Film Review: The Odyssey 奧德賽 (2026) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 10/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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A man stands on a beach that looks older than language and tells a goddess he only wants to go home. That is the whole movie, and it is enough.
Christopher Nolan has made a film about the cost of returning. Not the adventure of leaving—anyone can leave—but the harder voyage: crossing years of blood, pride, and weather to become again the person a wife and son might still recognize. Matt Damon plays Odysseus as a man who has already used up most of his luck and is now spending the rest of his character. The face is lined. The body is still capable of violence. The eyes keep calculating whether the next clever trick will save the crew or only postpone the bill.
Nolan shoots the entire picture on IMAX film, and for once the format is not a stunt. The sea is not a backdrop; it is a character with moods. When the camera finds the wooden horse against fire, or the single red plume of a helmet in smoke, you feel the old story the way a child first feels it: too large, slightly frightening, and impossible to look away from. Hoyte van Hoytema photographs faces the way he photographs cliffs. Ludwig Göransson’s score does not decorate the myth; it remembers it.
The structure is Nolan’s, which means time is not a line but a wound that keeps reopening. We cut between the voyage and Ithaca, where Anne Hathaway’s Penelope weaves and waits with a patience that is itself a form of strategy. Tom Holland’s Telemachus is the film’s secret engine: a son who has grown up on stories of a father he has never met, and who must decide whether those stories are a gift or a trap. Robert Pattinson, as the suitor Antinous, is the rare villain who understands the joke. He does not want the throne so much as he wants the story to end with him in it.
There are monsters. Of course there are. The Cyclops sequence is terrifying in a way modern effects rarely manage, because Nolan trusts duration and sound more than revelation. The Sirens are not a music-video; they are a temptation aimed at the specific man who hears them. Charlize Theron’s Calypso offers the oldest bargain in literature—stay, and never have to become mortal again—and Damon plays the refusal as grief, not heroism.
What surprised me is how much of the film is about hospitality and its opposite. Who feeds you. Who remembers your name. Who opens the door after ten years and does not ask you to explain everything at once. John Leguizamo’s swineherd Eumaeus has only a handful of scenes and walks off with several of them, because Nolan finally lets a supporting player simply be kind without underlining it.
Is it faithful to Homer? Faithful enough to the feeling. Nolan compresses, rearranges, and sometimes invents, as every adapter must. The deviations that bothered some viewers did not bother me. The poem has survived twenty-seven centuries by being retold. This version retells it as a movie about a man who won a war and then had to live with the winning.
I walked out thinking not of gods but of the small, stubborn human wish to be recognized. To come home and find that the dog still knows you. That the bed still holds the secret only two people share. That the son, after all the stories, is willing to look you in the face.
See it on the largest screen you can find. Not because Nolan demands it, but because the film was built for the part of you that still believes a journey can change a life, and that arriving is the most dangerous part. (Neo, 2026)