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

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.