Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many film cameras: Christopher Nolan's ODYSSEY

Starring Matt Damon as a toilet brush:

https://people.com/thmb/YILp5A87zz05zzOcagqhNaUNoaY=/4000x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(599x0:601x2):format(webp)/matt-damon-the-odyssey-021725-2-4ae9f59958f347758e261cb65392141c.jpg

Plus everyone else so far:

Tom Holland
Zendaya
Robert Pattinson
Lupita Nyong'o
Anne Hathaway
Charlize Theron
Jon Bernthal
Benny Safdie
John Leguizamo
Elliot Page
Himesh Patel
Bill Irwin
Samantha Morton
Mia Goth
Corey Hawkins
Jesse Garcia
Will Yun Lee
Rafi Gavron
Shiloh Fernandez
Nick E Tarabay
Jimmy Gonzales
Maurice Compte

I don't know how this is a good idea but I've doubted Nolan before.

Jon Bernthal might have made a pretty good Odysseus. Matt Damon, not so much. Honestly, a lot of that cast list is a flashing neon STAY AWAY sign. Ooh, is Zendaya gonna make her one facial expression again?

He should make them all act in ancient Greek.

Needs Tim Blake Nelson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNaCWSAAb8A

He's going to do the mo cap for the cyclops.

He's also going to do the mo cap for Matt Damon.

Yeah this sounds very bad. Nolan often a Cinema of Quality bore and this will be tailor made for that.

assume by this time next year it will be a trilogy

RPattz IS cyclops

bring on the lotus eaters i am here for all this imo

All in on IMAX:

After the success of Oppenheimer, which earned more than $190 million on Imax screens, some 20 percent of its total gross, Nolan challenged the company to improve its cameras, to make them lighter and quieter, and to solve issues with scanning and processing the cameras’ 70 mm film stock, to allow him to easily watch dailies as he shot.

“Chris called me up and said If you can figure out how to solve the problems, will make (Odyssey) 100 percent in Imax. And that’s what we’re doing,” said Imax CEO Rich Gelfond, speaking at the company’s annual press lunch in Cannes on Thursday. “He forced us to rethink that side of our business, our film recorders, our film cameras.”

The new Imax cameras are reportedly 30 percent quieter — so those infamous muffled dialogue scenes in Nolan films could be a thing of the past — and substantially lighter. Gelfond said new film scanning and processing techniques will allow a faster turnaround for dailies.

Having recently read Emily Watson's translation, it was plain to me that Homer's primary concern in every single book of the Odyssey wasn't stuff like the spectacle of blinding the giant cyclops or men turned into swine. Nope. Homer was mostly focused on the proper relationship between hosts and guests, their conduct toward one another, and the various gradations of propriety determined by social status, power, and wealth among the participants. It was a book of bronze age etiquette at least as much as an adventure story. I doubt this will be made apparent in Nolan's adaptation.

Let's go defy some gods:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gu2dTQsWsAAxmSd?format=jpg&name=900x900

And if that didn't work:

https://images.bauerhosting.com/empire/2025/07/odyssey-poster-christopher-nolan.jpg?auto=format&w=992&q=80

There has to be some way to put this alongside a poster of The Brutalist so it looks like these sparks are coming from Adrien Brody

Having recently read Emily Watson's translation, it was plain to me that Homer's primary concern in every single book of the Odyssey wasn't stuff like the spectacle of blinding the giant cyclops or men turned into swine. Nope. Homer was mostly focused on the proper relationship between hosts and guests, their conduct toward one another, and the various gradations of propriety determined by social status, power, and wealth among the participants. It was a book of bronze age etiquette at least as much as an adventure story. I doubt this will be made apparent in Nolan's adaptation.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Thursday, 15 May 2025 19:34 (one month ago)

180 minutes and 9 seconds of who eats what and in what order they eat. Filmed in IMAX.

Initial teaser running before Superman. Tom Holland asking about his dad, a tiny Trojan Horse, and floating around on wreckage.

So maybe Aimless was OTM

https://bsky.app/profile/grousehollow.bsky.social/post/3lwp6v2e63c2u

At last I have finished The Odyssey, after many years and triumphs and tragedies and olive oil rubdowns and what-have-you. So finally know what the epic is all about, which is this: eating meat. Lots and lots and lots of meat.

