(A review of Christopher Nolan’s film, The Odyssey)

Like everything that Christopher Nolan does, The Odyssey (2026) aims for magnificence and ends up somewhere else – landing mid-way between silly and spectacular. He is a forger of graceless epics, visually striking but hampered by conventions, which he seems to have little interest (or facility) in transcending. His movies are full of brilliant surprises that he never intended, usually lodged between set-pieces that have been micro-managed to the max. 

Here, Tom Holland achieves a disarming maturity in the part of Telemachus, offering a kinder and more compassionate version of Odysseus’s son than anything we find in Homer’s neck-snapping original. Apparently undaunted by Nolan’s notoriously one-dimensional dialogue, he goes toe to toe with more established stars and out-acts them all – including Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and even Matt Damon, stocky and be-whiskered, who occasionally struggles under the demands of the script, which (as in most of Nolan’s previous features) can feel either too lean or too grandiose to take entirely seriously.

One of the accidental amusements afforded by Nolan’s filmography to date is that of seeing which A-listers have enough self-possession to make the cartoonish character-types favoured by their auteur-director come across as actual people. While veteran players such as Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy were over-shooting into hamminess in Dunkirk (2017), pop-star Harry Styles and Jiu-Jitsu champion Tom Hardy seemed, by contrast, to emit a natural glow; they were the bright lights of the show. When he wasn’t speeding around like an undercover athlete, John David Washington (at one point ranked among the fastest sprinters in the USA) mostly drowned amid the tessellating plot-pivots of Tenet (2020) – a movie that resembled a noisy Rubik’s Cube taking a long time to solve itself. With its large cast and inescapable background music, Inception (2010) was a mixed bag: over-stuffed but intermittently effective at walloping its audience into a daze of adrenaline-induced appreciation.

The Odyssey, too, boasts a large ensemble. Jon Bernthal plays Menelaus, kitted out to look like a cross between Robin Hood and Disney’s idea of an Arabian prince, while doing his by-now classic impersonation of a fourteen-year-old jock who’s just chugged his first protein-shake of the morning. As Calypso, the ever-statuesque Charlize Theron seems to have stepped out of a Chanel commercial, sea-breeze essence in human form. Dressed as an Attic sheep-herder from 1960s Hollywood, John Leguizamo retains the exact accent he used for Sid the Sloth in Ice Age (2002), and almost gets away with it. Samantha Morton materialises as a Hebridean fisherwoman on helium, otherwise known as Circe. Many other famous folk sidle up to the plate – of whom, as mentioned, Tom Holland emerges as undisputed victor.

Of all the elite movie-makers operating today, Nolan may be the one who owes the most to Leni Riefenstahl, whose visual sweep, technical audacity, and Wagnerian fascism resulted in cinematic vistas that could be either over-powering or bombastic. Nolan has many of her virtues (if that’s what they were) and, thankfully, only some of her faults. He’s no Nazi in artistic clothing – despite Dunkirk’s weird point of pride in not naming the Allied forces’ politically repugnant adversaries directly, referring to them throughout as “The Enemy” – but, like her, he seems incapable of surmounting the emotional hollowness and mechanistic fixations of the story-boards he starts from. In general, his roaring, Zimmery soundtracks do the work of lathering over the discrepancies that result.

Like the Oscar-chomping Oppenheimer (2023) before it, The Odyssey alternates between eye-rolling melodrama and sequences of undeniable power. The journey to Hades is appropriately muck-boned and haunted. The fantastical scenes involving Circe and the Cyclops are similarly unsettling, if also refreshing in their sense of Odysseus as an ambiguous hero – duplicitous, hubristic, pained, and not only intelligent and tenacious, as in conventional tellings. The sacking of Troy – re-imagined from Virgil’s Aeneid, rather than Homer’s epics – ultimately feels war-weary and riven by grief, in a manner that carries (in our own calamitous century).

Nolan may be the perfect example of grandeur without greatness; craft divorced from intellect or feeling. The Odyssey supplies plenty of evidence of this, even as it runs its required race with skill. Was it worth the effort? It’s certainly worth a watch.