The Odyssey Review: Christopher Nolan’s Greatest Epic Is a 70mm IMAX Masterpiece

The Odyssey Review Verdict: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a towering achievement, the most emotionally devastating and visually staggering film he has ever made. It is epic in the truest sense of the word, not as a synonym for big but as a description of what it actually feels like to sit inside a story that stretches across a decade of loss, longing, and the terrifying power of myth. See it on IMAX. See it while you still can.

I watched The Odyssey in IMAX. I was not ready. I am still not fully recovered. This review is written in English and is deliberately light on plot specifics; the less you know about how specific scenes unfold, the better.

Quick Verdict

I went in knowing the story. I have known the story for years, Odysseus, ten years at the Trojan War, ten more years trying to sail home, gods intervening at every step, the wife holding the kingdom together, the son growing up without a father. I thought that familiarity would create some distance, give me the ability to appreciate the craft without being fully inside the experience. I was wrong.

The last forty-five minutes of The Odyssey had me sitting in my seat doing the thing you do when you are trying not to cry in public, the slight look upward, the controlled exhale, the pretending to adjust your glasses. It did not fully work. This film makes you feel things that do not end when the credits roll. I took it home with me. I was still thinking about it when I went to sleep. That is what cinema is supposed to do.

The Odyssey (2026) — Movie Info

The Odyssey Cast

What The Odyssey Is Actually About (For Those Who Don’t Know the Story)

If you are going to see this film without knowing the source material, read this section. It will not spoil anything. It will prevent you from being confused for the first hour. Odysseus is the King of Ithaca, a small island kingdom in ancient Greece. He spent ten years fighting in the Trojan War, and he helped win it, primarily through cunning rather than brute force. He is not the strongest man in the Greek army. He is the smartest. The journey from Troy back to Ithaca should have taken weeks.

It takes ten more years, because during the war Odysseus blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus, who happens to be the son of Poseidon, god of the sea. Poseidon’s curse is the engine of the entire story: Odysseus will either not make it home at all, or he will arrive so late that everything he loved will be unrecognizable. While Odysseus is lost at sea, his wife Penelope is holding the kingdom together. Suitors have invaded his home, eating his food, spending his money, pressuring his wife to accept that Odysseus is dead and remarry.

His son Telemachus has grown up without a father and is trying to become the man Odysseus never got to be present for. The film is not a linear story. It moves between these simultaneous realities, Odysseus’s journey and the home he is trying to return to, in ways that require you to trust the storytelling. If you trust it, the final act pays off everything. If you resist the non-linearity, you will spend two hours feeling slightly lost and then spend the last forty-five minutes being emotionally leveled anyway. Trust it.

 Is The Odyssey a Scary Movie?

This surprised me more than almost anything else about the film: yes, in significant stretches, it is. The Cyclops sequence, Polyphemus’s cave, the trap, the escape- is the most purely terrifying sequence Christopher Nolan has ever put on screen. The Cyclops in this film is the thing you were afraid was under your bed as a child, scaled up to a size that would not fit under your bed. The cave itself is shot and sound-designed in a way that makes the walls feel like they are closing in.

When the Cyclops screams in that cave, and the scream is mixed so that it is significantly louder than anything you have heard in the film up to that point, I physically flinched. That was not an accident. That was sound design being used as a narrative tool. The Circe sequence unsettled me in a different way, quieter, more psychologically disturbing, the kind of scene that does not feel frightening while you are watching it and then lives in your head afterward.

I was still thinking about that sequence, driving home. For a film people are approaching as a mythology epic or an action film, the horror register Nolan deploys in multiple sequences is one of The Odyssey’s most distinctive qualities. He makes the magic in this story feel terrifying. Not whimsical, not fantastical, genuinely threatening. You feel the existential dread that the characters feel when they encounter something beyond the limits of what they understand about the world.

Matt Damon as Odysseus

The Right Call, Even If It Seems Wrong, I would not have cast Matt Damon as Odysseus. I want to be honest about that. The announcement landed with a question mark for me, not an exclamation point. He is exactly right for the role. Odysseus’s defining characteristic is not strength or beauty. It is intelligence, resourcefulness, and the specific kind of endurance that comes from refusing to stop even when every rational calculation suggests you should.

Matt Damon has been doing versions of this character his entire career, the competent man in an impossible situation who finds the solution not through force but through thinking, and Nolan has cast him in the role those previous performances were rehearsals for. He also looks like he has been at sea for ten years.

