Walter Reviews The Odyssey: Can Christopher Nolan Win Over a Longtime Hater?

August 26th, 2026

By: Walter Moak

Making a three-hour-long IMAX movie about an ancient oral epic is a bit like writing a K-Pop song about cave paintings. But differences in medium aside, Christopher Nolan is undeterred in The Odyssey, a nearly three-hour-long movie that adapts Homer’s Ancient Greek epic to the big screen.

I must admit that I came to this movie with some trepidation. The only other Nolan film I’d seen was Oppenheimer, which I watched in a movie theater in Dodge City, Kansas during the summer of 2023. Oppenheimer failed both my intelligibility test (I couldn’t keep track of the characters and timelines) and my bladder test (I had to leave the theater to pee).

The Odyssey, however, receives passing grades for both complexity and runtime. I could follow Nolan’s nonchronological storyline, as it was clear when the setting shifted between present and past. I also found that style appropriate to the original epic, much of which is recounted by Odysseus himself. The length was tolerable, too: grand, but not grandiose.

What exactly was Nolan trying to accomplish here? Plenty of writers and moviemakers have put creative twists on Homer’s original epic (see: Cold Mountain; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; even Percy Jackson) What’s to be gained in such a straightforward adaptation of an ancient story?

Straightforward it certainly is: the flashbacks to Troy’s siege look like an organized soccer match, with the Greeks all in black armor and the Trojans in white. Agamemnon, the Greek king, rather resembles a LEGO minifigure with his chunky, black-crested helmet. There are few significant omissions from Homer’s plot, nor additions to it.

Most of Nolan’s changes make Odysseus more likeable, removing some of his unsavory qualities. By eliding Calypso with the lotus eaters, Nolan presents Odysseus as a sexual victim rather than a consenting philanderer. His final bloodbath is toned down as well: in contrast to Homer’s original, Odysseus spares many of the suitors, as well as his disloyal slaves (who are only “servants” in Nolan’s film). Instead of slaughtering them, he and Penelope quite literally sail off into the sunset together. These changes force Hollywood tropes where they don’t belong; the plot and protagonist would be more interesting if they were somewhat frustrating.

Nolan’s most substantive twist is that Odysseus regrets the Trojan Horse, the ploy that won the war. By turning a gift into a weapon, he feels he has broken the ancient laws of hospitality, hastening the downfall of his own civilization. Since the war, Ithacans have heard ominous rumors of vicious “people of the sea.” Upon his homecoming, Odysseus reveals that these are in fact stories of the Greeks’ own brutality at Troy. This new angle of a regretful Odysseus is hard to buy, however. Immediately after a long reflection on the horrors of Troy, he still seems to revel in laying his trap for the suitors.

The most compelling side plot involves Sinon, a young soldier who stays behind to deliver the Trojan Horse. In Nolan’s version, Odysseus conceals his plan from Sinon as well, such that he earnestly believes the horse is merely a peace gift. When Odysseus communes with the dead, he must reckon with a spiteful Sinon before hearing the prophecy he came for. Later, back at Ithaca, Odysseus avenges Sinon by killing Antinous, a suave but odious suitor whose place Sinon took at Troy. Unlike Nolan’s other alterations, these changes add nuance to the original story rather than directly countering it.

The overall project of the The Odyssey disappoints, but the film is still entertaining and visually impressive. The sea and coastal shots are stunning, and the scenes of the Cyclops and Circe’s transfigurations are strikingly original, if grotesque. There’s plenty of combat, too.

In Oppenheimer I felt that Nolan was overambitious, both in message and style: in trying to make some grand claim about the nature of humanity, he let the film become too complex and bloated. In The Odyssey, we have the opposite problem: apparently hesitant to depart from Homer’s epic, Nolan loses any original message he wished to achieve. The result is a reasonably entertaining, though underambitious movie.