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The Odyssey Review: Nolan's Epic Failure

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  July 18, 2026 11:30 AM

The s**t I do for a story.

A year ago, I was genuinely looking forward to seeing Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey.' It was Christopher Nolan, who directed some of my favorite movies, including 'The Dark Knight,' 'Interstellar,' and the Oscar-winning 'Oppenheimer.' And it was Homer's 'Odyssey'—one of the foundational texts of Greek culture and Western civilization. In addition to being a cinephile (who has been going to movies since she was 13 and has seen 100 films this year alone), I'm an English major, so I've read the work several times. I have a translation on my bookshelf that's followed me since college.

On top of that, the entire ethos around 'The Odyssey'—the male hero's journey—is tailor made for conservative folks like me and red-state America. It was undoubtedly going to be a smash, right? 

The only reason I didn't buy a ticket when they went on sale 365 days ago was that I know me, and I know my life. Something would have come up and thwarted those carefully laid plans. Back in January, I bought tickets a few weeks in advance to see 'The Lord of the Rings' back on the big screen over three weekends to celebrate my birthday. Then Wisconsin turned into Hoth, and my pipes froze. I missed 'The Fellowship of the Ring' because I was dealing with a plumber. True, it's July now, and my pipes can't freeze, but there are always tornadoes, and Wisconsin is currently blanketed by Canadian wildfire smoke.

But I digress.

It turns out a year is a long time in politics and Hollywood. Because as we moved closer to the release of Nolan's 'Odyssey', the excitement that I—and many others—felt about this movie began to chip away under the rumors of casting, the translation Nolan based the film on, and a wave of scolding from the woke media about how we just didn't get what Nolan was doing.

Soon, it became clear that 'The Odyssey' wasn't about the movie making, Homer's epic, or the audiences. It was a political vehicle, and one that actively hated the audience it should have been targeting, that aforementioned red-state America.

Despite that, I tried to go into the film with an open mind yesterday evening. I tried to set aside my concerns about making Lupita Nyong'o Helen of Troy, casting Zendaya as Athena, and shoehorning Ellen Page into the film as a Greek warrior. Maybe I would be pleasantly surprised. Maybe it wasn't so bad. Heck, it might even be good, or at least entertaining.

I regret to inform you that 'The Odyssey' isn't as bad as I thought it would be. It's orders of magnitude worse. But not for the reasons you'd think.

It's a poorly written, poorly directed, poorly made film.

(Editor's note: this review contains spoilers of the film)

First, let's address the casting choices, and not just Lupita Nyong'o and Ellen Page. The problem with putting big-name movie stars in your film is that most audiences will see the big-name actor and not the character, which happens throughout this movie. That's not Calypso, it's Charlize Theron. That's not Antinous, that's Robert Pattinson, etc. etc. Even Matt Damon is miscast as Odysseus. Zendaya, who is on screen for about five minutes as Athena, constantly looks like she just smelled a nasty fart off-camera. Her expression never changes, and she's supposed to be the goddess of wisdom. Nolan undermines Nyong'o's Helen of Troy by having the 'face that launched a thousand ships' disfigured by the war it started.

And Ellen Page is Sinon, who is not in the poem. Rumors were that she would be playing Achilles, but no. Achilles, who is a pivotal character in the text of 'The Odyssey,' doesn't make an appearance at all in the film. Odysseus later describes Sinon as the 'bravest' warrior, too, and for what? On screen, Sinon is seen sitting on a beach by the Trojan horse, then comically running to meet approaching troops. Sinon is killed, pierced by arrows, but not before he tells the troops the horse is a gift for Athena. It's clear Page intentionally lowered her voice to seem more masculine, and to get around the fact that she's tiny—just five feet, one inch tall, according to IMDb—Nolan is careful never to really film her next to other actors.

It still amazes me that they couldn't be bothered to find a Greek to cast in this movie, but that Odysseus' crew included an Indian and an Asian, as did the suitors pursuing Penelope.

But the problems go beyond the casting.

If you are not familiar with 'The Odyssey,' you will be lost. The story is broken up into time jumps, largely framed by Odysseus on Calypso's island, telling most of the tale as a flashback. But if you don't know how the story progresses, you have no idea what is going on. The pacing is off, with some parts dragging and others moving so fast it's unclear what just happened. For example, the film jumps immediately from the encounter with the Sirens to the encounter with Charybdis and the strait of Scylla without even a beat to absorb what happened. 

The names of the characters aren't articulated, nor are their relationships. Perhaps part of that is because the sound is muddy, and some lines of dialogue are lost to the sounds of battle, the score, or just low volume. There's one scene where Nolan intentionally mutes the sound entirely when they encounter the Sirens. Speaking only for myself, I would have liked to see how he brought their ethereal voices—voices men die for—to life. But nope. We got wax in our ears, too, and we could only watch as Matt Damon screamed, tied to the mast of his ship.

Simply put, if I had streamed this at home, I would have put on the closed captions.

Nolan said he avoided using a traditional orchestra for the score because those instruments didn't exist in Ancient Greek times. That's the only Greek representation the film had, it seems, and the result was a score that was often jarring, discordant, and distracting. I left quickly when the closing credits rolled because the music, if we can call it that, sounded more like nails on a chalkboard than anything else.

