The Trojan war has long since ended, yet Ithaca still awaits the return of its king, Odysseus (Matt Damon). Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) delays naming a new suitor, but the bachelors have grown restless across the years, and Prince Telemachus (Tom Holland) has grown agitated seeing them disgrace his father’s palace. Telemachus makes sail to Sparta to meet with King Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) in hopes of bringing back news of Odysseus’ whereabouts, but it is not a king, rather a beggar, that washes up on Ithaca’s shores who will bring news that returns the island nation to its rightful glory.

Christopher Nolan writes and directs The Odyssey as his follow-up to a meteoric critical and box office hit, Oppenheimer (2023). He adapts Homer’s 12,000-line poem of the same name – while also working in aspects of “The Iliad” – into a 173-minute epic, shot and filmed entirely on IMAX 70mm, for Universal Studios. Like Odysseus assembling his war campaign to Troy, Nolan, too, assembles his most trusted and dependable department heads including editor Jennifer Lame, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, composer Ludwig Göransson, and casting director John Papsidera who additionally helped reunite the director with Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Elliot Page as Sinon, and Benny Safdie as Agamemnon in front of the camera.

In Oppenheimer, the titular scientist, poetically, stole fire from the gods, a deed for which he was punished; here, Odysseus lies, cheats, and defiles the gods, and is similarly punished. It builds off of the crucible of many of Nolan’s heroes – in both Dunkirk (2017) and Oppenheimer, the heroes shoulder the weight of abandoning themselves in participation in their master’s war; in Interstellar (2014) Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and the weight of leaving home; in Inception (2010) Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the weight or desperately wanting to return home to find that it is not the same as you had left it; and in The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and the weight of heroism, legacy, and public opinion – and makes for one of the most broadly emotionally sweeping films of his career to date. Obviously, much credit it due to Homer who laid the framework for this story and dug the well from which Nolan has pulled from across his career, but it is his calculated – or same may say, stubborn – agnosticism to the text that allows him to make this his own tale.

Tenet (2020) can be seen as the death of story; the complete shattering of form and consistent rearranging of its pieces not into any unified image but an amalgamas rearrangement of the experience of time. Nolan sets his sights then on the birth of the form by adapting one of our oldest stories, still with all of his modern narrative and filmic trickery at the ready. It allows the cast to breathe, to flex and grow beyond our expectations of these centuries old characters and inhabit them in a refreshing new way. There is an allegiance to the text, sure, but Nolan is not treating this like a sacred work of Shakespeare where a missed syllable is mortal sin, instead, he is deeply honoring the oral tradition of Homer and is conveying his telling of The Odyssey as a series of tales where the embellishments and the omissions would have been par for the course before Homer put down a definitive version to parchment. This has the added benefit of letting us leave the action as soon as it is done – the cyclops (Bill Irwin) has retreated back to his cave, the Laestrygonians evaded, the hogs transformed back into men – and move cleanly on to the next point without endless drifting at sea. The interstitial material falls mostly on Telemachus seeking information about his father, but also sometimes to Odysseus himself as he recounts his exploits to Calypso (Charlize Theron) through lotus flower induced hazy memory.

Hopefully still decades away from being written, Odysseus is an obituary role for Damon; a standout within his own impressive career, and within the context of the film, a standout among and impressive cast. In treating the text with modern sensibilities, Nolan frames this film at times as a sendup on Greece’s most-clever general a’ la Barry Lindon (1975) or Napoleon (2023), albeit less outrightly funny, though still the most playful that Nolan has been to date. As Odysseus, Damon is not allowed to engage in much of the showboating of a great and accomplished warrior, instead having to settle for his deeds in battle speaking that part for themselves and leaving him to occupy all the darker parts of the human condition. By allowing the narrative to fold in the history of oral tradition, the Odysseus we see from sequence to sequence changes ever so slightly so that we must come to our own conclusion about who this man of legend is. Through it all, though, there is ego, anger, lust – sort of, in so far as Nolan allows for sexuality to breach into his worldview – but while much of the film’s runtime shows us Odysseus at his most unsavory, we nevertheless root for him through his redemption arc in the final hour, but also because Damon imbues the character with thoughtful magnetism delivering a fascinating performance that is constantly shifting and evolving in front of us. He never tries to act above what is on the page, and so his vices are contained in the personal aspects of his character poisoning his own image instead of lashing out at those around him, though this is hardly an absolving trait and downfall awaits them all the same.

