The Odyssey 2026
Christopher Nolan's USA 2026 epic film The Odyssey adapts Homer's ancient Greek poem, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, released on July 17, 2026, with a runtime of 173 minutes. You can read comprehensive details and coverage on the USA The Odyssey 2026 Film
The Odyssey, the latest film from Oscar-winning director Sir Christopher Nolan, has received rapturous reviews from critics.
The USA movie, adapted from Homer's epic ancient Greek poem, is the director's first since 2023's Oppenheimer, which won the Academy Award for best picture.The USA Telegraph declared The Odyssey the "film of the year", while Metro added that the movie would "change cinema foreve
r".
The Times, meanwhile, described it as "a masterpiece in every way", and the Standard praised the film as a "colossal piece of cinema".The Odyssey, which will be released in the UK on Friday, stars Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron and Lupita Nyong'o.'A real pinch-me moment': Tom Holland on his role in The Odyssey
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Matt Damon seen in first full-length trailer for The OdysseyIt follows Odysseus (Damon), the Greek king of Ithaca, on his long and perilous journey home from the Trojan War to rescue his wife and son (Hathaway and Holland).His fantastical journey sees him encounter mythical beings along the way. Meanwhile, the cruel antagonist Antinous (Pattinson) has his eyes fixed on the queen while her husband is still away.
It follows Odysseus (Damon), the Greek king of Ithaca, on his long and perilous journey home from the Trojan War to rescue his wife and son (Hathaway and Holland).
His fantastical journey sees him encounter mythical beings along the way. Meanwhile, the cruel antagonist Antinous (Pattinson) has his eyes fixed on the queen while her husband is still away.
Variety's Guy Lodge said: "A genuinely grand, gutsy vision, The Odyssey thrills generously for the bulk of its near three-hour running time.
"Every few minutes, it seems, it throws at its audience another mighty setpiece that, in almost any other summer studio spectacle, would be a climactic standout."
There was further praise for the "staggering" set pieces from the Standard's Nick Howells, who said The Odyssey was a "far more astonishing experience" than Oppenheimer.In a five-star review, Metro's Tori Brazier said The Odyssey was "a watershed moment for filmmaking"."It's somehow both the most Nolan-esque film I've seen, while being nothing like Oppenheimer, Inception or anything he's previously made," she said."Damon is superb, going to dark places seldom if ever explored in his previous roles," he said. "Hathaway is a model of steely self-possession masking vulnerability; Pattinson bites into his character's villainy with gusto."Another critic, Deadline's Gregory Nussen, singled out Spider-Man star Holland.
"His performance certainly seems tinged with the courageous naivety of Spider-Man, insisting on trying to influence those much more cunning and physically capable than he," he wrote."Holland may be playing a child, but his performance is bursting with a newfound maturity. It is his strongest one to date."Although there were hardly any negative reviews, some critics said they had difficulty hearing the film's dialogue in places.This is frequent complaint with Nolan films because of his tendency to only use audio that was recorded on set, rather than have actors re-record certain lines later.There was also some scepticism about the dialogue itself, with the Financial Times's Danny Leigh saying the use of certain words "jarred me out of the past".
"Nolan has called using contemporary language 'a no-brainer'. Respectfully, in this case, I would argue it was a brainer," Leigh wrote.
"Maybe it only clangs because the rest of the dialogue doesn't, and even a harsh judge is soon distracted. As Odysseus sets sail for Homer's adventures, Nolan's spectacle slips into gear... he is a very talented action director."
Nolan's other previous films include Interstellar, Dunkirk, Inception, Memento and The Dark Knight trilogy.
"Nolan's stamp is all over the film – this is intellectual, brutalist, muscular Hollywood fare – yet it never wavers in its commitment to, and comprehension of, its source text," said the Independent's Clarisse Loughrey."There's not a single decision here that's been thoughtlessly made, nor that I imagine Nolan himself couldn't easily defend."Amy Nicholson of the LA Times said the film was "epically satisfying", but added that it deviated somewhat from the source material and "skimps on the character's ego and lust"."Damon's Odysseus is stubborn, overconfident and sacrilegious, but doesn't bear that much resemblance to the conniving, hypocritical egotist of lore who fretted over his wife's fidelity," she noted."The chasteness of Nolan's version bugs me as it's insulting he doesn't trust audiences to grapple with this hero's moral complexity - and I'm gut-sick that he's probably right."
The Odyssey was shot entirely on Imax cameras, and had a reported budget of $250m (£185m).Universal Studios will have high hopes for the film at the box office, after Oppenheimer took $975m (£723m) globally.However, Oppenheimer enjoyed a huge audience boost from the Barbenheimer phenomenon, the 2023 viral trend that prompted movie fans to buy tickets to see Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day.The Odyssey is a film with "thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair", wrote the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, awarding five stars"There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish," he added.The Odyssey is "the definition of epic", according to Empire's John Nugent, in another five-star review."The scale and scope here is, frankly, jaw-detaching," he said. "It is filmmaking at a magnitude few modern directors could ever realistically imagine, demand, or execute."
Also awarding five stars, the Telegraph's Robbie Collin said: "Nolan and his collaborators have constructed a strange, fearsome and trailblazing machine of a movie – by some distance, the best of the year so far.
"Its creator is known for playing tricks with time, and this may be his grandest yet: turning one of the oldest stories in literature into a vote of confidence in blockbuster cinema's future."
