The Odyssey

Snapshot

The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic: Odysseus's long journey home after the Trojan War to reunite with Penelope and take back his kingdom from the suitors who have overrun it. It is his first film since Oppenheimer (2023). It premiered at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London on July 6, 2026, and opened wide in the United States and the United Kingdom in mid-July. It runs 173 minutes. It is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX film cameras. Nolan wrote and directed it, and he kept the team behind his late period: cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, editor Jennifer Lame and composer Ludwig Göransson. Matt Damon plays Odysseus at the head of a very large ensemble.

The film was a major commercial and critical success. It had the biggest opening of Nolan's career and passed The Dark Knight Rises to become his highest-grossing film. By mid-October 2026 it had taken $1.789 billion worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing film of the year. Reviews were mostly enthusiastic, with a small group of dissenters. Debate went beyond the review pages: classicists objected to its dialogue and tone, some of its casting choices drew bad-faith attacks, and its shoot in Western Sahara was criticized on political grounds.

Industry & production

The Odyssey is one of the largest productions of Nolan's career, with a reported budget of $250 million. Principal photography lasted 91 days, from February 25 to August 5, 2025. The shoot covered Morocco, Western Sahara, Greece, Italy, Iceland and Scotland, plus the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles. The Ithaca scenes were filmed at the Castello di Santa Caterina, a hilltop site reached on foot. Ruth De Jong was production designer and Ellen Mirojnick costume designer.

The logistics followed from the decision to shoot everything on photochemical IMAX. Exposed negative was flown from distant locations to the FotoKem lab in Burbank for processing. The production used more than two million feet of film. Nolan's long-held preference for real places over digital environments took the crew to working coastlines, deserts and northern landscapes, not soundstage substitutes.

The choice of locations caused controversy. Writing in The Guardian, the Sahrawi writer Mohamed Sleiman Labat criticized the decision to film in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. He argued that it put the production in the service of a state publicity effort to legitimize an illegal occupation.

Commercially, the film turned its scale into a return. It opened to $264.1 million worldwide, Nolan's biggest opening, and fell only to $90 million domestic in its second weekend, which pushed its global total to $639.9 million. By August 10 it had passed $1.1 billion, overtaking The Dark Knight Rises as Nolan's top grosser. IMAX 70mm engagements were extended from mid-August into mid-September because of demand. By August 10 the film had also passed Avatar as the highest-grossing IMAX release. As of October 18, 2026, its worldwide total stood at $1.789 billion: $625 million domestic and $1.16 billion international.

Technology

Technology is the film's most widely discussed achievement. The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, which record on 15-perforation 65mm stock and produce the largest frame in commercial motion-picture use. Nolan had used IMAX photography for set pieces and long stretches of The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer. This film takes that campaign to its end point.

The format had always been limited by its cameras, which were loud enough to make synchronized dialogue difficult and bulky enough to restrict where they could go. The production worked with a new, quieter IMAX camera nicknamed "Kigley," built with carbon-fiber components and soundproofing. A coffin-sized soundproof housing, known on set as the blimp, weighed more than 136 kilograms and took six people to move. Because the rig was so large, a mirror system was devised so actors could see each other past the camera and keep their eyelines in close dialogue scenes. Anne Hathaway praised the system as truly ingenious.

The result is unusually hard to exhibit as intended. Only about forty screens worldwide can project the film in IMAX 70mm. Its premium-format success therefore depended on a small, specialized network of venues, and that network sold out. Nolan has called IMAX the best film format ever invented. The film's box office, with IMAX becoming the largest-grossing release in that format's history, is the strongest commercial support yet for his long argument that photochemical capture and theatrical projection are a better imaging pipeline, not nostalgia.

Technique

Cinematography

Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan's cinematographer since Interstellar (2014), has described the look of the film as an intimate kind of epic, and reviewers broadly agreed. Critics noted how he balances the huge IMAX frame with close-ups that keep the drama at human scale. Some observed that, despite the all-IMAX capture, the film feels grounded instead of grandiose: its magic happens in recognizable, almost mundane landscapes and not in fantastical vistas. Night and low-light scenes look naturalistic while daylight colors stay vivid. This follows from van Hoytema's work on Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, where he learned to use the large-format camera for proximity as well as spectacle.

Editing

Jennifer Lame, who cut Tenet and Oppenheimer, edited the film, and she faced the structural challenge Homer's poem poses. The film is non-linear. It moves between Odysseus's memories of his voyage and Telemachus's search for his father, and it nests flashbacks inside one another in the way Homer embeds tales within tales. Critics praised Lame's handling of both epic conflict and private moments, and several noted that the film moves quickly across its three hours. Not everyone was convinced. Some reviews found the parallel journeys of father and son unevenly balanced, and part of the online audience thought the non-linear telling and cutting were confusing.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Nolan's preference for photographing over synthesizing shapes the whole production. He told interviewers that the most important thing was to use the real world, and he resisted a fully computer-generated approach to the poem's mythic material. The sea scenes were shot aboard the Draken Harald Hårfagre, a modern-built Viking longship, not a digital vessel. The actors trained with the ship's crew and rowed for hours at sea. Visual effects are used sparingly and kept for mythic moments, so the supernatural appears inside a physical, weathered world instead of replacing it. Nolan said he approached the poem's creatures the way he would any other character, not as monsters to be rendered as spectacle. Some viewers took issue with the film's fight choreography.