A foil to his stoicism is just about every other character contained therein. Erupting with bravado emotions are seen in flashes by Penelope and, fittingly, to a lesser extent, Telemachus, but mostly in Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), the first mate who defies not only the gods but also Odysseus, and back at home, Pattinson’s Antinous, hopeful usurper to Ithaca’s crown. Through much of the telling of the story of Odysseus and his travels, Damon is asked to play an almost subdued man with his outbursts reserved mostly for the battlefield but most fully in his triumphant return home. Until that point, it is Patel who is afforded the showier role while out at sea, unafraid to go toe to toe with his captain and, defying his master as his master has defied his gods, is swiftly punished for it.

Patel’s Eurylochus is also one of the few human characters we actually feel sympathy towards, though this sympathy does erode as the story wanes on. Otherwise, that sentiment is mostly reserved for that which is caught somewhere between human and legend: Cyclops, Circe (Samantha Morton), the shades, Calypso, and Odysseus, meaning that Nolan has specifically framed his hero’s exploits as a turning of his back on his own humanity. These monsters, at least the more humanoid ones, are sympathetic as they were born from the gods and abandoned, same as the Shades, veterans of Agamemnon’s War, were drafted and abandoned by their leader. Likewise, Odysseus was abandoned by both, though later more willfully than the former. At the end of the film, despite his reunion with Penelope and his rebirth and baptism in battle in his own court, there is still a solemn air which hangs over the narrative because he is accepting his humanity and all of the culpability that comes with it, but forgiveness requires both parties. Nolan looks at Odysseus with sympathetic kindness when he is working as a general in Agamemnon’s Army, but after having witnessed the slaughtering of an entire city, that Odysseus still continues down a violent path after the war has been won is where the director’s sympathies end.

Ultimately, Odysseus is just a man and one that is complicit in the downfall of the world he was protecting. There is a revelation in his confession to Penelope on the eve of her trial to the suitors that it was his fleet that were being anxiously whispered about in the years after the fall of Troy; rumored “sea people” who would come ashore to ransack and pillage all that they could conquer. It is a great moment, and one that reframes the war and his desperate efforts to survive for Odysseus in the same way that back in Sparta, Helena (Lupita Nyong’o) reframes Odysseus’ victory over her city as a band of ruthless invaders rather than triumphant conquers. Additionally, this confession also reveals why Athena (Zendaya) is the only god to have made themselves appear to Odysseus, and while she is the conduit for which Odysseus seems to take full responsibility for his transgressions, it is notable that she never returns to him, leaving him to wallow in his own mortality.

Despite this, however, we never fully forgive Odysseus because while he is on his way to complete the prophecy by sailing to the unknown West and honoring the dead, we leave him before making that atonement yet he still gets to enjoy in the spoils of his victory having regained his wife, his identity, and all which makes him human; a quality Nolan seems to be finding more and more contempt with as he career grows and he begins to examines how we squander our free will. The final moments feel as if he is betraying his kingdom and fleeing his responsibility to restore Zeus’ law, and though Telemachus can be assumed to bring order back to the land, we leave Odysseus with Helena’s words in our mind and little love left in our hearts. Nolan has always been fascinated by regretful men, but even when working in the world of a foundational myth, he has stripped away so much of the interference by the gods and focused instead on Odysseus’ choices that we simply cannot see him as a man beset by fate, but rather the author of his choices. The gods may help those who help themselves, as Odysseus declares, but Nolan is ungracious to his characters who choose to help themselves at the expense of others.