Got photos if you want it:

https://ew.com/the-odyssey-exclusive-images-matt-damon-anne-hathaway-tom-holland-11857321

I wanted it to take a decade and everyone but Matt Damon gets eaten

the prologue that plays before Avatar 3 is insane, I am seated, etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzw2ttJD2qQ

trailer a bit underwhelming coming after that prologue tbh

but not as underwhelming as that flop Avengers teaser was when it played immediately after the prologue lol

No cheering?

O, Muses! You obviously failed to show up for this movie. The audience will miss you terribly.

no muses no watch

christ this looks dull as all hell.

Doesn't exactly scream summer, that's for sure.

i think of Nolan as a director who's formally strong but unimaginative so taking on a famous work of fiction that everyone already has cool mental images of feels like a big error

i always think back to Inception when they're entering the innermost layer of the dream world and i'm like "okay this is where you put the coolest setting you can possibly think of, show me what you got" and... it's the snow level from a Call of Duty game

It would be great if it was just Matt Damon, in costume, reading the book on location(s) for 10 hours.

just looks like another viking movie

just looks like another viking movie

Coming in 2029: Christopher Nolan's The Saga Of The Volsungs

well I'm just reminded of how The Northman pretty much tanked... I thought it was a good film but it has a lot of anger and weird dude energy at a moment when that wasn't hitting

looks like more of the same

a lot of anger and weird dude energy

I would not be surprised to see organizations catering to right-wing chuds with Roman statue avatars block-buying tickets to this thing in order to promote "classical values" and blah blah blah.

that's why i will only watch these kinds of things on mute, glancing up occasionally for beefcake, which if the trailer for this is representative seems to be sparse to non-existent.

i always think back to Inception when they're entering the innermost layer of the dream world and i'm like "okay this is where you put the coolest setting you can possibly think of, show me what you got" and... it's the snow level from a Call of Duty game

booming post, extremely otm

Nolan is the worst exemplar of several terrible tendencies, I won't belabour the point tho, god speed man-dreck fans

He’s gonna make this epic look like a three hour episode of swords & sandals Dragnet without any suspense except the occasional bit where you wonder when Göransson’s score is finally gonna resolve

I’m not like “oh if it doesn’t have a twist it sucks” guy over here, my family and I still love all the Captain America movies ffs, but what is the deal with Nolan and foregone conclusions ramped up to maximum volume? I assume after The Prestige he just decided “finally, I can stop making movies where the denouement is in question!” and surprising people with anything other than mild disappointments in the moral qualities of minor characters fell off the menu. Oh well. I guess if he and his fans and coworkers are all having fun I should shut up.

I can't say I was ever a Nolan super-fan but always thought his movies were worth watching once, preferably on a movie screen. They usually don't hold up to much scrutiny, despite their possibly higher aspiration, they are ultimately just popcorn movies. I like that he continues to stay with practical effects, I like what is doing with Imax. I guess not everybody likes his aesthetic, but it looks like he at least cares what his movies look like (I'm less sure that he really cares what they sound like). I have weirdly come to appreciate him more his last couple of movies just because his movies stand out more compared to most other blockbusters/action movies which somehow keep looking worse and worse to me.

This looks fun! A Clash of the Titans with fresher special effects (and not cgi slop) sounds great and potentially something he can pull off—the story suits his tendencies to grandiosity.

Tenet is his best movie, where the pomposity somehow actually elevates it to some kind of sublime ridiculous.

And the source text, obviously, can easily absorb just about anything ridiculous or grandiose or pompous you want to impart to it.

Apparently online racists are real mad that Helen of Troy is being played by the totally not beautiful at all Lupita Nyong'o.

I’m really enjoying the spectacle of musk fanboys vs nolan fanboys engaging in their little civil war of words. From a distance, of course, I only know what happens on x.com from screenshots and reposts

at the very least it prevents this from happening:

I would not be surprised to see organizations catering to right-wing chuds with Roman statue avatars block-buying tickets to this thing in order to promote "classical values" and blah blah blah.

It's just disrespectful to the real-life historical figure Helen of Troy who, being from a city in modern day Turkey, was undoubtedly a lily white woman like Sydney Sweeney.

Apparently online racists are real mad that Helen of Troy is being played by the totally not beautiful at all Lupita Nyong'o.

Foremost amongst them, Elon Musk.

Can't see Nolan improving on Horrible Histories' Helen though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSZ2BoBZH-4

it's very sad when serious historians and classicists fall out over stuff like this

Hey, we’re getting the dog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bKjZeJBBI

When he says "no one can stand between me and home" that is an easter egg callback to Homer.