Sound

Göransson's score is the most distinctive element of the film's sound. It largely avoids a traditional orchestra in favor of bronze gongs, voices, and reconstructions of the ancient Greek aulos and lyre. Critics heard it as both ancient and avant-garde, a texture that places the story in a deep past without the familiar conventions of the historical-epic score. It also continues the rhythmic, percussion-driven approach Göransson brought to Tenet and Oppenheimer.

Performance

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, his most substantial work with Nolan after a supporting role in Oppenheimer. Around him: Tom Holland as Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Robert Pattinson as the suitor Antinous, Lupita Nyong'o as both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Samantha Morton as Circe, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, and John Leguizamo as the swineherd Eumaeus. Himesh Patel, Elliot Page and Bill Irwin also appear.

Morton's Circe is reported to have drawn applause on set, something Nolan reportedly had not seen since Heath Ledger's Joker. The Rotten Tomatoes critics' consensus praised the ensemble as a whole. Not everyone agreed. The Jewish Chronicle's John Nathan argued that the starry casting sometimes risks trivializing the material, citing Theron's Calypso.

The cast also delivers its lines in American accents, breaking the long habit of historical epics defaulting to British ones. The Hollywood Reporter's James Hibberd treated this as a striking departure. Before release, Nolan defended the plain register: he said the poem itself is earthy, grounded and accessible, and that arguments held before anyone had seen the film were beside the point.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Homer's Odyssey is a nostos, a homecoming story built on delay. Odysseus is kept from Ithaca for years by divine hostility, mortal error and temptation, while at home Penelope and Telemachus hold out against predatory suitors. The poem begins in medias res and recovers its hero's earlier trials through retrospective narration. Its thematic engine is metis, cunning intelligence set against brute force.

Nolan keeps that recursive design instead of straightening it out. The film braids two lines of action. One is Odysseus's voyage, told largely through memory. The other is Telemachus's search: guided by Athena, he learns that his father is alive and held on an island. Inside this frame the film layers its flashbacks, from a bard's recitation in the palace to scenes of the war at Troy to individual characters' memories, mirroring Homer's own technique of stories told inside stories. The material suits Nolan, whose films since Memento have been built from fractured chronology and subjective memory, and here the fractured structure comes from the source itself.

The dramatic register is serious, even severe. Variety's coverage was summarized as finding a major set piece every few minutes, each one big enough to be the climax of an ordinary summer blockbuster. Nathan noted that Odysseus's violence often reads as spite more than heroism, which complicates the poem's celebration of its hero.

Genre & cycle

The film combines the mythological epic with the contemporary blockbuster and joins a long cycle of screen antiquity. That cycle runs from the mid-century Hollywood and Italian peplum films and Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion mythologies through Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004) and the stylized 300 (2007). Nolan has acknowledged the Harryhausen pictures and the Greek-mythology films he watched as a child as part of the film's background. The finished work leans away from their fantasy pageantry and toward something rougher and more physical.

Critics placed it in a double lineage. Monica Castillo of The A.V. Club saw a meeting of old and new Hollywood, a nod to the spectacles of earlier decades and also a morality play on a vast scale. William Bibbiani of TheWrap went further and treated it as a horror epic. The genre novelty lies less in the subject than in the seriousness and technical apparatus brought to it. It is an auteur-scale event film that applies the full resources of the modern tentpole to canonical literary material, in a tradition reaching back to David Lean's landscape epics.

Authorship & method

The Odyssey is a Nolan film in the fullest auteurist sense. He wrote the screenplay and directed, and the film shows the consistent habits of his career: practical photography, IMAX capture, a theatrical-first release, and a close repertory of collaborators. It is also an outlier. Most of Nolan's films come from original screenplays or work he developed himself, and here he adapts a public-domain classic. He called Homer's poem the foundational text, the urtext, of his own work, and said an adapter honors an original by interpreting it as strongly as they personally can.

Nolan described his writing process in interviews. He reads widely, writes notes from memory instead of from the page, sketches for months, and then writes the script straight through from the first page. For the film's visual and atmospheric tone he cited two specific models: the textures of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966) and the environment and wind of Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985). Both are historical epics in which landscape and weather carry as much meaning as action.

The key collaborators are the constants of his late career. Hoyte van Hoytema has shot every Nolan feature since Interstellar. Jennifer Lame has cut his films since Tenet. Ludwig Göransson, Nolan's main musical voice since Tenet after the long partnership with Hans Zimmer, wrote the score. Ruth De Jong (production design) and Ellen Mirojnick (costumes) complete the core team.

