The Odyssey (2026)

 

Christopher Nolan: The Odyssey (GB/US 2026). Matt Damon as Odysseus.

Οδύσσεια / Odissea / La Odisea / A Odisseia / L'Odyssée /  Die Odyssee / Odyssea /  Odiseja / Odisėja / Odüsseia / Odüsszeia / Odyseja / Одиссея.

    GB/US © 2026 Universal Pictures. Universal Pictures Presents. A Syncopy Production. EX: Thomas Hayslip. P: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan. Co-P: Andy Thompson, Helen Medrano.

    Written for the screen and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on the epic poem Odyssey / Ὀδύσσεια / Odysseia, 24 books in Homeric Greek from the 8th century BCE, attributed to Homer. In Finnish: Odysseia, Otto Manninen (1924), Pentti Saarikoski (1972) and Paavo Castrén (2016). The main source about the Trojan Horse is Aeneid / Aeneis, Golden Latin, by Virgil, 19 BCE.

    DP: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Shot and finished on film – negative format 65 mm – cinematographic process: IMAX – release formats 35 mm, 70 mm, DCP – aspect ratios 1.43:1 (IMAX 70 mm & Dual Laser) – 1.85:1 (theatrical, constant width) – 2.39:1 (theatrical, constant height) – 2.20:1 (70 mm). 

    PD: Ruth De Jong. Cost: Ellen Mirojnick. Makeup: Luisa Abel. Hair: Gloria Casny. VFX: Andrew Jackson. SFX: Scott R. Fisher. M: Ludwig Göransson. Song during final credits: "When I'm Home" (James Blake, Ludwig Göransson, Travis Scott, Christopher Nolan). ED: Jennifer Lame. Casting: John Papsidera.

    C: Matt Damon (Odysseus, king of Ithaca), Anne Hathaway (Penelope, queen of Ithaca), Tom Holland (Telemachus, Odysseus' son), Robert Pattinson (Antinous, an Ithacan suitor of Penelope), Lupita Nyong'O (dual role as Helen of Troy / and her sister Clytemnestra, queen of Mycenae), Charlize Theron (Calypso, an immortal nymph), Zendaya (twin role as the Troyan priestess of Athena and the goddess Athena herself), Samantha Morton (Circe), John Leguizamo (Eumaeus, blind swineherd, servant of Odysseus), Jon Bernthal (Menelaus, king of Sparta, husband of Helen of Troy), Himesh Patel (Eurylochus, second-in-command to Odysseus’ crew), Bill Irwin (Polyphemos, a Cyclops, a one-eyed giant), Elliot Page (Sinon, a Greek warrior), Benny Safdie (Agamemnon, king of Mycenae), Corey Hawkins (Polybus, an Ithacan suitor), Ryan Hurst (Mentor: guide, bodyguard and teacher of Telemachus), Mia Gothe and Logan Marshall-Green (twin siblings Melantho and Melanthius, treacherous servants of Penelope and Odysseus), Travis Scott (Phemius, a bard), James Remar (Tiresias), Kate Fuglei (Eurycleia).

    The part of the dog Argos is played by several dogs of all ages of the ancient Portuguese Podengo breed.

    Dedicated to David Keighley.

    Filming dates: Feb – Aug 2025.

    Loc: Morocco (Ait Ben Haddou, Essaouira, Marrakesh, Dakhla), Western Sahara, Greece (Messinia, Methoni Castle, Pylos, Corinth, Nestor's Cave [the Cyclops' lair]), Italy (Sicily: Favignana [Ithaca], Aeolian Islands), Malta, Iceland [Hades] (Markarfljot River, Sydra Skogarnes, Hjorleifshofdi Beach), Scotland (Moray: Findlater Castle, Culbin Forest, Sunnyside Beach), England (Heythorp Zoological Gardens) and the United States. 

    Studios: Stage 12 and Falls Lake, Universal Studios, Universal City. – Stages 9 and 27, Sony Picture Studios, Culver City.

    172 min

    Gala premiere: 6 July 2026 London (Odeon Luxe Leicester Square).

    France, Belgium, Switzerland: Wednesday 15 July 2026.

    Global release (UK, US and others): Friday 17 July 2026 

    Finnish premiere: 17 July 2026 – released by Finnkino – Finnish / Swedish subtitles by Topi Oksanen / Frej Grönholm.

    Viewed on DCP at 2.39:1 at Kuvalinna (Savon Kinot), Savonlinna, 17 July 2026.

Official: "Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX® film technology. The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to screens worldwide as the first feature film ever shot entirely with IMAX® Film Cameras."