Is there discourse somewhere on ILE about “The Return” with Ralph Fiennes?

not excited... reading the kids versions of the odyssey and iliad; my brain was always in full color magical harryhausen mode with how i imagined it all. this looks like....a Christopher Nolan film :-( ...dour and grey.

^ i heard NOTHING about tThe Return on release... mention above is first i heard it even happened.... from a quick google, looks great?

I liked The Return, but I’m a bit of a Fiennes fanboy (Fiennesboy?). For those keeping track, it also has his faithful dog.

idk if this was posted/talked about already, but Emily Wilson's takedown of Anne Carson in 2024 was the "Not Like Us" of the classics world

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/anne-carson-wrong-norma/

not really impressed by the cyclops or the big tall men. fantasy movies are a crowded genre, where mediocre films try to outdo each other with SFX. against that yardstick big tall men in tin cans won't cut it!

It's a Christopher Nolan movie, so I don't think it's meant to be funny, but... wow. This is a joke, right?

i'm only interested in beefcake shots from this movie. the poster art and trailer do not bode well. why does nolan have to make everything so 'realistic' in a bad way.

Seriously, the trailer looks like a particularly vicious parody. "What if Christopher Nolan adapted The Odyssey?"

looks like the only thing this has going for it is villainous R Patz and even that's not much

I want to see an IMAX screening of this and the Dune movies with the reels all mixed up.

That's the trailer? Aren't they supposed to make you want to see the film?

https://bsky.app/profile/mattbaume.bsky.social/post/3ml3jbxnlrk2z

more like ody-not-see

the man knows his audience

haaaa

it's REALLY weird to me that Tom Holland keeps calling him "my dad", like thoroughly the weirdest thing in the trailer.

Pvmic I guess but jesus you lot are a bunch of shut-in grumps! I’m excited for this and none of your endless hrrm-ing will dissuade me!!

i'm objectively kind of lolling at the typical Nolanisms but subjectively i'm excited tbh. neutral on Damon, but Patz and Charlize look perfectly cast here, Leguizamo looks pretty bizarre and cool.

it's REALLY weird to me that Tom Holland keeps calling him "my dad", like thoroughly the weirdest thing in the trailer.

This (and Pattinson's haircut) were the things that completely put me off this. And thanks for pointing out Leguizamo - he went by so fast that I was thinking, Was that...? Nah.

Was Anne the only one using an accent?

leguizamo one of the most off putting people of all time

wtf that seems wildly incorrect

jesus you lot are a bunch of shut-in grumps! I’m excited for this

I hope you like it so much you go back to enjoy it multiple times. Based on what I saw in the trailers, that is most certainly not going to be the case for me. If this makes me a "shut-in grump", so be it. To each his own.

Was Anne the only one using an accent?

Based solely on the limited dialogue in that trailer, seems like Hathaway is going English and Pattinson is going American. Which is odd.

Would much rather watch Fritz Lang's Odyssey.

https://job-in-france.babylangues.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/le-mepris-004.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DcczsTGV0AUVuS3.jpg

I am much more into Holland as Telemachus now that I’m seeing Pattinson is Atinous. love that dynamic

I for one look forward to another round of Leguizamo Doing Way Too Much
It’s very nostalgic for me

Ye Gods! This entire thing seems off.
If you haven't seen "The Return" I definitely recommend it. Can get a little ponderous but it's the Odysseus you wanna see. No monsters and men turned into pigs,though.

i am upset that they are using the word “dad.” furthermore, there seems to be additional dialogue in english and almost nothing in ancient greek!

hahaha

also this

Pvmic I guess but jesus you lot are a bunch of shut-in grumps! I’m excited for this and none of your endless hrrm-ing will dissuade me!!

Based solely on the limited dialogue in that trailer, seems like Hathaway is going English and Pattinson is going American. Which is odd.

I should have specified that Anne seemed to be the only one not doing an *American* accent in the trailer. That appears to be the default accent they're using. I'm sure Nolan already has a smug defense ready for stuff like that. "The region where Penelope grew up would have spoken differently ..." or "Well, actually, the English word 'dad' is by some accounts a more accurate translation of the Greek, because ... "

they don’t show it in the trailer but leguizamo’s character speaks like hans & franz

Man the Emily Wilson translation is impossible to overrate thusfar. Inclined to dive right into her Iliad once I’m through it

I just started it!

God it’s good. I’ve only read Fagles before this

Same!

