Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review, Universal | Tagged: the odyssey

The Odyssey Review: Captures the Source's Scope, Despite Missteps

The Odyssey mostly comes together in the end, but with someone like Christopher Nolan behind the camera, the bar is that much higher, and he can't quite meet his own expectations.

The Odyssey has some missteps that keep it from reaching greatness, but it does capture the scope of one of the greatest stories ever told.

Director: Christopher Nolan
Summary: After the Trojan War, Odysseus faces a dangerous voyage back to Ithaca, meeting creatures like the Cyclops Polyphemus, Sirens, and Calypso along the way.

The Odyssey has always been and will always be one of those epics that is both known to all and completely impossible to adapt. Stories that live on for centuries do so for a reason, and there is a reason the works of Homer are still assigned in high school and college classes for people to read. The epic poem as a storytelling device is one that some have a hard time wrapping their heads around, but much like any piece of literature that isn't going to hold your hand, once you're on its own level, you're in for one hell of a ride. This new adaptation of The Odyssey from director Christopher Nolan is doing an admirable job of adapting the massive scope of this story in a way that will appeal to everyone, from those who are intimately familiar with the source material to those who know the SparkNotes version at best.

When telling stories that are this long spanning this much time, there's no avoiding length and The Odyssey was always going to be a long movie. In fact, it's a little surprising that they managed to clock in at under three hours. Very few films justify a longer than two-hour runtime, let alone one that flirts with three, but unless you're going to avoid certain segments of this story, it was always going to be long. The challenge was going to be keeping the audience engaged, and they did a pretty good job of doing that.

The Odyssey does not follow a traditional structure in any sense of the word and jumps around a lot as we see the various adventures Odysseus goes on as he fights to make his way back home. Each of these adventures are almost framed as short films or fables themselves, which does work for how stories and myths were shared during this time period. Almost everything was verbal, and the way the stories tell these brief moments feels like someone telling you about key moments in their life or journey. It works, for the most part, which is kind of amazing considering how badly everything could have gone. It makes things a bit meandering, but this is an Odyssey, this is a journey that takes years to complete, and it was a journey marred by missteps and wrong paths, so of course it meanders. It's a meandering that works thematically for the story that we're watching unfold.

However, the nature of this storytelling robs Odysseus and the audience of any real emotional investment in his journey. We are constantly told by himself and other characters that he just wants to get home, and later we learn that, for all that he said he wanted to get back, he really didn't. That emotional payoff does come through in the end of the journey, but it comes through Odysseus explaining that hesitation once he has finally returned home. The unrelenting journey, all of the terrible things that keep happening to him and his men, and ultimately how futile all of it was because no one can defy the gods, the payoffs for all of it only work because Matt Damon delivers one hell of a monologue. Without that monologue, the payoff wouldn't be there, and relying on a monologue for emotional payoff keeps the film from falling on its face.

The cutting back and forth might be enough to keep audiences engaged, but it also keeps you from truly understanding just how dire things are back in Ithaca. The suitors taking up residence in the palace and how they are attempting to marry the queen, we don't see enough of it to truly see how bad all of it is. That means we can't really understand the circumstances Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and Telemachus (Tom Holland) are living under, aside from seeing some people acting up at feasts. However, all of those scenes also include Robert Pattinson as Antinous, who is just the worst, and no one plays the worst better than Pattinson.

In terms of performances across the board, this is a massive group of people putting in career-best work from top to bottom, and no one really brings things down. There are standouts for sure, with Pattinson being one, and Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, who quietly owns every scene that he is in. Benny Safdie is practically unrecognizable as Agamemnon, and Samantha Morton flawlessly owns what might be one of the most disturbing scenes in the entire movie as Circe. Ludwig Göransson has thrown his second excellent soundtrack of 2026 on the pile like it's no big deal.

This is a film adapting an epic poem that tells stories that never happened, yet director Christopher Nolan's staunch commitment to realism in every sense of the word makes people think that arguing historical accuracy is something worth considering when it really only shows how badly we've all lost the plot. The language people are using is another thing people are getting hung up on. This largely comes from the adaptation of The Odyssey that Nolan is basing his script on, but the juxtaposition between the more modern dialogue and the stark, historical epic-like filmmaking clash for a bit, but it eventually settles. That dissonance is present throughout the entire film as Nolan's filmmaking clashes with the more horror or surreal aspects of the story unfolding.

The Odyssey mostly comes together in the end, but with someone like Nolan behind the camera, the bar is that much higher, and he can't quite meet his own expectations. Any issues with the film aren't enough to break it, but it is enough to keep it from ascending to the heights of its source material. The epic poem by Homer will continue to live on for centuries, but this film adaptation will linger in the footnotes of the careers of the creatives involved as something good that couldn't achieve greatness.

The Odyssey

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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7/10

The Odyssey has some missteps that keep it from reaching greatness, but it does capture the scope of one of the greatest stories ever told.

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