The Odyssey (2026) Review: Nolan Strings the Bow Homer Handed Him (4.5/5)

Sing to me, Muse, of the man of twists and turns, and of the director who dared to film him.

I rose before rosy-fingered Dawn herself for the 6 AM show of The Odyssey. I had to. It was the only way to quiet an agony I had carried since the day the film was announced, the agony of waiting to watch one of this century’s finest directors bring to screen one of the finest odysseys of the last three millennia.

I was raised on the myths of gods. Hindu, Greek, and Norse pantheons were the most prominent stories of my childhood, and their heroes felt more like elder relatives than fiction. So when Nolan’s name was joined to Homer’s, I did what any child of myth would do: I made a prophecy. This film, I declared, would dethrone Interstellar as Nolan’s number one. Prophecy is a dangerous business in Greek stories. Mine came true.

Let me say it plainly, the way no oracle ever would: The Odyssey is everything you imagined seeing on a screen, and much more. It makes you doubt every doubt you ever had, about the casting, about whether a director fluent in wormholes and dreams could speak the older tongue of monsters and gods. I have already made this pilgrimage twice in theatres in a single week. Like its hero, I keep getting pulled back toward the same shore.

What Nolan Keeps from Homer’s Odyssey

Homer, remember, was cinema’s first nonlinear storyteller. The poem opens in medias res, in the middle of things, with Odysseus already ten years lost, his adventures unspooling later as tales told out of order. 

Nolan, the high priest of shuffled time, was always fated for this material. His film honors that ancient structure: Troy burns in flashback, the great horse looms in memory, and Odysseus recounts his voyage as his own past reassembles itself, the Trojan War material reaching past the Odyssey itself into the wider Epic Cycle, since the sack of Troy is famously in neither of Homer’s poems.

And the great stations of the voyage are here, rendered in 70mm glory. Polyphemus the Cyclops, staged as pure horror, a cave that becomes a slaughterhouse. Circe (a spellbinding Samantha Morton), whose stew makes gluttonous beasts of hungry men. 

The Sirens, with Odysseus lashed to the mast, in agony against their song. The katabasis into the land of the dead, where blind Tiresias prophesies and Agamemnon’s shade tells of the axe that awaited him at home. 

The Laestrygonian giants. Calypso’s island prison, where Charlize Theron’s nymph offers eternity to a man who only wants Ithaca. And the homeward strand that anchors it all: Penelope at her loom, Telemachus learning what it means to be a son, Antinous and his suitors circling the throne, and the great bow that only one man alive can string.

Boldest of all is what Nolan does with the divine. The gods here are human-sized or absent altogether. Poseidon never strides on screen; the Earth-shaker exists only as weather, storms, splintered hulls, a sea that holds a grudge. You won’t see the curses being called on screen, but you’re definitely going to see Odysseus going through each one of them.

Grey-eyed Athena appears in Zendaya’s flashes as a girl murdered in the sack of Troy, a goddess reimagined as grief and conscience. Purists may call it blasphemy. I call it the film’s quiet masterstroke.

And the theories say, it was never Athena at all, but the pure conscience of the man in the center of it all, his guilt chasing him.

What Nolan cuts in The Odyssey Compared to the Poem

But every loom has threads left on the floor, and here is where my half-star sails away.

“This section includes spoilers. So, be very wary of whether you still want to continue reading”.

Aeolus and the bag of winds, gone entirely. No gift of the winds, no crew tearing it open within sight of Ithaca, no crueler lesson about how close a man can come to home. The Lotus Eaters are gone as an episode, though the lotus itself is cunningly smuggled onto Calypso’s isle, where she feeds it to Odysseus so he forgets his longing. A clever transplant, I admit, but I mourned the original: a whole crew of men who ate forgetfulness willingly.

And the cut that stings most: “Nobody.” In the poem, Odysseus plies the Cyclops with wine, names himself Outis, Nobody, and when the blinded giant howls that Nobody is hurting him, his neighbors shrug and walk away. It is the single greatest trick in Western literature, the moment cunning is crowned above strength. 

Nolan’s version blinds the monster in his sleep, and the men escape beneath straw rather than clinging under sheep. The terror is magnificent; the wit is missing. Odysseus polytropos was never merely brave, he was clever, and “Nobody” is the cleverest thing he ever did.

The trimming continues at the edges: Hermes and the moly herb, Phaeacia and the court of Alcinous (the poem’s original frame story), old Laertes, Penelope’s final test of the immovable olive-tree bed. In their place Nolan weaves inventions of his own, Sinon (borrowed from Virgil, not Homer) made brother to Antinous, the mysterious Sea People raiding the coasts, and an ending that sends Odysseus and Penelope into exile together while Telemachus takes the throne. 

Homer would raise an eyebrow. He might also nod: the bards always reshaped the tale in the telling. Nolan is simply the latest singer at the fire, and this has always been an oral tradition that rewards the boldest voice in the hall.

The Odyssey vs Troy (2004): A Question of Thrones

The obvious comparison. In all the Greek myth movies out there, is Troy (2004), Wolfgang Petersen’s swing at the Iliad, and the contrast is instructive. Where the Iliad is bronze and rage, kleos, the hunger for glory, the Odyssey is salt and longing, nostos, the ache for home. 

Troy banished the gods entirely and, in its mortal fervor, rewrote fate itself: it killed Agamemnon on Trojan sand, robbing Clytemnestra of her axe. Nolan, stripping his gods nearly as bare, still lets the myth keep its spine, Agamemnon’s true death is honored, delivered by his own shade in the underworld. 

Troy gave us one immortal duel between Achilles and Hector and two hours of handsome melodrama. The Odyssey gives us mortals and still lets the uncanny breathe.

So, is there any film that dethrones the greatness this one offers? I searched the catalogue like Telemachus searching for his father. And I just didn’t shortlist, I went through the experience of each one of them to establish a real comparison. 

Kirk Douglas’s Ulysses (1954) is a charming relic. The 1997 miniseries had the episodes but never the awe. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a delight, but a detour. The Return (2024) gave us Ralph Fiennes’s haunted homecoming, yet dared not touch the wine-dark sea. 

And Troy, for all its spectacle, broke the myth to fit the screen. None of them dethrones this. The final act is almost a self-portrait: a hall full of suitors, one bow, and only one man who could string it.

The Verdict: Is The Odyssey (2026) Worth Watching?

The missing half-star departs with Aeolus’s winds. I dreamt of watching that bag torn open on an IMAX screen the size of a temple wall, of tasting the lotus with the crew, of hearing “Nobody!” thunder off a cave in 70mm. But I understand the choice. Nolan builds his miracles in camera, this is the first film shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, nearly three hours that pass like a following wind, and those episodes would demand the very digital sorcery he keeps at arm’s length. Given the covenant he has made with the real, I accept the sacrifice, even as I light a small candle for what was lost.

Ten years the man of twists and turns wandered. Two viewings in, my own nostos keeps repeating: I leave the theatre, and the theatre calls me home again. A third crossing feels fated. But now, I am saving the budget for this next one to come: Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Pour a libation for Interstellar. It reigned long and it reigned well. But a stranger has walked into the hall, strung the bow, and named himself, and this time, he is not Nobody.