Christopher Nolan on reuniting with Elliot Page a decade after 'Inception': “It was really fun. Elliot’s just terrific, and I just thought this was such a great part for him. We had such a great time years ago on Inception. It’s nice to reunite with people.”

Seems like a good dude.

He can be a good dude with good thoughts and still be up his own butt when it comes to making movies though

I like the fact that this movie is winding up racists, but sadly I don't care for Nolan's films very much so I suspect I wouldn't enjoy this one either.

Not a huge Nolan fan but he's technically very good, I like the setting, if anyone can turn Homer into a blockbuster it's him. Risked it all on a couple of IMAX tickets.

I'm kinda surprised at how much I'm looking forward to this considering how Nolan-skeptical I am, but if this is just a prestige blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey with movie stars and monsters and landscapes and big storms, I've definitely got some room in my life for that. But I cant shake the fear that he'll feel compelled to fuck around with showoffy timeline games and annoying flashback tricks and that type of overcomplicating shit that he loves.

tbf, Homer fucked around with timeline shifts and parallel stories in the Odyssey jumping around between present and past, and Telemachus and Odysseus.

for sure, and i'm fine with all that, but theres a part of me that worries that Nolan will think its like about that and just go nuts with it. cautiously optimistic though.

No way am I intending to see this, but at least the source material suggests it'd be a more interesting way to spend three hours than Oppenheimer was.

i got no issue with using the source text as a vague reference for an unrelated movie - it's not exactly the first time the Odyssey has been used that way. i just have no interest in Nolan's work. also dude you'd probably be more comfortable remaking Ulysses 31 or something.

Probably not seeing this movie but it's cool that everyone's talking about the Odyssey! My favorite translation is Fitzgerald but I've never really given any others a try. My dad read it to me when I was four (dooming me to a lifetime of being a nerd) and I imprinted on that translation.

I was a Fitzgerald adherent for several decades, but I now prefer Emily Wilson. Each has its excellencies. Wilson is more easily assimilable as a work of modern poetic translation. I recall Fitzgerald as hewing more closely to the letter of the text, but sometimes his servitude to the text cramped the narrative and the poetry. Wilson was unafraid of 'editing Homer' if it served her readers while not doing Homer a disservice.

if anyone can turn Homer into a blockbuster it's him.

― disco stabbing horror (lukas), Sunday, July 12, 2026 2:40 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

A little while back, I was discussing this movie with a coworker. He's a big Nolan fan and is stoked about the movie. I haven't watched that many of his movies, but I'm low-to-mixed on those I have seen, so I'm not anticipating it unless there are tremendous reviews from people I trust. But he asked me who I would want to see direct it?

I thought about it for a minute and came back with Alex Garland. And I haven't even seen his whole filmography either, but what I've seen indicates to me that he's capable of, and maybe in the right place in his career, to approach an epic fantasy film. And so I went and looked up his wikipedia article and, as it turns out, he is directing an epic fantasy film right now based on the Elden Ring video game (source material I'm completely unfamiliar with). Video game adaptations can be fraught, obviously, but I hope he pulls it off.

If anyone can make a really good FromSoft film adaptation, it would be a feat on par with the Jackson LOTR trilogy. By which i mean, its extremely doubtful :-(

i liked this a lot. some others in my group were more mixed... tbh i thought they were being a bit harsh. as far as major hollywood epics of this sort go, i had very few complaints. some of the set pieces i thought were pretty breathtaking. i also think matt damon is basically fantastic always. tom holland is the one casting decision that left me wanting, some of the other actors listed exist very much in the periphery (i think zendaya has like two lines). i sorta got tired of nolan's shtick over time, i would concur w/ the thesis that the existing framework of this story is a helpful curb against some of the creative impulses that have made some of his past films hard to love

Bummed to read that they filmed in occupied Western Sahara... there are SO many deserty places they could've filmed that are way less problematic

After hating Tenet and being meh about Oppenheimer, loved this

It was solid, yup. More tomorrow.

This ripped

how's Hathaway? Her accent looked dodgy in the hallowed Hollywood tradition.

People more or less used their natural speaking voices other than Holland

Travis Scott is the Bard at the beginning in the crowded dining hall.

A very good review, talking about how this film sucks.

https://time.com/article/2026/07/15/the-odyssey-review-christopher-nolan/

I saw this (not in IMAX) today. It's an episodic film with lulls but the best parts are extraordinary.
I thought Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo and Anne Hathaway gave the best performances though most of the others are solid.
Like Oppenheimer this could have been a good bit shorter and still have worked at least as well.
The cinematography is generally astonishing, the design is excellent and the score was good.
I'm vaguely tempted to go see it IMAX to see if the scale adds something

IMAX made Hoytema's gnarly zoom mishaps stand out.

