Muscular flourish … Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures View image in fullscreen Muscular flourish … Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures Film Review The Odyssey review – Nolan goes god-tier with breathtaking epic of men, monsters and moral metamorphosis Doing full justice to the Homeric legend, Christopher Nolan amasses an epic cast to convey the true cost of war with film-making of thrilling ambition
A classicist’s verdict: soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard
Peter Bradshaw Wed 15 Jul 2026 18.00 CEST Last modified on Wed 15 Jul 2026 21.36 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google C hristopher Nolan reinvents the Homeric legend as a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion, an epic ordeal of anguish witnessed by the dead and presided over by capricious deities who participate on almost equal terms with the humans. It speaks to the generational pain of PTSD; plenty of soldiers come home in person after any war promptly enough, but arriving back to their prewar state emotionally or spiritually can take years or decades and may never happen at all. The invisible odyssey of anguish is punctuated by flashback episodes, hallucinations, confrontations with the arbitrary gods of dysfunction. And all the time the spouses and children cannot move on with their lives.
This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish. It has gasp-inducing, Imax-sized landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who, incidentally, avoids the sea’s traditional cliched colour – and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums.
Read more Matt Damon plays Odysseus, his boyish, almost cherubic face turned into a careworn mask of sadness. He is the military commander from Ithaca appointed by the Greek king Agamemnon, played by Benny Safdie, his face always mysteriously masked in a Batman-type helmet. (Another echo of Nolan’s previous work is detectable in the troops’ endless wait on the beach, as in Dunkirk.) Odysseus reveals to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), the wife whom he is about to leave and whom he advises to remarry if he dies in battle, that the notional cause for the imminent war with Troy – the elopement of Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) with Trojan prince Paris – is a pretext. It is a banal commercial contest for trading routes.
Read more The Greeks’ eventual victory is achieved after a brilliant tactical deception: an elite combat unit hides cramped in a huge horse statue, which is not rolled into the fortified city on casters as a gift, but dragged inside by its own victims as a precious object from the surf, half hidden in the sand. It’s a trick that involves Odysseus having to deceive his own comrade and cousin Sinon (Elliot Page), a blood sacrifice for which he feels unending guilt. Nolan recreates the Trojan horse as a cross between the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes and Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias.
The point is that the war, its supposed aims, its storied strategic success and presumed outcome are all irrelevant compared to the long, bizarre chaos of the aftermath, the giant toxic effect that follows the forgotten cause, as demoralising as a retreat that follows catastrophe. Agamemnon r...