The Odyssey — I Walked Right Back In

Nolan points the biggest camera on earth at the oldest story about going home, and the legend comes back dirtier, heavier, and breathing.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” does not open with thunder or a god throwing a tantrum. It opens with a man standing on a banquet table, working the room like an ancient stand-up prophet, and I knew inside a minute that this was the right door into the poem. Because that is what this movie is actually about: storytelling as power. The tale that saves you, damns you, flatters you, betrays you, and now and then gets everyone in the room killed. When the lights came up on the 70mm IMAX print I walked straight out and bought a ticket to walk right back in. I want to tell you why.

The speaker on that table is played by Travis Scott, who also cowrote and performs the closing song. He turns up briefly but with purpose, and the story he tells is not the poem advertised on the marquee. His bit is one room inside the labyrinth. By the time he appears, Nolan has already dragged us deep into the legend, close to its grand housecleaning by murder. The real subject is the Trojan Horse and Odysseus himself, played by Matt Damon as a hero so overhandled by culture that Nolan can use our boredom with him as a weapon. You think you know the image. Nolan keeps handing it back stranger and more dangerous, with dirt under its fingernails.

Start with the Horse, because Nolan does, and because it is not even Homer’s property. The Trojan Horse is not in The Odyssey. It is not in The Iliad either. It comes down through other classical channels, most famously Virgil’s much later Aeneid, and Nolan seizes that hand-me-down icon and strips off every ounce of gift-shop gloss. This is no adorable wooden pony on wheels. It lurches out of the surf like a dead god and gets dragged inland over logs, and inside it Odysseus, Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), and the Greek soldiers are packed into a reeking coffin of armor, sweat, terror, and corpses. Days pass. Men die before the trick even works. The movie spares us the smell, which may be the single most merciful choice Nolan makes.

That tells you how he treats the source material: not as holy text but as salvage. Fragments, rumors, canonical leftovers, ancient gossip, all welded into one bruised and living thing. That is not disrespect. That is adaptation doing what adaptation is for, and it is why I think this is the best screenplay Nolan has ever written. He takes a monument and turns it into a nerve ending. The center still holds: Odysseus, king of Ithaca, husband of Penelope (Anne Hathaway), father of Telemachus (Tom Holland), a son who has grown into the shape of a question his father never answered. Back home Penelope is trapped with suitors who eat her food, raid her wine, poison her household, and wait for her exhaustion to look like consent. Odysseus goes to Troy for ten years, then spends ten more not coming home. Storms, gods, monsters, sex, pride, guilt, or the oldest excuse in the book: himself. That is the live wire running through all 172 minutes. Is this fate, punishment, trauma, vanity? Or is it a man turning delay into destiny because destiny sounds better?

At that length and at IMAX scale the film should lumber. It never does, because Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame cut time into shrapnel. Youth, war, aftermath, prophecy, confession, all ricocheting off one another until chronology feels like a weak way to organize a life. The method recalls “Oppenheimer,” but with less stopwatch panic and more mythic rot. This film does not race toward disaster. It prowls around an old wound and presses until something ugly leaks out, and when one story opens into another it feels less like structure than infection.

I have to be honest about where I saw it, because it shaped everything. I watched it in 70-millimeter IMAX in Dallas, Texas, one of the few places on earth showing the film that way, and the privilege of that access sits uneasily with me. Everyone deserves a theater capable of making a movie feel this large and enveloping, and my saying so changes nothing when distribution and infrastructure make the choice for us. But in that room, with the image towering and the sound moving through the walls, the film became what the format promises at its best. Not impressive. Transporting. There is a difference, and you feel it in your chest.

The roll call of mortals and gods is sprawling and unruly, and a few of these figures flash past as faces more than presences, but the movie is better for the crowding. Athena (Zendaya) appears to Odysseus like a private hallucination with authority. Lupita Nyong’o plays both Helen, the face that launches a catastrophe, and Clytemnestra, Helen’s twin and Agamemnon’s wife. Benny Safdie plays Agamemnon with the same hard little glint he carried in “Oppenheimer.” Nolan raids The Iliad, The Aeneid, The Odyssey, and the barnacles of later interpretation stuck to all three, and the result is basically an Odysseus expanded universe without the corporate stink of a post-credits scene where Zeus announces Phase Two. There is Scylla, a tentacled maritime nightmare. There are sirens. There is the Cyclops, Poseidon’s one-eyed outcast son. There is Calypso (Charlize Theron), who loves Odysseus enough to drug his memory with lotus flowers, and Circe (Samantha Morton), daughter of Helios and Perse, the film’s purest menace, who turns men into beasts without giving anyone the version they expect. Elliot Page’s Sinon begins as a doomed Greek pawn in the Horse scheme and returns after death in a sequence that owes as much to zombie cinema as to epic poetry.

