Christopher Nolan’s films are usually about men who build elaborate systems to outrun grief. In Inception, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) folds cities in his sleep. Oppenheimer (in the eponymous film, played by Cillian Murphy) splits the atom and spends the rest of his life trying to unsplit his conscience. Nolan’s Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, fits the pattern, except that the system he is trying to escape isn’t of his own making. It’s a 10-year war, a decade lost at sea, and a home that has stopped waiting for him to explain himself.
The film is adapted from Greek poet Homer’s historical epic about the ill-fated Odysseus and his decade-long voyage home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. The film’s founding wound arrives early, in the fall of Troy itself. The horse isn’t wheeled through the gates as some triumphant gift on casters — it turns up crusted in sand, looking like something the tide coughed up and it’s the Trojans themselves who haul it inside, believing they’re claiming a relic.
Buried in it, Odysseus and his men wait in silence for a war built entirely on someone else’s misplaced trust. The cost of that trust falls on Sinon (Elliot Page), his own kinsman, whom Odysseus has to manipulate into a sacrifice that seals the victory. Nolan doesn’t let this play out as a clever strategy. It plays as the first thing Odysseus can’t put down — the moment his war stops being fought against Troy and starts being fought against his own conscience, one he’ll drag across every island for the next 10 years.
Greek tragedy to PTSD
What makes The Odyssey Nolan’s most ambitious film isn’t just its scale (it is, after all, the first film to be shot entirely in 70mm Imax cameras). It is also that he is using a 3000-year-old war poem to make a film about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and doing it without ever naming the condition.
This is a movie about what war does to the men who survive it, told through monsters and gods instead of clinical language and the mythology ends up doing more honest work than realism could. The Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe’s island — elements of Homer’s Odyssey, which attempt to entice Odysseus and delay his return home — aren’t detours from the trauma story. They are the trauma story, staged as the only way Odysseus can process what happened to him.
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Throughout his career, Nolan has always been drawn to externalising interior states — dreams as architecture, memory as a maze — and here he finally has a text built for exactly that move. The result doesn’t just narrate a war story. Rather, it asks what a war story is for and who it’s actually serving: the soldier, or the people who need him to have a clean ending.
Damon plays Odysseus without armour-plated heroism. There’s a worn, haunting sadness in the way he carries himself, closer to defeat than victory — a choice that separates this Odysseus from the square-jawed swordsmen who’ve played the role before him. Jennifer Lame’s editing keeps folding decades into each other, so the only reliable marker of how far along the journey is, is Damon’s greying beard. It can feel disorienting at times, but the disorientation is the point. It puts viewers inside a man who no longer trusts his own timeline.
Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is the film’s other centre of gravity. She isn’t shot as a woman pining at a loom. She’s running a kingdom, quietly rehearsing its own succession, fending off Robert Pattinson’s Antinous and a court of men who’ve mistaken her patience for surrender. Tom Holland’s Telemachus, who plays Damon’s son, is less interested in finding his father than in figuring out what kind of man he’s supposed to become in his absence. It is the more interesting question, and the film is richer for knowing it.
A study of human mind
Nolan takes real risks in the casting and register. The ensemble spans continents and accents by design. His approach treats The Odyssey the way theatre has long treated Shakespeare, as a text that belongs to whoever is telling it.
Technically, the film earns every bit of its reputation, but nothing here is technique for its own sake. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s camera favours texture over gloss and Ludwig Göransson’s score carries the emotional weight in scenes where the dialogue deliberately underplays. What Nolan is building, image by image, is a war film where the war ended reels ago and the movie is still happening, turning it effectively into a study of a man’s nervous system.
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Not everything holds. There are a few mythological set pieces that arrive compressed to the point of feeling like footnotes and a couple of stretches do feel inert. In fact, the modern, unadorned dialogue is bound to garner split reactions.
But the ambition here is unmatched, and it’s ambition of a specific kind: Nolan isn’t just retelling Homer; he’s using Homer to push at what cinema itself is for: whether a medium built on spectacle can also hold something as unresolved as a soldier’s mind refusing to come home.
Which is why the question of whether Ithaca forgives Odysseus is almost beside the point. The film is more interested in whether he can forgive himself and whether that’s even a question cinema is equipped to answer.
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