Every once in a while, the goddess Athena (Zendaya) will appear at Odysseus’ side to judge his actions, mostly by offering a scowl of disapproval, the sort of face a wife makes when her husband loads the dishwasher wrong.

Well, of course she does. Making the Zendaya Face (see also: both Dune movies) is her only talent.

ILX vet Mark Slutsky with a good piece/interview:

https://www.markslutsky.com/archive/something-good-123-a-hero-for-our-time/

I loved this— as a perennial Nolan hater I thought his pseudo-documentarian style worked stupendously well for the material, the narrative was lithe and flexible and strangely worked wonders even on the long run time

I saw in basic screening settings and do want to see it properly in IMAX but it just looked classical gritty glorious to me, the full fruits of Nolan’s practical effects/shot on film insistences on display

Performances were roundly spellbinding, Samantha Morton in particular— Anne Hathaway seems to be able to work a miracle with any gloopy role and I just followed her into the gloop and found myself, too, blubbering along with her. I don’t understand how Charlize Theron can possibly be both 50 and a cigarette smoker.

The largest imperfection imo— and my attitude might soften— was Nolan’s insistence on placing the Sack as a narrative lynchpin, it throws the entire pacing off, places some moralizing on the proceedings that feels grafted and unnecessary. I wish the suitors fight sequence was filmed in daylight, also, but IMAX may shift my view on this. Argos narrative felt weak but I’m a dog guy. Near-perfect aside from these crits

Formatting snafu, my apologies

Samantha Morton as Circe and her sequence were just marvelous: I love the idea of not much hocus-pocus, just a witch getting her hands dirty. Matt Damon projected a surprising pathos: he sold the idea that he has sullied his greatest triumph by violating the most basic of Zeus' tenets. His decision to read his lines without affect helped.

It took a while for the film to sort itself out -- a lot of exposition, and my audience was not one primed to know a thing about Homer's poem. Once Telemachus set sail for Sparta and Odysseus and his men entered the Cyclops' cave it didn't stop. Some of the loudest sound design I've heard in a film.

I'll you what didn't work: every damn scene with Calypso. With the rippling blue water and Charlize Theron making moo faces those scenes looked like 1980s Maybelline ads.

Zacharek's one of my favorite working critics, but these conclusions are wrong:

But then, there’s little in The Odyssey that breathes. It churns so dutifully toward its predictable conclusions—summed up roughly as “War dehumanizes men!” and “Civilization, now as in Odysseus’ time, is on the brink!”—that you begin to wonder if it wouldn’t be a better use of your time to just stay home and read The Odyssey. We want and need more movie artistry—and more dedication to the craft, which Nolan, no matter what you think of him, surely espouses. But a movie still needs to add up to something you actually want to watch, not just a testament to a filmmaker’s solemn dedication to the hallowed tradition of filmmaking.

Have you seen Richard Brody’s New Yorker review yet?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/27/the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-movie-review

"Matt Damon plays Odysseus as a gruff, practical tactician, rather than an energetically inventive and morally dubious schemer."

Uhhhh Odysseus is first and last a morally dubious schemer. Have these people watched the same film?

(I do loathe defending Nolan, a director whose work mostly means nothing to me).

Yep thought this worked, at grand scale. As with the best parts of Oppenheimer, the story suits Nolan’s insistence on thundering portent. His self-seriousness overwhelms flimsier material — why I don’t like his Batman movies — but you can’t really overwhelm The Odyssey, it calls for all the world-shaking sense of import you can muster. I think Damon is OK, he serves the story but doesn’t bring much distinct to the role. Hathaway’s very good, and Morton’s great.

Damon plays the hardest role! Like Spartacus and other sword-and-sandal epic heroes, the lead is the bore; Damon made his purported moral tumult and his bloodthirstiness interesting.

I came home and reclaimed my wife
Howdya like them apples

I loved this! But at the same time I did feel like it split me into two separate schools of thought as well.

As a fan of Nolan I love this incredible monument he created, at times a thrilling Realist Harryhausen, at others Thin Red Line But Make It Sparta, but always wholeheartedly giving itself over to The Epic. The locations, the sets, the tangibility? of all of it, it was fucking THRILLING seeing it all on screen, put forth in such a carefully crafted way. Like I haven’t seen a Ben Hur level movie in a theater for a LONG time. I love having this!

