The Odyssey Is a Natural End Point for Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan is the king of the thinking man’s blockbuster — the director who, for better and worse, ushered in the age of the serious superhero movie and who has since spent his time holding fast against the overwhelming pressures pushing the industry toward streaming, digital, and the impersonal. Nolan has embraced an elaborately mathematical approach to storytelling and somehow applied it successfully to the subjects of subconscious corporate espionage, space exploration, and World War II. He made a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb that didn’t just rack up seven Academy Awards but also managed to net almost a billion dollars at the box office. At this point in his career, the British filmmaker can do anything, and there’s a “no more worlds to conquer” bravado to his decision to make a reportedly $250 million adaptation of an ancient Greek epic and, while he’s at it, shoot the whole thing on Imax cameras. If anyone can make a massive mainstream hit out of Homer’s nearly 3,000-year-old text right at the moment when studios are casting about frantically for whatever hot new trend audiences might want, it’s Nolan, and, frankly, who’s going to tell him “no”?

And yet, watching The Odyssey, which is a whole lot of movie, some of it thrilling, what becomes amusingly apparent is that Odysseus actually makes the ultimate Nolan protagonist. The cunning king of Ithaca, who spends a decade laying siege to the city of Troy for his fellow king Agamemnon and then spends another decade struggling to get home, may exist in an era when giants stalk the earth and the wrath of a deity can blow ships far off course. But the version of the classical hero that the film conjures up nevertheless embodies the great preoccupation of Nolan’s filmography. While the director himself is a family man who famously collaborates with his wife, producer Emma Thomas, on all of his features, his work presents a fundamental incompatibility between having a vocation and a contented domestic life, a binary between chasing a calling and being present as a father or a partner. And his Odysseus, played by a brawny, weather-beaten Matt Damon, is a man who very badly wants to want to get back to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway, smiling through tamped-down rage), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). It’s a longing belied by the fact that he keeps getting in his own way and prolonging his journey.

In his clumsier variations on this theme — Inception’s Dom Cobb and his dream children, Interstellar’s Joseph Cooper and the daughter he leaves behind after missing her entire life — Nolan’s heroes can be thought of as men who feel bad about the fact that they don’t find their loved ones more compelling. But there’s also a soul-sick exhaustion to this Odysseus that makes him feel like Nolan’s attempt to exorcise himself of this archetype. Damon’s Odysseus is less tricksy and prone to vanity than the one in the text, a stalwart strategist rather than someone inclined to rely on a silver tongue. If he’s been chosen by the Olympians, their plan for him is unclear — the only divine presence onscreen is Athena (Zendaya), who may or may not just be a hallucination born out of guilt and grief. What is evident to him from the start is that the war he’s been called to help wage by Agamemnon (Benny Safdie, demonic in black armor) has nothing to do with Helen (Lupita Nyong’o, who also plays Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra) and everything to do with trade routes. But he’s very good at war — so good, in fact, that he becomes convinced his best-known innovation may have broken something fundamental in society.

His weariness with being a leader of men permeates his every movement; every time he sacrifices a few for the many, it etches itself on his face. Damon’s Odysseus is an action hero who is all too familiar with violence, but the strength of his performance comes from how heavily he wears the years that pass, letting them seep into his pores. It’s met by a corresponding frustration from the actors playing his men, especially Himesh Patel as second-in-command Eurylochus, who exudes exasperation at finding himself a secondary player in someone else’s prolonged healing process and seems to find the prospect of death increasingly preferable to dealing with so much main-character energy. Death threatens to find the veterans in all sorts of ways, from their unsettling encounter with the cyclops, a crêpe-skinned colossus whose single eye is placed sideways and who munches on the men he catches like Goya’s Saturn with his son, to their even eerier run-in with the Laestrygonians, portrayed as wordless soldiers in silvery armor who tear through the Greeks like tissue paper and enlist the trees in their slaughter. 

The world of The Odyssey may be veined with magic, but it’s rarely beautiful. Instead, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s lens emphasizes the wildness of the landscape in a way that suggests how tentative civilization’s hold on this place is. Even the idyllic island on which the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) is keeping an amnesiac Odysseus when the film begins is depicted as a windswept sandbar that looks in danger of being washed away by a strong-enough storm. The palace in Ithaca where Penelope tries to hold off dozens of suitors vying for her husband’s throne, and the one that Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) lords over in Sparta, are porous in all the ways that matter with strangers and frenemies passing through at all hours. Nolan’s take on the mythic past doesn’t strive for realism so much as it strives to bring unfathomably distant dramas to something like arm’s length, especially in the case of the Trojan horse, which is rendered in upsettingly claustrophobic, sensory detail. But his efforts to humanize the characters end up emphasizing the concerns we don’t share, especially the convention of Zeus’s law, a repeated expectation of hospitality toward strangers that the film never quite metabolizes into a larger theme.

The result is something that’s splendid and sprawling while remaining insulated from major emotions (with the exception of the thread involving Argos, Odysseus’s faithful hunting dog, which could shatter the hardest of hearts). But that’s Nolan, who’s always going to lead with his head and who even here circles around the sacking of Troy like the eventual sight of it will unlock all the anguish its protagonist feels but can’t express. And yet the ravaging, when it does unfurl onscreen in a maelstrom of screams and flame, is just another spectacle — and a numbing rather than enlightening one. What’s far more eloquent is the episode with the witch Circe (a terrific Samantha Morton), whose habit of tricking and transforming men into animals is rendered in evocatively physical, body-horror-esque imagery. Nolan will never be a great director of women, though he gives the women in this film more consideration than ever before, down to a scarred Helen’s hostility at having been used as an excuse for slaughter. 

Circe demands that Odysseus consider what it means for her to be confronted on her doorstep by a dozen professional pillagers who expect to be welcomed in. In her sputtering fury, there is an acknowledgment of what it means to be one of the many people in this world resigned to being acted upon, rather than having the luxury of being burdened by action. The Odyssey may not go far down this path, but the fact it turns its attention that way at all, however briefly, hints at how much unexplored territory remains out there for Nolan after all.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 27, 2026, issue of New York Magazine.

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