Nyong’o’s casting as Helen predictably sent the usual bad-faith scolds into their tiny paper storms, suddenly defending Greek myth as though it were a police report. Let me say the plain thing. Myths are not HR forms. They survive because cultures keep stealing them back from museums. Shakespeare lived through Denzel Washington’s Macbeth, Ian McKellen’s fascist “Richard III,” Julie Taymor turning “Titus” into a fever dream. Homer can handle a casting director with a pulse. Nolan’s inclusiveness is not homework. It is the point. These stories belong to whoever can make them bleed again. Page, back with Nolan for the first time since “Inception,” plays a male warrior without quotation marks. John Leguizamo brings his own voice to Eumaeus, Odysseus’ blind counselor, and the character instantly stops smelling like marble. Leguizamo belongs in the awards conversation, though Robert Pattinson may steal his oxygen as Antinous, a suitor so slick, smug, and morally rancid he practically sweats cologne.

This strategy has ancestors, and Nolan knows it. “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Gladiator” both understood that period distance is useless if everyone behaves like waxwork, and the Scorsese connection is documented: Ludwig Goransson, Nolan’s composer, has said Nolan invited him over specifically to screen “The Last Temptation of Christ” as inspiration for this film. Nolan wants immediacy, not archaeology. The blunt language, the contemporary rhythms, the open casting: none of it is an attempt to make Homer relatable in the cheap sense. It is a claim that the story already is relatable, because it is about war crimes recast as glory, men confusing absence with destiny, women forced to survive entitlement dressed up as tradition, and societies turning violence into myth before the bodies are cold. That is why Telemachus says “my dad.” That is why soldiers swear instead of declaiming like graduate students in linen. Purists can clutch their footnotes, but unless they are demanding the whole cast speak ancient Greek, the complaint is costume jewelry.

As spectacle it has the brute authority Nolan’s partisans crave and his detractors often pretend not to notice. Huge, but never weightless. Immaculate, but never shrink-wrapped. Salt, blood, smoke, crushed leaves, hot metal: the world has texture and bite. The Horse looks heavy because, miracle of miracles, something heavy appears to actually be there. In a war flashback a towering burning structure collapses while bodies scatter beneath it, and the image lands with the sickening credibility of real mass and real heat. I sat there thinking we may not get a feat of filmmaking like this again soon, maybe ever, not at this scale. Big-budget Hollywood mostly moves like an industry devoted to corner-cutting now. Green rooms pretending to be kingdoms, digital weather, digital crowds, digital danger, digital everything. Nolan is allergic to the shortcut. His devotion to practical effects, real locations, and film photography can sound precious in interviews, but on screen it becomes a rebuke. Gravity still matters. Too many modern blockbusters have forgotten what objects are.

And the scale is never the whole case the movie makes. Ships, palaces, monsters, and collapsing towers matter because they squeeze the people trapped among them. Penelope’s rage is not ornamental suffering. It is the rage of a woman watching men treat her home, her labor, her body, and her future as a prize in a waiting room. Telemachus has inherited not a father but a vacancy with muscles. And Odysseus slowly faces the possibility that the gods are convenient scapegoats. Maybe home is far away because he has done things that make return morally impossible. Maybe exile is not only what happens to him but what he keeps choosing. Damon plays him like a classical star hero left out in the weather: sturdy, handsome, battered, and not nearly as noble as his posture claims. Cunning is his brand, and cunning has a body count. He talks honor, even ceremonializes it with the twang of a bowstring before he kills, and his code folds the moment rage, pride, or convenience touches it. The movie knows that warrior ethics tend to become decor once the killing starts. Even the Cyclops gets a nasty twist of sympathy: not just a monster, but a shepherd invaded by murderous houseguests with better public relations.

Troy’s fall is ugly enough to poison the victory without tipping into misery tourism. Odysseus’ men are accused elsewhere in Greece of “rape and murder” done in its name; Nolan keeps the first offscreen and makes the second unavoidable. Women and children die. The Ithaca climax still delivers the savage pleasure of payback, because genre has its appetites, but catharsis never gets to scrub the blood clean. These men are kings, husbands, fathers, soldiers, and butchers, and the hero has committed atrocities and still expects to be welcomed back as the moral center of the room.

Best of all, Nolan skips the moralizing explainer, that deadening little plaque so many blockbusters nail beside the exit. “The Odyssey” leaves its hero contaminated: brave and vain, loving and violent, homesick and guilty, mythic and rotten. It neither exposes him as a fraud nor embalms him as an icon, and that refusal is what makes an ancient poem feel startlingly current. Homecoming, conquest, masculinity, memory, propaganda, guilt, the stories nations tell to excuse their bloodshed — none of it is sealed in antiquity. It is all still pacing around our world in cleaner clothes. Rarer still is the object itself: a colossal studio picture that feels built, dragged, burned, weathered, and endured rather than rendered into corporate vapor. People are mixed creatures. Not breaking news. But in a franchise age designed to sand down every edge and hand the audience a sedative, declining to simplify feels almost rude. Good.