On the other hand, as a lover of the poem it was dismaying to see it flattened into A sToRy BoUt A bOY an HiS DaD aND WaR, losing so much of the powerful femininity & the nuance & lyricism. flattening & carving out the female characters to just serve as beautiful signposts. That part of me was SO bummed that none of what I loved of the poem itself was really apparent.

But like I said up top, I really did love it anyway. So. Inside me there are two wolves? Idk.

After my Nan died we cleared out her living room. Behind an armchair in the corner she had had a table covered in a sheet, stacked w old magazines & phone books. We took the sheet off for the first time ever, even my Mum who grew up there had never seen it without the sheet on it -we expected the sheet was covering a plywood box or something - and we found a gorgeous handmade table with beautiful carvings in the top. The table -had- been round but someone had ~sawed off~ the edges of the carved circular tabletop to fit it in the corner! Then dumped the sheet on it & shoved it behind the armchair where it sat for 40 years.
Part of me always decried “how could you do that” to such beautiful craftsmanship?
But part of me acknowledges the Depression-era utilitarianism of putting it to use regardless of aesthetic beauty.

Anyway. That’s kinda what Nolan’s Odyssey made my weird brain think of.

otm

P.S. The first time Tom Holland's been hot. Why the fuck were there 15,000 suitors for Penelope? Fucking Telemachus was right there.

Some real Florida Man logic right there Alfo

Mine, flambo, is, like Jadis the White Witch's, a high and lonely destiny.

Oh wait I get it now-- I thought you were suggesting an Oedipean union

ew

Alfred otm re Damon’s pathos as Odysseus. It’s difficult to pull that off convincingly but I thought he was excellent

Bernthal such a great choice for Menelaus, the gregarious host carrying light years of damage from war plus oh, The Most Insane Family Ever

Safdie’s Agamemnon was not very good at all. After all the buildup w the fuckoff helmet, he was SO flat & not even a little bit kingly. He’s like the biggest egomaniac of ALL the egomaniacs!

That entire Circe sequence was so my shit! So inventive, I really loved the design of that whole thing

Nolan made him Agamemnon look like Sauron.

Something I learned about myself is I am kinda into grizzly Matt Damon? I think this is the most ripped I’ve ever seen him.

Pattinson rocked that short kilt too. My guy has great gams <3

Don’t often agree with Daniel Mendelsohn but I nodded along with his nyrb review https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/07/17/artful-weaving-odyssey-christopher-nolan/

I wasn’t bored which may be an achievement for a 3 hour film but I was rarely thrilled or moved - except maybe by the Elliot Page character. Feel like Nolan purposefully bunged his ears up to block out the sex, the wileyness, the weirdness of Homer to create a grim, dark prosaic adaptation.

"Grim, dark and prosaic" is pretty much Nolan's whole shtick for sure.

lol

But as weird as it feels to cheerlead a Hollywood blockbuster, I do appreciate that Nolan’s turned The Odyssey into what appears to be a total global smash in 2026. Looks like $260m worldwide?

I wonder if this’ll start a gold rush for other ancient IP. Zach Snyder’s Gilgamesh!

Benny Safdie's Salammbô.

The Russo Brothers’ Ramayana

Bong Joon Ho’s Water Margin

Lord & Miller’s Candide

I was captivated by this, even through what I thought was some jarring miscasting (Bernthal, Holland, Scott...). Really visceral and entertaining. My favorite Nolan, I think, after Inception.

The ending of The Dark Knight Rises when Batman inexplicably nukes whatever the Gotham equivalent of Brooklyn is and everyone cheers was somehow better than anything in this.

Feel like Nolan purposefully bunged his ears up to block out the sex, the wileyness, the weirdness of Homer to create a grim, dark prosaic adaptation.

It did feel to me like a high school atheist explaining it to me, which honestly is how a lot of Nolan's work feels to me.

I thought Samantha Morton was great and I loved Pattinson's sniveling. Some parts were great, but other times the choices he made felt weird, like removing the "nobody" from cyclops sequence (which was really well done otherwise) and deciding to have no gods except Athena, except she just sort of makes scowly faces?

Tom Holland...he cannot hang. Honestly, casting like anyone else in the world in that role other than him would have I think changed my whole opinion of it.

He reads his lines.

Memorized them too.

Also I disagree with Emily Wilson, I thought Nolan did the dog stuff great, it didn't feel schmaltzy and didn't' take up too much space

The dog has, like, 90 seconds of screentime, it's fine.