The makeup and physical transformation are extraordinary across the entire cast, hair texture changed by salt water and wind, skin worn by sun and starvation, bodies that carry the weight of a decade of survival, but Damon’s physical presence as Odysseus, the specific quality of someone who has not stopped moving long enough to grieve everything he has lost, is exactly what the role needs. I would have been wrong about the casting. I am glad Nolan was not.

The Odyssey Supporting Cast

Multiple Standouts, Zero Weak Links. Tom Holland as Telemachus is quietly the emotional center of the film’s home-set storyline. He is playing a man who has grown up in his father’s legend without ever having known his father, and the specific longing in his performance, the pride and the resentment and the love all coexisting, is some of the best work of his career. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is fierce and exhausted and devoted in ways that make her the film’s most underrated performance.

She is holding an entire kingdom together with nothing except will and time, and Hathaway communicates the cost of that without melodrama. Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, the lead suitor, with a quality I can only describe as polished menace. You want to smack him. That is the intended response, and he earns it completely. The standout I did not see coming: John Leguizamo. His role is more substantial than I expected, and he does something in it that I found genuinely moving.

I will not tell you what it is. Just be aware that he is not a cameo. Charlize Theron as Calypso appears in what is one of the longest and most seductive diversions of Odysseus’s journey, the seven-year entanglement that almost makes him forget he wants to go home. She is magnetic in the role, which is exactly what the role requires. Zendaya as Athena appears as Odysseus’s internal compass, the goddess of wisdom who functions in the film as the voice of his own better judgment rendered external. It is a delicate thing to play, and she plays it with precision.

Shot on 100% 70mm IMAX

What That Actually Means The Odyssey is the first film in the history of cinema to be shot entirely on 70mm IMAX cameras, and Nolan worked with IMAX to develop a 30% lighter version of the camera specifically because some of the film’s locations were physically inaccessible with the standard weight. The film was shot across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, the Western Sahara Desert, and Malta. These are not set pieces.

These are places. When you watch a sequence set in a landscape that looks genuinely impossible, you are watching an actual landscape, black sand beaches in Iceland, the actual Mediterranean, and a real desert. The physicality of what is on screen is not simulated. It is documented. In IMAX, the difference this makes is not subtle. Colors have a depth and texture that looks nothing like conventionally shot studio film. The frame is wider and taller.

Darkness in this film has actual shadow and contrast rather than the flat, lifeless, muddy darkness that afflicts most contemporary big-budget productions. When Nolan lights a scene, you feel the light and dark in the same frame simultaneously. I had almost forgotten what that looked like as a default choice in a new cinema. See this film on IMAX if there is an IMAX within driving distance of you. Not as a preference, as a requirement for the intended experience.

The Odyssey Ludwig Göransson’s Score

The Film’s Emotional Engine. The music that plays in The Odyssey’s trailer is the film’s main theme, and that theme is the emotional through-line of everything. It is mournful and searching and enormous in exactly the way that a ten-year journey away from home should feel. Ludwig Göransson, who built the soundscapes of Black Panther and Oppenheimer, has created something here that I have been replaying since I left the cinema. The score never announces itself as the score. It is not constantly telling you what to feel.

It arrives when the film needs it and recedes when the film is doing its own work. In the horror sequences, the sound design takes over from the music, and the silence that precedes certain sounds in the Cyclops’ cave is as frightening as the sounds themselves. In the emotional third act, the theme returns, and it carries everything the film has been building. I noticed when the music started and when it stopped. That level of attention to a score during a film I am deeply engaged in is unusual. It is doing its job at the highest level.

The Odyssey Movie Controversies

My Honest Take Two casting choices generated significant internet argument before this film was released. Both deserve direct address. Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy. Ancient Greek mythology describes Helen as white. Nyong’o is Black. She is in the film for approximately five minutes. Her performance in those five minutes is excellent.

The argument that this casting damages the film requires believing that historical accuracy is owed to a story that is three thousand years old, was written by a man whose existence is genuinely disputed, and has been adapted into dozens of different cultural forms across millennia. I do not believe that. If you are going to the cinema to experience what Christopher Nolan has made of this story, this casting will not affect your experience in any negative way. Elliott Page does not play Achilles.

He plays Sinon, a character borrowed by Nolan from Virgil’s Aeneid rather than Homer’s Odyssey, representing creative liberty with the source material rather than inaccuracy within it. His role is brief. His performance in that brief role works for what the film needs from the character. The “Let’s go” line in the trailer, Odysseus delivering what sounds like a TikTok hype phrase, plays very differently in context than the trailer suggests. I will not tell you how. Watch it and see whether you think Nolan was aware of what he was doing with that line.

Is The Odyssey a Masterpiece?

