The Odyssey review: Nolan takes Homer to sea, IMAX-sized
Christopher Nolan swaps the atom bomb for Homer, with Matt Damon as a battered Odysseus. It’s huge, thrilling and a bit chilly. Here’s whether it deserves three hours of your evening.
Reviewed, edited and approved by Editor-in-chief Daniel Sköld · Updated 24 October 2026
Contents
Most of us met Odysseus in a classroom: a dog-eared paperback, a teacher who said the word epic as if it hurt, and a vague sense that a Cyclops was involved. Forty years on, Christopher Nolan has turned that set text into a near three-hour summer blockbuster shot on IMAX film. It’s the kind of thing only a man who just won an Oscar for a three-hour film about nuclear physics could get away with.
The question for anyone over 45 with a bad back and a cinema seat booked is simple: is The Odyssey a voyage worth making, or does it just feel like a long way home?
Premiere2026-07-15
GenreAdventure, Action, Fantasy
CastMatt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson
Directed byChristopher Nolan
Running time173 min
Rated15
Watch onIn cinemas
80%
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Ten years at war, then a very long commute
The set-up will be familiar to anyone who stayed awake in English. The Trojan War is over, and Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wants to get back to his wife and son. The gods have other ideas. What follows is a run of trials involving fickle deities, mythical monsters and tests that push both his cunning and his humanity to breaking point. Back home, his family waits, and the kingdom gets restless.
This being Nolan, he doesn’t tell it in a straight line. The timeline is broken up and shuffled, just as he did in Memento and Dunkirk, so the voyage, the war and the home front fold into each other. The roll-call of horrors is all present and correct, including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Sirens and a six-headed sea monster. That’s no small relief, given Nolan’s habit of making everything grittier and more believable. Jason and the Argonauts this isn’t, but the monsters do turn up for work.
Damon, Holland and a cast list like a BAFTA seating plan
Matt Damon plays Odysseus. Variety called it a fine, bone-weary performance, which sounds about right for a man who has been away from home for most of his adult life. Tom Holland plays his son, Telemachus, and gets a properly grown-up role after years of swinging between New York rooftops. Around them is a cast that would bankrupt most studios: Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Himesh Patel and Charlize Theron, with Zendaya as Athena, the one god who bothers to show up regularly.
Nolan wrote and directed it, his first film since Oppenheimer. His career has been one long argument that cinema should be big, physical and seen in a cinema, from The Dark Knight through Inception and Interstellar to Tenet. The Odyssey is the logical next step: the oldest adventure story in the West, filmed with new IMAX film technology. It runs 173 minutes and carries a 15 certificate, so the kids can come if they’re old enough, but leave the little ones at home.
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What works, and what’s lost at sea
The scale is extraordinary. The longships, the waves and the monsters are the kind of spectacle Ray Harryhausen would have killed for in his stop-motion days. Nolan keeps the big set pieces coming so often that most of them would be the climax of any other summer film. It never drags, which at nearly three hours is a minor miracle.
His handling of the gods is smart. Rather than a crowd of squabbling Olympians, he keeps them mostly in the background, which makes the story about people, not puppets. The Sirens, notably, aren’t there to seduce sailors so much as to drag up truths they would rather leave buried. That’s a very Nolan idea, and a good one.
Nolan has made the oldest story in the West look brand new. He just forgot to make you cry.
The problems are familiar ones too. The dialogue has been modernised, American accents and all, and hearing a Bronze Age hero say dad takes some getting used to. The sound mix is Nolan’s usual murk in places, so expect to lean forward during the quieter bits and wince during the loud ones. Most of all, for a story that is ultimately about a man trying to get home to the people he loves, it can feel strangely chilly. You admire it more than you feel it.
What the critics say
The reviews are broadly glowing, with some reservations. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics’ consensus praises its majestic sweep and says it fills myth with primal human feeling. Variety’s headline went with vast, thrilling and slightly aloof, praising a genuinely grand, gutsy vision but deciding it is felt more through the senses than the heart. NPR was keener, calling it the epic only Nolan could make and, memorably, a film for grown-ups, with kickass sea monsters. A second NPR review found it thrilling but uneven.
Forbes called it awesomely weird and visually stunning but not without its flaws, singling out the jarring modern dialogue and the murky sound. Not everyone was won over: the film site InBetweenDrafts found it shockingly hollow and complained that the monsters felt like footnotes. Most critics, though, have backed it.
Where to watch The Odyssey in the UK
The Odyssey opened in UK cinemas in mid-July, and that’s where to see it. This is a film built for IMAX, and Nolan shot it on IMAX film cameras, so if there’s a proper IMAX screen within reasonable driving distance, it’s worth the extra few quid. No UK streaming or home release date has been announced yet. Universal will eventually put it out for digital rental and purchase, but on a 50-inch telly at home with the dog barking, much of the point will be lost.
Verdict
The Odyssey is a staggering piece of big-screen craft, more thrilling than moving, and the most fun Homer has been since your English teacher retired. It’s for anyone who loved Harryhausen as a kid, anyone who still remembers studying the poem, and anyone who believes cinema should still be an event. Go big, go early, and go easy on the large Coke: it’s 173 minutes.
Ashley Isaacs picks what's worth your evening – film, TV, streaming, music and books for men 45 and over with limited evenings and too many subscriptions. Reviews of what's new on Netflix, Prime Video, BBC iPlayer and the rest, crime dramas worth a weekend, and classics worth a second look. What's worth watching, what isn't, and where to find it in the UK.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to ashley@midcent.uk.
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