I wasn’t bored which may be an achievement for a 3 hour film but I was rarely thrilled or moved

My feeling too. It's engaging enough, but I came out feeling that it was just okay. The cats on Circe's island were maybe the one detail where I felt a touch of strangeness and style.

Felt this was pretty poor. Some good setpieces but of course didn't need to be three hours. Hugely baggy beginning then after the most or only powerful part of the film with Odysseus remembering the brutality of Troy it decided to stick on another stupid fight scene that went on for ages.

Was amused having seen the odd bubble up of weird culture war stuff about the casting etc that the really bad thing in the casting was how deeply American it was, which was also a problem with the script. I know that the old school everyone in ancient Rome or Greece is posh and British makes no sense either but it feels less annoying and stupid. And some of the slang was quite American which never felt true of British versions of these stories.

Also felt this was a problem with casting. The blind elder character, at the beginning in particular, was like some extra from Xena Warrior Princess.

Jon Bernthal was so casually and modern American it felt like he could crack a bottle of Bud and take an actor swig of it at any moment.

Beyond all that the good scenes were the setpieces, and some of the stuff about violence and regret was good but again a few clunky lines with people calling themselves veterans or saying "I was at Troy".

Lastly the villains were just so cheesy and each one played their role so badly, like school bullies or Cobra Kai. R-Patz's smug pout reminded me of Daffy Duck.

There was a lot wrong with it.

I kept thinking of the "RUN AWAY!!!" bits in Monty Python and the Holy Grail whenever they were high-tailing it back to the ships.

Haha. It also felt like they were about forty people as they approached evil island number five. Then about seven hundred as they fled.

I thought Matt Damon was going to Paris Texas on Anne Hathaway

Was amused having seen the odd bubble up of weird culture war stuff about the casting etc that the really bad thing in the casting was how deeply American it was, which was also a problem with the script. I know that the old school everyone in ancient Rome or Greece is posh and British makes no sense either but it feels less annoying and stupid. And some of the slang was quite American which never felt true of British versions of these stories.

xenophobe!

did any of the warriors call each other bro or dawg?

Antinous does accuse Telemachus of being a "twink" at one point.

Jon Bernthal was so casually and modern American it felt like he could crack a bottle of Bud and take an actor swig of it at any moment.

Bernthal is the most one-note actor currently working, and I'm including sitcom dogs in that ranking.

Incredibly minor point also but Bernthal had a shaved head and a beard with no fade at the sides. I am not saying everyone in ancient Greece who was bald blended their beard, bald head and sideburns, but I feel if his head could be cropped that close there would he some kind of facial grooming happened.

One to note for anyone who's not seen it yet and wants an exciting thing to look out for.

Having never seen The Bear, Bernthal was fine. I liked the idea of a Menelaus who's like, "It sucked to be my brother, but, hey, I'm alive. More wine?"

I see some maga chuds here and there on Reddit claiming there are screenings near them that haven’t sold a single ticket, watch out for the “actually it’s about ethics in box office receipts” crowd.

We went to this today. My wife liked it, I didn't think it was all that. (Overshadowed by the fall she took as we were leaving the house, bunging up her knees and left shoulder. By the time we'd finished at the cinema and gotten lunch, her shoulder was hurting bad enough that we spent the rest of the afternoon at a walk-in ortho clinic, so it would have had to have been a hell of a good movie for it to be worth it to leave the house.)

this was pretty great, i thought. my expectations for holland were so low that he wound up impressing me. circe scene was the best part. damon was such a steady hand, really carried the movie on his shoulders

bernthal was maybe a little miscast but it makes sense to me that the king of sparta would be a bro dude

I watched this last night with an extremely hyped up audience. (70mm in a theater partially owned by Christopher Nolan!)

I’m not in the bag for Nolan by any stretch—I walk into all of his movies highly skeptical and think his best movies are “pretty good.”

It took me a little time to get acclimated to the film—I was so distracted by the massive quantity of famous faces in this thing. But by the end I felt Nolan had really landed the plane and it was overall a very successful film (Tom Holland aside). And now the next day, I’ve really been thinking about it and it’s been growing in my esteem. I’d really like to see it again.

70mm in a theater partially owned by Christopher Nolan!

Eh? Which theater?

Formerly the Fox Westwood theater in Westwood, near UCLA. Now called Director’s Village and programmed by the American Cinematheque.