Across this sweeping character study, Göransson provides a score that is as far removed as possible from the orchestral swelling found in many of the classic swords and sandals epics, arriving at his melodies through many of the diegetic sounds so that it plays out into the auditorium like an ocean breeze or the heat radiating off of the sands. This allows for the times when it does become more obvious and intrusive – already too strong of words to accurately describe it except when in comparison to other scores within the genre – to really help elevate the emotion of the scene. It unifies the film by creating a throughline that helps us with the oscillating tones when out on the adventure with Odysseus and back home on Ithaca. Even during the action scenes, thrilling as they are, there is a metered approach to them – Nolan, ever the realist – that it never becomes a frenzy. In these moments, the score often enhances the sounds around us, and it is only after the threat has passed to we catch that there was a melody ringing out from the clashing of swords or in a few instances, the thundering of war drums.

The drums are loudest during combat, specifically in the final duel. This finale is one of the more conventionally shot aspects of the entire affair, but unfortunately, the combat is strangely bloodless and looks muddy on screen, though to be fair it is a low light location. Van Hoytema frames many of the combat scenes quite tight which results in awkward marks for the actors to hit – possibly due to the sheer size of the camera – but he is determined to get us right into the fray that we can practically feel the sweat fly off of Damon’s shoulders.

It is out in the exteriors where the cinematography shines most. Pulling back to let us revel in the great locations, overseen by locations manager Janice Polley, van Hoytema allows us to be swept away sheer scope of the world. The color palate is almost exclusively earth tones, but it never feels drab or dirty. Rather, we are presented with a world that we recognize: grass that is green yet crunchy; sands that are white but rough under our feet; waters that are blue but keep secrets beneath their waves. He shakes the allure of the Technicolor epics that feel almost storybook in their contrast and instead transports us to “a time of apparent magic” as promised by the film’s title card.

There is an old screenwriting adage which goes that a page of script equates to a minute of runtime. To inappropriately apply that same formula here, a minute of runtime is equal to almost 70 lines of Homer’s poem. While Lame’s pacing in the edit is quite swift, especially in that first hour that feels like a feature film in and of itself without ever feeling bloated, what holds The Odyssey back the most is the constraints imposed by the IMAX 70mm format, specifically the 180-minute maximum length. This is easily a film that could have supported a 210-minute runtime when you consider just how short the encounter with the Laestrygonians were, how underdeveloped the Calypso storyline was especially given her importance to Odysseus’ arc, and the racing by of palace intrigue in the final act. This is not something that could have been solved in the edit because the scenes are perfectly arranged and paced. The IMAX film platters are simply too small.

To say Nolan’s take on this story skirts some of the slower moments is not an entirely unsupported claim, but it is equally off base to say it is just action and spectacle. Looking at Nolan’s pages, he derives much of his script from what does not fit into the prose of Homer’s epic, and while it creates deeper characters, they do feel under explored. There are so many character setups across the runtime that would benefit from an extra scene or two. It is in the characterization, though, that Johnathan Nolan’s pen is most missed. The dynamic established between Telemachus and Antinous is the one which occupies the most screentime, yet these two characters still feel as paper thin as the decaying parchment upon which Homer wrote. Beyond them, there is the dynamic between Odysseus’ two wives, Penelope and Calypso, as well as his two chief deputies, Eumaneus (John Leguizamo) and Eurylochus. These characters are just begging to be expanded on to further compare and contrast how Odysseus has changed when at home vs the legend in matters of his successorship, his role as a husband, and his role as a leader.

Quibbles aside, The Odyssey washes over audiences with all the power and fury of Poseidon, and it puts Nolan in an impossible situation as to where to go next. He finds a balance between the two and while the classics majors will find plenty here to clear their throat of the library dust and proclaim all of Nolan’s sacrilegious inaccuracies in adapting this text, that is just what this is, an adaptation; one which takes all of the elements that work as a poem on the page and utilizes every filmmaking tool available to bring that story to the big screen. After reaching such great heights, it is cosmically natural to go small in the same way a star starts over as a white dwarf after a supernova, but are audiences ready to accept a more personal film from this director, or will, like Circe, he prove that too much is never enough for us? Wherever the creative tides lead him, we will be singing of his triumphs for years to come, and like Odysseus’ millennia-spanning influence on storytelling, so too will Nolan’s journey be forever carved and seen as a foundational body of work as we enter into the next century of filmmaking and beyond.