Well, long after the brouhaha has passed, I’m finally doing it: writing my review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026). Dr. Wife and I saw it back on Saturday, 25 July 2026, in inglorious 2D (as opposed to glorious 3D or IMAX). Overall, we enjoyed it.

Before diving into the film itself, let me address the meta-narrative/-commentary around the film: the woke casting. Yes, Ellen Page (now going by “Elliott”) appears playing a Greek soldier. If you were going to cast a woman-pretending-she’s-a-man as a male Greek soldier, Ellen Page was about as benign as you could get. The role is a young man who is drafted, essentially, when he’s still a little boy, so he’s kind of gangly and weak, even after ten years at war. Ellen is dispatched in the first few minutes of the film, and only appears again as a shade from the Underworld, her figures so obscured by mud and her voice so obscured by scary audio effects that, at long last, she can actually pass as a man.

It’s the same for the other controversial casting decisions: Lupita Nyong’o as Helen (and Helen’s sister) and Zendaya as Athena. As much as I loved the “Helen of Detroit” memes and thought it was kind of ridiculous to cast the incredibly black (but still beautiful, just not “Helen of Troy” beautiful) Nyong’o as a flaxen-haired Grecian super beauty, she appears only fleetingly in the flick. Zendaya’s casting is, perhaps, the most egregious, primarily because, well, she plays herself the entire time—making one or two facial expressions while wordlessly staring at Odysseus. At least here it makes sense, because (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) she’s basically a representation of his trauma over the atrocities he committed at Troy, so looking like a pouty bullfrog is a bit more excusable.

None of that is to endorse this casting—there were many superior choices to portray “the face that launched a thousand ships”—but to note these roles are fairly minor. Remember, Helen is the catalyst for The Iliad, which details the origins of the Trojan War; The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus’s long voyage home after the war. Matt Damon was convincing as Odysseus, and Anne Hathaway was exquisite as Penelope, Odysseus’s besieged but loyal wife.

One more note on the casting: the one time the diversity casting made me LOL was when the Indian actor portraying Odysseus’s lieutenant exclaimed, proudly, “We are Greeks!” It was so incongruous, it made me laugh. That is, perhaps, a commentary on the pitfalls of “woke” and/or DIE casting: there is a thing that it is to be “Greek”—or “Indian,” or “English,” etc.—and we all know, even if we don’t want to admit it, that a guy from the Indian subcontinent is not Greek (although I’m sure some wags would point to Alexander the Great’s conquests of the far western edges of India, or note the common Indo-European ancestry, etc., but let’s not get carried away with autistry here).

But I digress. What about the actual movie?

Well, it was pretty good—but too long. Yes, yes—how do you condense a story like The Odyssey (that’s an Amazon Affiliate Link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link at no additional cost to you. —TPP)into a ninety-minute escapade? You probably can’t; but Nolan likely could have trimmed it to two hours, maybe 2h15m. The nearly three-hour runtime was a slog with a full bladder (I had to slip away at one point, but Dr. Wife tells me I didn’t miss anything). Nolan is a great director, but he likes flabby runtimes, which seem to be the norm for most big productions now. The first hour seemed to drag, and the acting initially seemed incredibly wooden and stilted, although that seem to improve as the action picked up.

But, as I reflect back, the movie felt about right! Yes, the first hour was tedious at points, but it also seemed like Nolan had the time to say what he wanted to say with this adaptation. And, boy, what an adaptation!

True to Nolan’s style, the narrative jumped around quite a bit, with lots of flashbacks and such. The “frame” of sorts is that Calypso is trying to help Odysseus regain his memories. I last read The Odyssey in the eighth grade—1998ish—but I seem to recall Calypso not being quite so conciliatory. Regardless, her probing questions spark memories in Odysseus. The story also jumped to his son and his wife, showing the state of things in Ithaca, as well as the difficulty they both have with the dozens and dozens of suitors dining at their palace each night.

Here is what the movie did really well: it truly brought The Odyssey to life. The Trojan Horse, for example, isn’t just sitting there on wheels; it’s cleverly half-submerged in the wet sand of the beach. It takes a huge team of slaves to drag the horse, which is on its side, into the city’s gates. The sacking of Troy is nightmarish, and fuels Nolan’s focus on the post-traumatic stress of hand-to-hand combat and mass pillaging. The suitors at the palace—which it always seemed Penelope fobbed off pretty easily—are brutish, nasty, and lascivious, clearly taking advantage of their hostess’s hospitality, basically leering at Odysseus’s wife while eating his food and drinking his wine. Nolan makes The Odyssey seem visceral and real.

