When Christopher Nolan was a kid in Chicago, he would sit in the dome of the Museum of Science and Industry, watching Omnimax documentaries and wondering what a Hollywood action film would look like if shot that way. That question stuck with him for over forty years. He started chipping away at it with The Dark Knight, filming select action sequences on IMAX film, and every movie since has pushed the format a little further. With The Odyssey, his thirteenth feature, he finally did it. This is the first movie in history shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, and it is a true cinematic experience, a movie that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
There is something fitting about a decades-long quest to get somewhere behind a movie about a decades-long quest to get home. The Odyssey has been retold and reexamined in a million different ways, but this version is distinct because it is made by Christopher Nolan. The film approaches the story with the same verisimilitude Nolan applied to the Batman mythos, grounding ancient Greek men, gods, and monsters and turning a 3,000-year-old epic poem into a traditional summer blockbuster for a wide audience of all ages.
The Camera That Does Not Lie
To shoot this film entirely on IMAX, Nolan and his team had to face a trial of their own: noise. IMAX film cameras were historically so loud that close-up dialogue was impossible, with Matt Damon once comparing the sound to running a blender in your face. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema tried to fix it for Tenet with a sound-dampening casing and failed. This time, a reworked casing dubbed “the blimp” was used, and it worked, meaning that quiet, intimate, all-IMAX dialogue scenes were finally possible.
The breakthrough came at a price. The encased Keighley weighs almost 300 pounds, so a dedicated six-person crew hauled it everywhere, and it is refrigerator-sized. This caused problems for actors trying to play off of each other in intimate scenes, so a rig of mirrors had to be built just so actors could see each other’s eyes. Its magazines hold roughly three minutes of film per reload, yet the production still burned through 2.1 million feet of the stuff, longer than the distance from Toronto to New York. So why go through all of that? Van Hoytema said it best: “It is a camera that does not lie; it has such beautiful depth and resolution.” That honesty kept every department on point, because IMAX is unforgiving and exposes anything superficial the second it hits the lens. It can also capture the beauty of cinema in a way unlike any other camera.
Zeus’s Law and the Long Road Home
The Odyssey follows King Odysseus on a perilous ten-year journey home after the Trojan War, as he faces monsters, magic, and the potential wrath of the gods, and we learn who the man behind the celebrated war hero really is. Back on Ithaca, his son Telemachus and wife Penelope contend with hostile suitors looking to claim her hand and the kingship, while Telemachus loyally waits for a father he never knew, chasing any scrap of news that keeps hope alive. With the story in place, the film’s central ideas come into focus.
Nolan built the entire film on two ancient Greek ideals, and understanding them is understanding the movie. The first is Xenia, also called Zeus’s Law, the practice of extending generous hospitality to strangers. In Odysseus’s time, this was a civic and divine duty, and violating it was shameful. Strip away the antiquity, and it is something we all know: treat others as you would want to be treated. The Golden Rule. It all boils down to empathy and respect. That principle becomes clearer when Nolan shows it being honored and broken.
Nolan examines it from many angles. We see it spat on by the suitors, who boorishly feast night after night, running Odysseus’s fortune dry in hopes of taking his queen. We see it through the hubris of Agamemnon, whose vanity and ego started a war that cost so much death, depravity, and destruction, a man who violates the lands of others while aura farming in armor that takes no damage, drifting around battles he takes no part in, only to sail home expecting to be greeted as a conquering hero. The law of Zeus is simple. If you lack respect or empathy, karma will find you. You must either pay for your mistakes or repent and be reborn.
That leads to the second theme: Nostos, meaning “return” or “rebirth.” On its surface, the story is literally about Odysseus trying to return home. The rebirth angle is the more exciting one to examine from a film perspective, because growth has to stem from hardship. We watch Odysseus face trials depicted in fantastical ways for the sake of storytelling, but the theme resonates with all of us because we face trials in our own lives that force us to be reborn and to mature.
The most important change Nolan made to the story sits right here. He tightened the focus on Odysseus’s character and shifted the epic from a hero’s tale driven by the gods of ancient Greece into a character study of a “hero” in lament, a man who cannot get home because, maybe, deep down, he feels he does not deserve to. A man who shattered the Golden Rule and understands the consequences of his actions. This Odysseus is not the boastful egomaniac getting humbled by the gods he insulted. He is a man who made a mistake, grasped the severity of it, and no longer believes he is the honorable man who left, so why should he deserve the warmth and comfort of home? It is a far more layered, modern take on an ancient hero, and it is why the twin themes work so insanely well together: Nostos is what Odysseus wants, but Xenia is what he keeps violating to get there.