When the theater closed in 2024 Jason Reitman led a collective of filmmakers to invest. Nolan, Spielberg, JJ Abrams, Judd Apatow, and a bunch of other directors all went in on it together.

It seats something like 1000 people! They are showing The Odyssey for three weeks, and a few other screenings of other films in August and then I think it shuts down for remodeling before it reopens sometime next year.

I will be seeing this for a 2nd time on Saturday :D

I tried to see it tomorrow for cheap Tuesday but most of the normal-time showings were close to sold, unless you want to sit up the front like a psycho

just got back, the theater was absolutely packed on a Monday night

I liked it overall

I also just saw this at directors village in westwood, which I’m very excited will be opening back up permanently next year. want to think more about it, but like most nolan films I’m left pretty ambivalent

most irritatingly, the lighting and sound mixing, similar to most nolan/villeneuve films, just too dark and the huge score obscuring dialog. the cinematography/editing of the fight scenes consisting almost entirely of ultra-closeups and 1.5 second shots, pretty pedestrian choreography considering the budget, again nothing really new with nolan

i thought the arrangement of the story was kinda crappy also - like i'm not sure what it added to have constant storytelling from a present point where nothing was really happening. or if it could have added stuff it was done in a very bitty kind of way. the start felt quite weak generally i thought, took ages to take shape.

like i'm not sure what it added to have constant storytelling from a present point where nothing was really happening.

This is Oppenheimer's shtick too.

maybe for the odyssey it sort of allowed him to show more stuff but idk, it might have been the diff between a great two hours and the unnecessary three

Nolan is the definition of a middlebrow film-maker, I can understand and agree with most of the criticisms, but while we live in this anti-intellectual society there is going to be a huge market for the unchallenging "woah dude!" genre, and he does it better than most.

Agree with this thread:

Robert Pattinson's work in THE ODYSSEY belongs to a lineage of venomous, pathetic men, mannerly played by actors having a pompous good time on the sidelines of sword-and-sandal epics. Think Ustinov in QUO VADIS and SPARTACUS, Laughton in SALOME, Robinson in THE ROBE, etc.

— Cláudio Alves (@claudioalvesDC) July 20, 2026

Pattinson and Leguizamo the only male performances I really enjoyed; otherwise - shockingly for him - it's a Nolan film highlighted by some great female performances.

It took a couple minutes to place Leguizamo; his makeup reminded me of Billy Crystal's in Mr. Saturday Night.

(Side note, but Leguizamo was in a sweet movie last year called Bob Trevino Likes It with Barbie Ferreira that reminded me what a likable actor he is. It's a nicecore indie that might be too cute for some tastes, but the two central performances sell it imo.)

Formerly the Fox Westwood theater in Westwood, near UCLA. Now called Director’s Village and programmed by the American Cinematheque.

Oh dang, nice. (As I went to UCLA and all I like the idea of this being its new incarnation.)

Out of interest, how does this film measure up against Bergman's The Seventh Seal, which follows a roughly similar narrative path and, thinking about it, may even have been partly inspired by Homer? As in, weary soldier returns from an overseas war and must overcome existential/supernatural challenges to get back home.

Max von Sydow is a pale imitation of Matt Damon.

Less chess in this one. There is a carved horsie but it can’t go two up and one over.

Does any of the characters muse on the meaning of strawberries?

Do not does

In The Odyssey the chess pieces are played by cyclopses.

actors having a pompous good time on the sidelines of sword-and-sandal epics. Think Ustinov in QUO VADIS and SPARTACUS, Laughton in SALOME, Robinson in THE ROBE, etc.

Dont forget Vincent Price in The Ten Commandments, always a fave.

From some of the chatter about Pattinson chewing scenery I expected his performance to be more hammy than it was. Not that he was a model of subtlety but it didnt hit me as particularly ott for a Hollywood bad guy. Then again I also had no problem with Tom Holland, unlike a lot of people, so what do I know.

The only dodgy performance for me was Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, no idea what would lead someone to make that casting decision, but he's only in it for like a minute. The head & shoulders standout for me was Samantha Morton, thought she was amazing in her episode.

This was a lot of movie! Thoughts to come once I’ve had a chance to digest some.

That said, regardless of the movies' other faults, I thought Dunkirk and Oppenheimer kind of turned it down a bit, for which I'm grateful.

(sorry I meant to reply to the hollywood auteur thread, I will repost it there)

Loved this, pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. Holland was surprisingly good

Theater was also more crowded than I've seen it in years. The concession line was so long, we almost missed the start of the movie!