Indeed, it might be the best depiction of the late Bronze Age I’ve seen. I’m sure greater historians than I would quibble with that, but it’s the first time I’ve really gotten a sense for what the time period might have been like. Of course it’s filtered through all sorts of Hollywood trickery (and there’s the aforementioned Indian guy proclaiming himself Greek), but it felt like getting a small glimpse into a very different world.

Nolan does do things to make it relatable, and he obviously injects modern themes. Reading a copy of The Odyssey, one never gets the sense that Odysseus is struggling with guilt over leading his men into one ruinous situation after another. He seems pretty boastful and brash, relying on his ingenuity to get him and (at least some of) his men out of danger. That comes through in this adaptation, but the pride seems enhanced—Matt Damon’s Odysseus is almost literally shaking his fist in the face of the gods. But he is also tortured, with his deceased men literally dissing him for leading them into war (that part was a bit rich—Odysseus was clearly fulfilling a quasi-feudal obligation to Agamemnon to lead his people into war; Nolan’s/Damon’s Odysseus didn’t even want to go to war!).

Back to the relatability: the characters speak English. No problem on my end, but some have balked at it. Perhaps more telling is the concept of “Zeus’s Law,” a device Nolan invented as an easy way to convey to a twenty-first-century audience the concept of owing strangers hospitality and that one’s word is one’s bond. Some have read a certain Christian metaphor in here, a Bronze Age “Golden Rule”; I took it less as an overtly Christian theme (although it might be one tangentially) and more as a shorthand that the audience would be able to absorb. The frequent invocation of “Zeus’s Law,” as well as the perennial concern that the Trojan War irrevocably broke it, works more as a framing device that modern audiences can grasp: the old order, which respect the gods, is dying away; people are breaking those laws and causing the downfall of Bronze Age civilization.

Linking The Odyssey to the Bronze Age Collapse was clever, I thought. It gives the journey home a sense of apocalyptic dread. The sacking of Troy served as the major breaking point, the “Rubicon,” as it were (to jump ahead quite a few centuries) from which the world as it was could never return—and something new and probably worse was on its way. I thought the idea that (SPOILER ALERT) the Greeks themselves were the Sea Peoples was pretty hokey—very much a “modern Hollywood” kind of gimmick. But it at least fit with the story Nolan was telling.

My favorite scene involved the cyclops, Polyphemus. Through a combination of puppetry and some digital effects, Nolan created a truly terrifying cyclops. Polyphemus was probably my favorite character when I read The Odyssey in the eighth grade (other than Odysseus himself, of course), but he’s a little more human in the story. Yes, he’s a giant, one-eyed, man-eating monster, but he talks and jests and such with Odysseus. He plays with his food. Nolan’s Polyphemus is a monster, and what I imagine the ancient Greeks would have thought of when attempting to conceive of a cyclops. Polyphemus’s eye is not neatly centered, but askew, almost as if he lost the other eye, or it simply never grew in the first place. His nose is slanted longways. He is introduced first only in shadows, and for an instance, the film became a horror flick.

I’m sure there are many flaws (other than the controversial casting) that eagle-eyed historians of antiquity will pick up and apart, but as I noted earlier, this film was the first time I felt like I was in the story—like I was truly experiencing a Bronze Age epic. Yes, I’ve seen tons of more historically accurate films set in antiquity (and, lest we forget, while the Trojan War was real and Troy was a real place, this story is fiction), but Nolan transported me to the beaches of Troy. He portrayed the difficulties and dangers of sailing in small crafts on the Mediterranean. He captured the trauma and violence and intensity of warfare in the era. Even a casual scene where a man is tossing a basket of puppies over a cliff (sad, but also kind of comedic, because he does it so casually) drove home the idea that this world is very foreign to us, even if it retains some familiarity (who would toss puppies, even useless ones, over a cliff?).

Is the film perfect? No. Are there adaptations that might hew closer to the spirit of Homer’s Odyssey? Probably.

Should you see Nolan’s stab at the greatest epic of Greek antiquity? Absolutely.