 Yes. I think it is. It is not a perfect film; the first thirty minutes require patience as the non-linear structure establishes itself and you orient to which storyline you are in, and the creature Scylla, glimpsed briefly, does not fully register visually in the way the Cyclops does. These are real limitations. They are smaller than everything else the film achieves.

The scale of what Nolan is attempting, compressing twenty-four books of ancient epic poetry into three hours of film, serving audiences who know the story and audiences who do not, making mythology feel terrifying rather than historical, building an emotional payoff that does not arrive through manipulative score swells but through genuine accumulated weight, is genuinely extraordinary. And he succeeds at it.

The last forty-five minutes of this film are among the finest forty-five minutes of cinema I have seen in years. The emotional payoff is built on everything that came before it, and it lands with the force of something you did not quite see coming, even when you knew it was coming. That is the rarest quality in storytelling: the inevitable that still surprises.

The Odyssey Pros & Cons

✓ Pros

• Matt Damon is exactly right as Odysseus, against his initial instinct, against all odds
• The Cyclops sequence is genuine horror filmmaking at a masterful level
• Shot 100% on 70mm IMAX, the most beautiful I have seen a film look in years
• Ludwig Göransson’s score is the film’s emotional engine and one of his best
• The last forty-five minutes are devastating in the best possible way
• Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and John Leguizamo all deliver
• Nolan makes mythology feel genuinely terrifying rather than fantastical
• The non-linearity pays off completely when the final act arrives
• Tactile realism in makeup, costuming, and physical deterioration across the cast

✗ Cons

• The first thirty minutes require patience to orient to the structure
• Scylla does not register as visually as the Cyclops; the “less is more” approach has limits here
• The dialogue occasionally feels contemporary in ways that briefly break the mythological register

Final Verdict

The Odyssey sits next to Interstellar for me in Nolan’s filmography, above Oppenheimer, above Dunkirk, which is a statement I did not expect to be making. It is the film where his technical command and his emotional ambition finally arrive in the same place at the same time, and the result is something you do not fully recover from before you are already wanting to watch it again.

It is about war and what it takes from you. It is about home and what it means to spend a decade trying to return to it. It is about fathers and sons across a distance that neither fully understands. And it is, unexpectedly, terrifying, in ways that will live in your head long after the lights come up. Go see it on IMAX. Take someone you love. Hold on.

If you’re deciding which movie to watch next, explore our latest reviews of The Five-Star Weekend Review, The Westies Review, Moana Live-Action Review, Ikka Review, Evil Dead Burn Review, Dhamaal 4 Review, and Night Nurse Review. At NexaFeed, we publish spoiler-free movie reviews, OTT series reviews, ending explained articles, hidden details, and streaming guides covering Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, HBO Max, and the biggest theatrical releases from around the world.

The Odyssey Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Is The Odyssey movie any good?

Ans. Yes, it is exceptional. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic is visually stunning, emotionally devastating, and anchored by a career performance from Matt Damon. The Cyclops sequence is genuinely scary. The last forty-five minutes are among the finest in Nolan’s entire filmography. My rating: 5 out of 5.

Q. Is The Odyssey actually good or just overhyped?

Ans. It is genuinely as good as the best reactions suggest. The early praise is earned. This is not a case of influencer hype inflating a mediocre film; the film delivers on the ambition the marketing promises.

Q. Is The Odyssey a scary movie?

Ans. In significant sections, yes. The Cyclops sequence in particular is the most purely terrifying scene Nolan has ever directed. The Circe sequence is psychologically unsettling in a quieter way. This is not an action film or a fantasy film in the conventional sense; it is a film that makes mythology feel genuinely threatening.

Q. Is The Odyssey a masterpiece?

Ans. I believe so. The first thirty minutes require patience, and the non-linear structure takes time to settle into, but when the final act arrives, it retroactively justifies everything that came before it. The film sits next to Interstellar in Nolan’s filmography.

Q. What is The Odyssey doing at the box office?

Ans. The Odyssey is performing strongly at the box office, driven by IMAX premium pricing and strong word of mouth following the opening weekend. Specific figures are developing; check the current tracking for updated numbers.

Q. Who is in the cast of The Odyssey?

Ans. Matt Damon plays Odysseus. The cast includes Anne Hathaway (Penelope), Tom Holland (Telemachus), Robert Pattinson (Antinous), Lupita Nyong’o (Helen of Troy), Zendaya (Athena), Charlize Theron (Calypso), and John Leguizamo in a significant supporting role. Elliott Page plays Sinon, not Achilles, despite internet speculation.

The Odyssey is in theatres now. IMAX strongly recommended. Ludwig Göransson’s score is on streaming platforms. The trailer version of the main theme is worth playing before you walk in.