AA: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a full-blown Hollywood blockbuster and a fresh interpretation of Homer's timeless saga. Recommended for everybody, including lovers of the classics of Antiquity, not despite its departures from the original but because of them.

XENIA

The concept is great. Odyssey the movie is theme-driven, and the theme is xenia – hospitality to the stranger and the asylum seeker. In the movie xenia is called Zeus' Law.

    "Don't be rude to the stranger, for he may be God in disguise."

    This supreme virtue was discussed by Hesiod, Homer's contemporary, in Works and Days. Its legendary dramatization, the tale of Philemon and Baucis, survives in a classic form in Ovid's Metamorphoses, written 700 years later.

    Issues of hospitality and breaches against hospitality appear at every stage of The Odyssey. Even before The Iliad begins, Paris, a prince of Troy, enjoys the hospitality of Sparta but elopes with Helen, the Queen of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in the world. Their treachery ignites the Trojan War.

LOVE

Nolan excels in violence. Love has been diluted. We hear the Sirens singing but never see them. The seductive beings have inspired countless artists, not Nolan. 

    Missing is the young Princess Nausicaa and her entourage of swimming maids who save the shipwrecked naked Odysseus. A missed legitimate opportunity to display male physical glory, paying tribute to the sculpture of classical Antiquity, in which male physique was preferred to the female. More importantly, this is a missed chance to create a moving vignette of the earliest surviving tale of unrequited love. According to Aristotle, Nausicaa later married Telemachus, Odysseus' son. 

    The tale of Circe the daughter of the sun god Helios is totally chaste. In Homer, Odysseus spends a year in her bed, resulting to at least one child, if not more (possible for gods if not for mortals).

    The greatest passionate affair – with Calypso – even more so. Nolan merges the Calypso tale (in Book 5) with the lotus-eaters (a flashback in Book 9). In the movie, Calypso drugs Odysseus with lotus so that he loses his memory. In Homer, Calypso attracts Odysseus with kindness, hospitality, ambrosia and nectar, and most of all her divine female desire. For seven years, they spend nights in loving embrace. At daytime, the homesick Odysseus sits on the beach crying. In Nolan, we do not know if they even sleep together.

    Calypso offers immortal love. Odysseus prefers a mortal one with Penelope. 

    In Homer, Zeus sends Hermes to Calypso to set Odysseus free. Male gods are allowed affairs with mortals, but female gods who want the same, are punished. Calypso "rages against the male double standard for female sexual behavior in a memorable speech that has lost none of its freshness – or pertinence" (Daniel Mendelsohn).

    In Homer, Calypso helps Odysseus build a solid raft carved from highest quality timber for his homecoming. In Nolan, he is only able to craft a dismal vessel from driftwood. 

    At Ithaca, after finishing off with the hostile gang of "suitors", Odysseus can finally embrace his beloved Penelope. In Daniel Mendelsohn's translation:

    "When the two had taken their pleasure in love’s entrancing delights,

    They took their delight in stories, each telling a tale to the other."

    Nolan is too coy to convey even true marital passion.

    This is strange. I found the sexuality in Oppenheimer both moving and essential to the story. Sex and wit go together.

RECOGNITION

Recognition (anagnorisis), a crucial narrative device in Aristotle's Poetics, is inspiredly employed by Nolan, faithfully to Homer. Odysseus returns to Ithaca in the disguise of a miserable beggar who calls himself Sinon. The first to recognize him is his 20 year old dog Argos who dies right after having seeing him. Only then does his loyal servant, the blind swineherd Eumaeus, realize his identity. Followed by Odysseus' son Telemachus, who hasn't seen his father since infancy.

    Next is Eurycleia, Odysseus' nurse. Requested by Penelope to wash the dirty stranger, Eurycleia recognizes on his thigh a tell-tale scar from a boar hunt. Odysseus hushes her. Still incognito, he enters the archery contest of the suitors using the bow that only Odysseus can string. Everybody fails, even Odysseus at first try. After his victory, in Homer, she tests the stranger once more by asking servants to move the marital bed. Odysseus states that it is immovable because he has crafted it from an olive tree still rooted in the ground. Nolan omits the bed as the object of identification and replaces it with Penelope's golden Athena pin which Odysseus has carried with him for twenty years.

   There is still one final recognition. Another addition of Nolan's to The Odyssey is the character of Sinon, who, however, appears in Aeneid. In Nolan's movie, Antinous buys Sinon's lot to dodge the draft to the Trojan War. At the end of the war, Sinon is ordered by Odysseus to stand guard by the wooden horse and convince the Trojans that it is a gift to Pallas Athene. On his visit to Hades, Odysseus meets the ghost of Sinon who reveals Antinous' deceit: he never paid his debt. Odysseus also confronts his own duplicity. He never told Sinon the truth about the Trojan Horse, wary of him giving the secret away. Sinon's ghost gives the lot to Odysseus. In the final battle at Ithaca, Odysseus forces Antinous to recognize it before dropping it into his mouth and killing him.