Movement / national cinema

Nolan resists easy national-cinema labels. He is British-born and American-based, works in English within the Hollywood studio system, and brings a European art-cinema sensibility to structure and time. He belongs less to a movement than to a transatlantic tradition of large-scale auteur filmmaking. The Odyssey makes that transnational character literal: a Greek text, shot across North Africa, the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic, voiced in American English, drawing openly on Soviet and Japanese masters.

If the film belongs to a movement, it is the small current of directors defending photochemical, theatrically exhibited spectacle against streaming-era economics. Nolan has led that cause more visibly than anyone, and The Odyssey is his strongest evidence for it so far.

Era / period

The film comes out of the post-pandemic film industry: a shrunken theatrical middle, franchise dominance, and an anxious debate about whether cinema can survive as a communal, big-screen art form. Oppenheimer's success in 2023 suggested that original, adult, format-driven event films could still draw mass audiences. The Odyssey tested that idea at a higher budget and with harder exhibition requirements, and won. Its run, sustained by strong word of mouth and premium-format demand that kept a few dozen 70mm screens booked for weeks past their scheduled end, now stands as one of the period's clearest arguments for theatrical exhibition.

The period's culture wars also shaped how the film was received. Casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy drew attacks from commentators including Matt Walsh and Elon Musk, which others condemned as racist; Nyong'o answered that beauty cannot be performed. Entertainment Weekly reported that Elliot Page's casting prompted transphobic memes. The controversy over the American accents showed how much modern audiences still expect antiquity to sound British on screen.

Themes

Nolan's version keeps the poem's central concerns: homecoming and its long deferral, cunning against force, and how identity wears down and reasserts itself across years of exile. Critics singled out hospitality, the sacred duty of host to guest that the Greeks placed under Zeus's protection. The film treats it as a moral law whose violation measures a world's decay. Reviewers noted its interest in the erosion of honor, in betrayal that survives victory, and in broken bonds and rejected hospitality as a warning about humanity more generally. Steven D. Greydanus of Decent Films saw in this a departure for Nolan, a film centrally about what human beings owe one another.

The film also favors the human over the divine. The gods are present, but critics found its emphasis on mortal choice and suffering more than divine intervention. Several readings stressed how dark it is. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian read it as a metaphor for the emptiness and exhaustion that follow war. Bibbiani called it Nolan's most sensitive film, one almost entirely concerned with the torments of the soul: a personal blockbuster about self-loathing and shame played out on an enormous scale. Nathan's sense that Odysseus's violence reads as spite fits this view of a hero damaged by what he has survived. The emotional center is still the poem's: the long ache of the journey home.

These concerns echo Nolan's recurring subjects: the subjective distortion of time, memory as the reconstruction of a self, and the moral cost of survival, which ran through Memento, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. Here they come with Homer's authority.

Reception, canon & influence

Critics were broadly positive. The film debuted at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes from early reviews and settled at 94% across 515 reviews. The site's consensus praised its majestic sweep, its ensemble and its success in giving myth primal human feeling. Metacritic records a score of 88 from 63 critics, signifying universal acclaim. Audiences agreed: an A CinemaScore, an 81% "definitely recommend" rating on PostTrak, and a 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The most enthusiastic critics made big claims. Bibbiani at TheWrap called it Nolan's finest achievement. Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph named it the best film of the year to that point. Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent stressed its unprecedented scale. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times saw an anomalous big-studio entertainment that had turned a 3,000-year-old poem into a smart, thoughtful film. Variety praised it as a thrilling achievement while finding it aloof. A smaller group dissented sharply. Stephanie Zacharek of Time found it lifeless and dismissed it as a dud. Richard Brody of The New Yorker argued that Nolan made an epic poem prosaic. Odie Henderson of The Boston Globe found it overserious and weighed down by its own bleakness.

Classicists added a separate critique. Mary Beard found the film lacking in sex and humor and its character dynamics weakly handled. Emily Wilson, whose translation of the poem is widely read, judged it a simple action film with poorly written dialogue. Online reaction was reported as split despite near-universal admiration for the images.

The influences on the film (backward) are clear and partly documented by Nolan himself. Homer's Odyssey, about three thousand years old, is the source of the whole tradition of journey-and-return narrative, and Nolan places it at the root of his own work. The film's look draws on Andrei Rublev and Ran, two epics in which mud, fire, wind and weather are dramatic forces. Its relationship to myth on screen goes back to Harryhausen and the Greek-mythology films of Nolan's childhood, which it rejects in method while honoring in spirit. Its technical lineage is the large-format photography Nolan has spent two decades extending, and behind that the landscape epic of David Lean.

The film's legacy (forward) so far lies most visibly where the production pushed hardest. It proved that a feature can be shot entirely on IMAX film, and that such a feature, shown properly in very few venues, can anchor a global mass-audience event. Its record IMAX gross and extended 70mm run make the strongest industrial case yet for premium large-format capture and exhibition. It also reopened the old argument over how the ancient world should sound and look on screen, from accents to casting. Its most lasting inheritance may prove as much technological and industrial as artistic: further proof of the kind of cinema Nolan has spent his career defending.