The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, his first film since Oppenheimer swept the Academy Awards in 2023. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, working his way home after the Trojan War through a string of encounters with figures out of Greek myth, including the cyclops Polyphemus, while Anne Hathaway’s Penelope and Tom Holland’s Telemachus hold things together back in Ithaca.
I saw it with my wife in IMAX, which felt like the right way to take in a story this size.
Nolan tells the journey home and the Ithaca storyline as two timelines running side by side, and that structural choice is what makes the film feel as epic as it does.
Movie Breakdown
Plot
The dual-timeline structure is the film’s strongest choice, weaving Odysseus’s journey and the situation back home into one story instead of telling them one after another. It makes an already sprawling myth feel cohesive rather than a string of episodic side quests. Where it comes up short is background. The film references and shows the Trojan War and the kings involved, Agamemnon among them, without ever explaining who they are or what actually happened between them. Some working knowledge of Greek mythology going in makes a real difference here.
Acting
Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway carry the film. Damon in particular transformed for the role, visibly jacked in a way that sells years of a soldier’s journey before he says a word. Tom Holland is good as Telemachus, but something about playing a boy on the edge of manhood didn’t quite land for me. I can’t point to exactly what felt off, just that it did.
Effects
The sound design is where the IMAX presentation earned its keep. The scenes at sea use it best, sound and scale combining to make the ocean feel genuinely dangerous rather than just a backdrop. The Trojan War flashbacks hit even harder. Between the sound and the format, I felt like I was in the middle of the battle, not watching it from a distance. That immersion occasionally tips into being a little much rather than purely effective, but that’s a minor complaint against a film that’s actually using IMAX instead of just being shown in it.
Pace
The runtime is long, but so is the journey it’s telling, and for most of it that length feels earned. A few stretches along the way still could have been trimmed without losing anything essential to the story.
Rate It Score
The Odyssey landed an 88 on Rate It. The dual-timeline structure and the sheer scale of the IMAX presentation are what make the film work, and that same ambition is what holds it back in a couple of places, asking for more mythology knowledge than it gives you, and stretching a few sections of the journey longer than they needed to be. Damon and Hathaway are strong enough to anchor it regardless. This is a film built for the biggest screen possible, and worth seeing that way.