   Penelope's pin and Sinon's lot are the twin objects of recognition introduced by Nolan to the story.

    

TO BE CONTINUED

I have covered only three topics. The more I think about The Odyssey, the more I find to say. Browsing the media I realize that I am not alone. People seem to be eager to debate every detail and every deviation. The reception is growing into an odyssey of its own.

...

THE ODYSSEY has long ago become a synonym for a trek into the unknown. The Finnish term is harharetki, in German, Irrfahrt. In English perhaps "peregrination".

    It has been said that the Iliad and the Odyssey are two major forms of narrative fiction in general.

    Cinema itself has been an odyssey since the Lumière brothers launched a tour du monde as film-makers and exhibitors. They recorded the seven wonders and more.

   Major genres relevant to the odyssey include the road movie and the Western. 

    "The Civil War is part of nineteenth century history, the Western has turned it into the Trojan War of the most modern of epics. The march to the West is our Odyssey" (André Bazin in Le western ou le cinéma américain par excellence, 1953). The Searchers belongs to the lineage of The Odyssey, Rio Bravo to that of The Iliad (the siege story).

...

STORYTELLING

The Odyssey continues to amaze in its craft of storytelling. In medias res. The non-linear narrative. Narrative inside narrative. The flashback. The first-person narrative. The untrustworthy narrator. Narrative masks. Narrative by dialogue. Character expressed in action and dialogue. Changes in point-of-view. The hero's journey. Anagnorisis and peripeteia. "Structure is nothing if people do not respect its meaning", as Penelope states in the movie. Nolan has changed much, but all in a Homeric spirit. The changes he has made are not trivializations.

...

FEMALE AGENCY

Christopher Nolan wrote his screenplay in an age aware of a groundbreaking English translation by Emily Wilson (2017) and reinterpretations by Margaret Atwood (The Penelopiad, 2005) and Madeline Miller (Circe, 2018). When Circe turns Odysseus' men into swine she tells him that "I just turned them into what they are". --- Btw. Emily Wilson is also the first translator to call the servants of the saga slaves.

...

THE HELEN MYSTERY

A mystery remains: the slashed face of the former Helen of Troy, now Helen of Sparta again. This does not come from Homer or another source of Antiquity. Did Menelaus punish her for her elopement? Male agency? Her face "launched a thousand ships" according to Christopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus. Now Menelaus remarks that it only launches 500 ships. The image reminds me of the fate of Debby (Gloria Grahame) in The Big Heat.

...

SHELL SHOCK

The Odyssey is the original "lost generation" tale and a foundational story about brutalization by war and violence. The post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). "We violated everything that's ever sacred between people".

...

CASTING

The casting is great down to the smallest parts. There are no indifferent performances. Matt Damon is rock solid as a war leader, a sailor, a fighter, a swashbuckler and a man battling with his conscience. He is not a great lover and could be replaced by a puppet in love scenes. Samantha Morton as Circe is my favourite performance. I also like John Leguizamo as Eumaeus. Charlize Theron and Anne Hathaway would be great with real chemistry with the performer of Odysseus. I don't feel they would care to go to bed with him.

...

PAINTING WITH LIGHT

The cinematographer John Alton, "the prince of darkness", a film noir maestro, wrote a groundbreaking book on his craft called Painting with Light (1949). Even in the darkest night you can convey a presence of light. About The Odyssey I am not certain. I was expecting a presence of dazzling, intoxicating Mediterranean sun, light and heat and a feeling of nature much lusher than today. I failed to experience that. Often there is darkness, twilight and a feeling of murkiness.

...

TODAY'S CINEMA EXPERIENCE

This movie must be experienced at the cinema, and I need to see it again. Perhaps there was something strange in the DCP parameters of the screening I visited today. I even thought for a moment that I had forgotten to remove my sunshades.

...

THE FINNISH TITLE

The Finnish title of Homer's epic is identical with the Greek one: ODYSSEIA. It is incomprehensible that the movie is shown in Finland with an American title.

...

FINAL VERDICT

Despite my reservations I find The Odyssey the greatest international film of the year I have seen so far and the best of Nolan (a high compliment), rewarding in the context of his entire parcours, including Batman and Oppenheimer. As for the storytelling genius, I miss David Bordwell and hope that Kristin Thompson might contribute to the critical reception!

Nolan's The Odyssey is boldly original and worthy of Homer's grandeur of spirit.