This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish. It has gasp-inducing, Imax-sized landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who, incidentally, avoids the sea’s traditional cliched colour – and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus, his boyish, almost cherubic face turned into a careworn mask of sadness. He is the military commander from Ithaca appointed by the Greek king Agamemnon, played by Benny Safdie, his face always mysteriously masked in a Batman-type helmet. (Another echo of Nolan’s previous work is detectable in the troops’ endless wait on the beach, as in Dunkirk.) Odysseus reveals to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), the wife whom he is about to leave and whom he advises to remarry if he dies in battle, that the notional cause for the imminent war with Troy – the elopement of Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) with Trojan prince Paris – is a pretext. It is a banal commercial contest for trading routes.
The point is that the war, its supposed aims, its storied strategic success and presumed outcome are all irrelevant compared to the long, bizarre chaos of the aftermath, the giant toxic effect that follows the forgotten cause, as demoralising as a retreat that follows catastrophe. Agamemnon returns home to be killed; his brother Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) is grimly reunited with Helen, in which role Nyong’o also doubles as Agamemnon’s killer Clytemnestra. Meanwhile, Odysseus and his men, tormented and disoriented with hunger and loss, embark on their own chaotic sea journey of survival, meeting Harryhausen-type monsters such as the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians and Circe (Samantha Morton), Calypso (Charlize Theron) and the alluring Sirens, but also the sorrowing goddess Athena (Zendaya), who is Odysseus’s ally.
The Greeks’ eventual victory is achieved after a brilliant tactical deception: an elite combat unit hides cramped in a huge horse statue, which is not rolled into the fortified city on casters as a gift, but dragged inside by its own victims as a precious object from the surf, half hidden in the sand. It’s a trick that involves Odysseus having to deceive his own comrade and cousin Sinon (Elliot Page), a blood sacrifice for which he feels unending guilt. Nolan recreates the Trojan horse as a cross between the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes and Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias.
And at home, to stall for time and contain the potentially violent power vacuum contingent on Odysseus’s assumed death, Penelope is forced to entertain dozens of potential marriage suitors as guests at a humiliating and continuous bacchanal of greed. The most prominent is the creepy Antinous, sleekly played by Robert Pattinson, who is cruel to Odysseus’s blind manservant Eumaeus, an emotional, sympathetic portrayal by John Leguizamo. Odysseus’s psychically wounded son Telemachus (Tom Holland) must now embark on his own odyssey, to find his father, or his father’s corpse.
When Odysseus has to descend into the underworld to converse with the dead, it is an unforgettably strange scene: Nolan has the shrouded spirits hunch above ground like the witches in Macbeth. The dead, like the gods, can be contacted on an almost level playing field; this is the biza
rre pagan rule of the Odyssey, as opaque and amoral as the secular symptoms of psychological breakdown. And yet when Odysseus finally approaches Penelope’s house, now under brutal siege from suitors in parallel to the siege of Troy, he does so in the Christ-like disguise of a beggar. In the final movement to this story, Odysseus begins his own mysterious metamorphosis into a god.
One part of the Homer original that Nolan doesn’t include is the hero’s roguish grandfather Autolycus, who named him and by that token gave this story its title. Odysseus means “victim of enmity” – though variant translations have ingeniously and insightfully rendered that as “giver or initiator of enmity and hate”. Still, it is perhaps the most unimprovable name an action hero can have: vivid, elemental, existential. He is the victim of no single enmity, except arguably that of Antinous, but enmity all around, an ecosystem of enmity, the hostile terrain through which he must pass to reach the even more hostile terrain of home.
The result is a gigantic, shimmering mirage, a mysterious three-hour vision of crazy episodes that does not yield up wisdom or contentment, but only a grim resolution to continue with the fight, to make sense of ruined lives, to re-enter the scorched battlefield of loss.
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Maybe you're like me, reader — a cynic. A jaded filmgoer. Maybe you heard that Christopher Nolan would be adapting Homer's epic saga of gods, monsters, reunions and retributions and thought: Him?
The guy whose aesthetic leans to the fixed, the grounded, the tactile, the particular? Who's never been averse to a certain amount of cinematic sprawl and spectacle, sure, but who's famously disinclined to the more emotive, expressionistic aspects of the human experience like wonder and awe — to giving oneself over to pure, ecstatic fantasy. (You know — the stuff we tend to think of, rightly or wrongly, as the domain of Spielberg.) I mean, this is the guy who turned the dang Batmobile into a brutalist doorstop, you know?
Maybe you heard he'd be making The Odyssey, and figured he'd turn into another Nolaneseque exercise in leaching the fun and color out of stuff. So all the wild, frenetic fancies of Homer's poem, with its imperious, queeny, tantrum-throwing gods, gore-flecked cyclopses, cannibal warrior giants, sexy witches, even sexier nymphs, and sea monsters? And one of the most over-the-top, viscerally satisfying (and literally visceral) scenes of vengeance-exacting in the Western canon? He'd take them all out, and make a restrained, ascetic, human-centric version of the story.
Which couldn't help but underwhelm, because real talk, reader: The Odyssey without its gods and monsters is basically the story of a deadbeat dad who goes out for a pack of smokes and keeps driving. It's boring, it's prosaic, it's mundane. It's classical antiquity Jerry Springer. You need the magic.
I'm happy, no, delighted to report that Nolan has brought the magic. The gods and monsters are on the call sheet, and they are bringing everything they need to — and they're doing it with epic sweep and grandeur, on a big-time Hollywood budget. This movie is made to get butts in seats and (given its nearly three hour runtime) keep them there.
Posted on 2026/07/18 08:43 AM