmanship. However, I think the design echoes how the war is portrayed. It might look glorious from the outside, but inside people are drowning and struggling to survive.
The film ends powerfully, as always for Nolan (it might sound biased here, but the director is renowned for sticking the landing), with an image of a burning Trojan horse. It is a powerful image of a hope for people to remember the Trojan horse not as an immortalised victory, but a symbol of brutality and destruction, burning away for good.
