Review: Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Is Long, Loud, and Ultimately Empty

Big studio spectacle used to mean something. Now it feels like homework. The Odyssey arrives as a three-hour promise that the theaterical experience still matters, pushed by Christopher Nolan’s insistence on 70mm IMAX film and scale, but what you get is not a revival. It is a long, heavy slog with almost no payoff and no one worth rooting for.

The noise around The Odyssey started months ago. People argued about its fidelity to Emily Wilson’s feminist adaptation of Homer, whinged about all the stunt casting, including Lupita Nyong’o as Helen and Elliot Page as a Greek warrior. None of that chatter prepares you for the real problem, and that is that the movie is dull in a way that drains you. It looks serious, it sounds important, and yet it rarely feels alive. It’s got the scale, the cast, and the serious expressions, but it never really grabs you. Instead, it keeps moving from one stiff stop to the next, like it’s checking items off of a ChatGPT generated list from the original poem instead of building toward something that actually matters.

Other than some of the distracting casting decisions, the main leads are less so. Matt Damon plays Odysseus as a man who’s been worn down by war and time, and you can see the effort in every step. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope has a perpetual patience and sadness, but the film doesn’t give her enough room to breathe. Tom Holland’s Telemachus is there, but he’s so undercooked that he barely feels like an actual person, let alone a son waiting for his father to come home. I felt bad for him. There should have been some poignant father and son moment near the end, but the dynamic was more focused on estrangement and guilt rather than the poem’s fuller reconciliation.

The journey itself should’ve been the fun part, it’s the core of the poem, but it kept getting bogged down. The Cyclops scene has great effects, but comes and goes too quickly and without the needed exchange that was the catalyst that turns a difficult return home into a full decade of suffering, opting instead for a more grounded, modern-dialogue approach. The sea storms roll in, and the men make the same bad choices over and over, and it seems like repetitive pointlessness.

While much has been said about Elliot Page playing a bumbling Greek warrior, or Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen, my issue was really with the way the film handles Odysseus. Matt Damon does some good work here, but Nolan seems more interested in turning him into a man who is haunted, softened, and constantly second-guessing himself than a warrior who carries his pride and guilt at the same time. In the original poem, the Trojan War is not just a wound. It is also part of his glory, and that tension is what gives Odysseus his force. Here, the movie keeps pushing him toward trauma and regret, which drains the character of the hard edge that makes him feel like Odysseus in the first place.

That choice also drags down Damon’s character. Instead of a clever warrior who knows what he did and stands by it, he feels like a PTSD stricken war veteran Nolan wants us to pity, as if the movie is quietly asking us to see the whole story through a more modern, anti-war lens. That might sound thoughtful, but it completely changes the balance of the story and makes Odysseus feel far weaker than he should. He is supposed to be a hard, brilliant survivor whose greatness and guilt live in the same body, but Nolan’s film seems far more interested in sanding that down than in letting it stay sharp. In the end, it makes it hard to root for him on his sufferable odyssey until a cathartic moment near the end that feels unearned.

There is one bright spot, in this otherwise dreary film, and that is Samantha Morton, who breaks through the noise as Circe. She brings a kind of cold, strange energy that the movie desperately needs, and for a few moments, it finally feels like there’s something dangerous happening. It does not last. After that, the film drifts again. Charlize Theron gives Calypso some star power, and is very alluring, but those beach scenes go on for far too long and start to feel like a nap with expensive lighting. Zendaya’s Athena keeps showing up to look like a disappointed friend who’s tired of your excuses, but the movie never gives her enough force to shape the story. Even when the cast is doing solid work, the whole thing still feels heavy and strangely empty.

Sadly, despite Nolan’s penchat for leaning into realism, this movie can’t even make its own world feel believable, starting with a Trojan horse that looks so awkward and overbuilt it pulls you right out of the story. The contemporary dialogue and the bizarre costume choices got a similar reaction from me, since they don’t feel lived-in or convincing enough to sell the age and the grime of the tale. I came away thinking that more than anything, the film seems to want the prestige of realism without actually committing to the rough, grounded details that would have made that approach work.

I went in expecting this R-rated film to deliver some real bite, but the battles are so bloodless they barely leave an impression. And instead of visceral violence that means something, we get pointless profanity that feels tossed in just to remind you the movie wants to sound like modern grown-ups.

That’s the real issue with The Odyssey. It wants to be an epic about war, pride, and homecoming, but it keeps sanding off the parts that bring those ideas home. The Greek gods should have been the engine here, and instead they’re barely present, which leaves the story without much needed urgency. What’s left is a long spectacle about a man trying to get home while the audience is looking at the time on their iPhones. By the time Athena returns to give us a speech about how Odysseus’s pride and destructiveness embody toxic masculinity, I was ready to go.

The Odyssey is  pushing toward big themes about war and decay, but it never really earns them. Nolan’s film discipline shows on the screen, yet this movie never added up to something I’ll want to rewatch. If this is the case for the big screen IMAX experience, it’s a weak one. You can stay home, read the poem, and come away with so much more. Three hours in a theater should not feel like a chore. This one does.

***