I also love that Nolan downplays the gods. Their presence is felt, but they are not actively driving the story, which keeps the focus on the humanity of these characters. The one god we do see is Zendaya’s Athena, and she is not there to intervene. She is there to haunt the narrative. That choice keeps the story grounded in the people who must live with the consequences.
The Cast
The main cast is fantastic. Matt Damon brings an earnest likeability to Odysseus, and that matters because a modern retelling needs a modern everyman hero with the nuance and range to convey the lament and haunted undertones this version of the character requires. Damon has both in spades.
Tom Holland is a delightful surprise as Telemachus. Let’s be honest, we all love Tom Holland; he is a great guy. Yet despite grinding year after year, people still do not see him as a powerhouse performer. I really hope he continues working with directors like Nolan who can showcase his commitment to the craft. And Robert Pattinson, this man is simply the greatest actor of my generation, on an insane generational run of unique, mesmerizing performances. Here he gets to play a proper shithead as Antinous, and he does it exceptionally well, to the shock of absolutely no one.
The two biggest standouts come from the supporting cast. John Leguizamo is unrecognizable as Eumaeus, the blind, loyal friend who watches over the kingdom in Odysseus’s absence. Leguizamo gives it his all and puts on a show in every scene. The character is naturally likable, and I was immediately charmed. Samantha Morton is a force of nature as Circe. She walks into the film and dominates her short but impactful screen time, wild, bewitching, and commanding, committed to the role, body, and mind. She is responsible for one of the most horrific sequences we have ever seen in a Nolan film, and a lot of that power comes straight from her performance.
Even the smaller players shine. Elliot Page delivers a haunting turn that proves impactful to Odysseus’s arc, Himesh Patel is great as Eurylochus, and I loved seeing faces like Ryan Hurst, Corey Hawkins, and Logan Marshall-Green pop up. The truth is, most of this cast operates at a high level.
The Horse
The Trojan Horse has transcended literature to become one of the most referenced images in the cultural zeitgeist, and with something so well-known and, honestly, so overused, I was thoroughly intrigued to see how an auteur like Nolan would approach it. I was not disappointed. Nolan’s Horse is a narrative throughline that bridges the story’s acts while letting us see the fall of Troy unfold from different perspectives.
The Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement, the chess move that ended the war and made him an epic hero in the eyes of everyone who heard the tale. But The Odyssey is told in medias res, after the war, so we never see the battle of Troy. We only hear about it. Nolan tells it in pieces, through three storytellers with three very different relationships to the event. The first piece comes from the mouth of a poet, who treats it like an epic tale about a larger-than-life hero. The second comes from Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus, king of Sparta, whose personal “tragedy,” the abduction of his wife Helen, kick-started the whole ten-year war. This is a warrior’s telling. He was inside the horse, and he recounts a massive military victory, a band of brothers executing with insane will and precision.
The final piece comes from Odysseus himself and ties together the movie’s themes while delivering its twist. His perspective forces us to witness the atrocities and vile acts his fellow soldiers committed once the gates were opened. He watched, in real time, as they violated the law of Zeus, and understood that while his move was brilliant, it set a terrifying precedent for the rules of engagement and stripped conflict of its honor. The same story told three times, each version pulling the myth further down to earth, until the hero’s greatest triumph is revealed as the source of his deepest shame. This storytelling method was executed brilliantly for maximum impact on both the audience and the story Nolan is telling.
An Intimate Epic
This is Nolan’s fifth collaboration with Academy Award winner Hoyte van Hoytema, and it might be their most impressive. The film was shot across six countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and the U.S. The gorgeous locales are enhanced by the IMAX format, creating shots that bring an epic poem to life in cinematic form. This is one of Nolan’s best-directed films, filled with remarkable visual sequences that elicit wonder, and the giant format showcases both the vistas and the ensemble in a larger-than-life way.