The fight sequences—which should be epic in, well, an epic film—were dark, with shaky cameras and lots of cuts. There were times I didn't know which character I was looking at. Was that Odysseus? Was it Menelaus? Who is fighting on screen and why should I care about them? At the end, when Odysseus gets home and confronts the suitors who have been plaguing his family, I had no idea he'd been pierced with spears until the fight ended and Matt Damon had two long bits of wood sticking out of his back.

And then there are the changes Nolan made to the characters and story itself, probably the biggest problem of the film. This has to be borne of using Emily Wilson's feminist-lens translation. Let's take a look at the difference between the one written by Robert Fagles and Wilson.

Here's Fagles' translation:

... the prime of Argive power lay in wait

with death and slaughter bearing down on Troy.

And he sang how troops of Achaeans broke from cover,

streaming out of the horse's hollow flanks to plunder Troy—

he sang how left and right they ravaged the steep city,

sang how Odysseus marched right up to Deiphobus' house

like the god of war on attack with diehard Menelaus.

There, he sang, Odysseus fought the grimmest fight

he had ever braved but he won through at last,

thanks to Athena's superhuman power.

And here's Wilson's:

The town was doomed to ruin when it took

that horse, chock-full of fighters bringing death

to Trojans. And he sang how the Achaeans

poured from the horse, in ambush from the hollow,

and sacked the city; how they scattered out,

destroying every neighborhood. Like Ares,

Odysseus, with Menelaus, rushed

to find Deiphobus' house, and there

he won at last, through dreadful violence,

thanks to Athena. So the poet sang.

See the difference? In Fagles' translation, Odysseus is brave, a warrior, engaged in an honorable and noble fight. In Wilson's, he's violent. In Nolan's film, when Odysseus returns to Ithaca and speaks to Penelope as a beggar, he expresses regrets for the war on Troy, the Trojan horse, and what he claims they unleashed on the world. He speaks like a soldier with PTSD and not the honorable, albeit hubristic, war hero he saw himself as. Obviously, Odysseus had regrets. He lost his men, whom he wanted to bring home safely, and his own mistakes, often borne from that hubris.

This included telling the Cyclops his name—which was either omitted from the film or said so quickly I missed it. That is a pivotal scene because it's what allows Polyphemus to call on Poseidon for revenge, which is what makes the journey home so long and so deadly. And like the other scenes, the cave with the Cyclops is dark, so it's hard to tell what's going on, what the plan of escape actually is, and how it's executed.

The entire thrust of the book is that Odysseus wants to return home to his wife and son, and when he finally does, Nolan has Odysseus and Penelope pack up and head west to honor his men, leaving Telemachus king of Ithaca. That doesn't happen in the book, either. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Odysseus and his motives. But again, Nolan used a translation of the work that treated Odysseus negatively.

He's not the only one tampered with, however. As I mentioned, Helen of Troy's face is disfigured in this adaptation, and when Telemachus visits her and Menelaus in Sparta, Helen whispers an apology to Telemachus for starting the war. That's a significant change from the book, where Helen says Aphrodite led her astray, and her actions are far more complex and interesting. She tells Telemachus of a time Odysseus snuck into Troy as a beggar and kept his secret until he escaped, and Menelaus shares a story of how Helen walked around the Trojan horse, mimicking the voices of the Greek warriors' wives to see if any would respond. 

Helen's sister, Clytemnestra, has her motive for killing Agamemnon changed entirely. In the book, she's a faithless wife who entered into an affair with Aegisthus after Agamemnon left for war. This adulterous relationship is why Agamemnon is killed, and Clytemnestra herself doesn't do it. In the film, she kills Agamemnon as revenge for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods in exchange for help with the Trojan War. Later Greek works add the revenge motive to Agamemnon's death. But by eliminating the adulterous relationship and making the revenge about her daughter, Clytemnestra is no longer a complex character; she's the girl-boss taking down the man who killed a child.

Circe, the cunning and powerful woman who turns Odysseus' men into pigs, plays the victim when Odysseus confronts her. It's off-putting for a character who, in the books, does not claim the men had it coming or that she was somehow wronged.

And, as someone else pointed out, the women get far less screen time in this film than they do in the book, and other female characters, including Nausicaa, are omitted entirely from Nolan's adaptation. Perhaps Lupita Nyong'o should ask Nolan about women and screen time, and not Homer, as the latter gave them more.

Oh, and if you like dogs, as I do, be forewarned: there are a few short scenes of disturbing abuse of dogs that bothered me quite a bit, including John Leguizamo's Eumaeus throwing a puppy off a cliff. Perhaps that was authentic to the time, but in a film where authenticity to the Greek source material was spotty at best, Nolan could have omitted that bit.

Ultimately, it's clear that Nolan, who has struggled with creating historical epics in the past (see: 'Dunkirk'), was in over his head. He has no appreciation for the source material (and I'm not talking about Wilson's translation), no concept of who Odysseus was or what he stands for, or how to bring such a complex and epic tale to life. Had it been better paced, better edited, with better lighting and sound, it could have been entertaining, despite the casting choices. Instead, it was a dull, discordant, dragging mess of an epic.