For all that scale, though, the cinematography is intimate and grounded, and that is the point. Van Hoytema’s guiding phrase for the aesthetic was “intimate epic.” The landscapes are the backdrop, not the subject. The design goal was to put you in Odysseus’s shoes and connect you to his yearning for home and the heavy ethical conflicts he encounters along the way. Those two ideas are the foundation of the movie.
An Odyssey of Sounds
The score is a real standout, as is the sound design. This is Ludwig Göransson’s third Nolan score after Tenet and Oppenheimer, the latter of which won him one of his three Oscars, alongside Black Panther and Sinners, and it might be his most conceptually daring work yet. That daring is clearest in how the music rejects convention and reaches back to antiquity.
Every antiquity epic scores the ancient world with a 19th-century European orchestra, an anachronism so standard that nobody even notices it anymore. Nolan refused the convention outright, pushing Göransson toward “an earthy, modern, relatable tone” built on the actual instruments of Homer’s era: the aulos, an ancient Greek double-reed pipe, and the lyre, the small harp bards would have used to sing The Odyssey itself. That is right, this movie is scored by the same instrument that told the story 3,000 years ago. That is a testament to the creative genius of Göransson, who continues to produce the most layered and accessible scores. His ability to research and play around with instruments from the Homeric era shows the dedication everyone working on this film had to making something truly special.
The main theme is where the score becomes something special. Nolan suggested that Troy would have had an alarm system made of large bronze sheets, which its people sounded during the siege. Göransson took that idea and built the whole score on it: “The growing cacophony would transform into a unified musical statement, ultimately evolving into Odysseus’s defining motif.” The hero’s theme literally emerges from the noise of the city he destroyed. The sound of Troy’s terror becomes Odysseus’s musical identity. Per Nolan’s direction, it is a lament, three notes that recur throughout the movie and echo the pluck of Odysseus’s legendary bowstring, the weapon of his homecoming.
The beauty of Odysseus’ signature theme is in its depth. It’s not heroic. It is grief, born from his own atrocity and resolved through the instrument of his return, with the beginning and end of his journey compressed into three notes. That musical language also supports the film’s larger moral framework. The beautiful complexity within the simplicity is insane to digest, as this score perfectly encapsulates the entire narrative and its core themes in a single track.
When Everything Might Be Too Much
At the end of the day, The Odyssey is a true achievement for cinema. You have a film shot entirely on IMAX where the cast and crew are all giving 150 percent, everyone firing on all cylinders. This is a movie where Nolan directed people on jet skis just to create a real whirlpool for the Scylla and Charybdis sequence, where life-sized Cyclops puppets were used on set, where new IMAX technology was invented just to get this thing locked in.
My problem is that it might just be too much.
Nolan went big, with a massive runtime, a massive budget, and a stacked cast, but I would argue the film would have benefited from less. While most of the cast is magnificent, there is an overuse of A-listers in roles that could have been handled with more creativity by unknowns. More than once, I was pulled out of the film by the sudden appearance of a famous face that offered nothing the role needed, and Calypso in particular felt miscast. I love Charlize Theron and think she is a fantastic actress, but her Calypso serves more as a plot device than as a fleshed-out character. With such an unsubstantial role, another actor might have offered a more interesting, less straightforward take on the character.
The movie also drags slightly in the beginning and could have been tighter. I understand the film was designed to be epic in size and scope, but that does not mean we need everything and the kitchen sink. The modernization of the dialogue works extremely well overall and is a huge part of what makes this accessible to such a wide audience, but it occasionally felt oversimplified. There were moments where the themes and morals were spoon-fed, and a story this rich did not always need the assist. A little dialogue polish and some restraint in the runtime and casting would have brought The Odyssey dangerously close to being a perfect film.
The Verdict
At the end of the day, The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan completing a forty-year odyssey of his own, and you can feel that passion in every frame. It is in a camera that had to be invented just to make this film possible. It is in a score built from bronze and grief. It is in a hero who cannot come home until he faces what he did to become a legend. This is a movie about a man who broke the Golden Rule and spent ten years paying for it, made by a filmmaker who spent a lifetime waiting for the tools to tell it right. Nostos is the journey home. Nolan’s journey took forty years, but upon finishing his odyssey, he may have, in fact, caused a rebirth of cinema. Do yourself a favor and see this one on the biggest screen you can possibly find. Anything less would be a violation of Zeus’s law, and we all know how that works out for people.
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