The Odyssey makes the epic leap from page to screen

How does someone top the best thing they’ve ever done in their career?

Manchester United struggled to live up to lofty expectations in the 1999/00 season after winning The Treble the season before.

U2 wrote themselves into a corner after the success of Achtung Baby.

David Lean could never quite capture the majesty of Lawrence Of Arabia.

Christopher Nolan now finds himself in similar company; how on earth does a director top a film like Oppenheimer?

His atomic age drama finally scooped Nolan his Oscars, and he directed Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Junior to their first Oscars.

Since its release in 2023, Oppenheimer has only grown in reputation and will only become more pertinent as the world faces the greatest sense of collective unease since the heyday of the Cold War.

Never one to make things easy for himself, Nolan decided his next film would be a $250 million, three-hour adaptation of The Odyssey.

We’ll cut to the chase – Nolan builds upon his success with Oppenheimer and makes a timeless film that will still be talked about 50 years from now.

The Odyssey has been the inspiration for everything from episodes of The Simpsons to a Coen Brothers comedy, but never before has Hollywood thrown its collective weight behind a retelling of Homer’s epic poem.

After memorable supporting turns for Nolan in Interstellar and Oppenheimer, Matt Damon finally takes centre stage.

Damon doesn’t exactly scream first choice for Odysseus, but then again, he didn’t exactly scream spy thriller material when he was cast as Jason Bourne either.

Damon has a screenwriting Oscar to his name for Good Will Hunting, but an acting Oscar has eluded him until now; it is very hard to see how he doesn’t win Best Actor next March.

The tiredness in Damon’s eyes (and the stories of him not cutting his beard for a year) helps deconstruct the Matt Damon persona; he is tender but tough all at once, and is an equal mix of brains and brawn.

There is a classical approach to Damon’s performance; you could easily picture him alongside Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur or Peter O’Toole in Lawrence Of Arabia.

For the first two acts of The Odyssey, you are waiting for that “wow” moment that makes the entire film click into place.

Sequences such as encountering a grumpy cyclops in a cave or Odysseus’ men falling prey to the temptations of a witch are stand-outs, but there is a sense that Nolan (and Damon) are holding out on the audience and have one more trick up their sleeve.

We won’t spoil the trick that Nolan and Damon pull, but it’s a scene, towards the end, that changes The Odyssey from an excellent film into a legendary one.

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Damon doesn’t go it alone; the supporting cast around him is equally impressive.

Anne Hathaway co-stars as Penelope, who has given up hope of Odysseus ever returning from his travels, while Tom Holland stars as Telemachus, the heir to the throne and a boy who is never treated like a man.

2026 is shaping up to be the year of Hathaway (between this, Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and her upcoming Colleen Hoover adaptation), and she conveys the majesty and quiet power of Penelope with ease.

There are very few actors who can go from a whisper to a shout quite like Hathaway. 

The hit on Tom Holland as an actor is that he does the Michael J Fox “gee-whiz,” wide-eyed wonder trick in every movie; it actually works well for the character he is playing.

In the poem, Telemachus isn’t treated with respect despite being the son of powerful people, and his quest to find his missing dad is treated as a flight of fancy.

The audience’s preconception of Holland, that he is a boy playing dress-up as a man, works in Nolan and Holland’s favour here.

The rest of the cast is also very impressive; Robert Pattinson nearly steals the movie as Antinous, one of Penelope’s suitors, playing the role with exactly the right kind of sleaze.

Pattinson unlocked himself as an actor after getting the romantic lead roles out of his system early on in his career; we are blessed to see this classically handsome actor reveal that he was actually a weirdo character actor all along.

Like Oppenheimer, the film grows richer the deeper you get into its ensemble; special mention goes to Samantha Morton’s movie-stealing performance as Circe.

Nolan’s films are known for playing around with time and having a non-linear structure; in this case, it helps support the text he is adapting.

All the big hits from the poem are present and accounted for in the spine of the story, but Nolan’s decision to show the events as Odysseus telling the story to someone else helps maintain the core of Homer’s work.

There has been a lot of online sniffing about the historical inaccuracies of the film (and we are sure someone more qualified than us will be able to explain what Nolan got wrong), but The Odyssey is myth rather than history.

Nolan prioritises the emotional truth and universality of the story over archaeological reconstruction.

Online complaints have centred around the perceived colourblind casting or actors using their natural accents; these same complaints seem to forget this is a story where a witch turns men into pigs.

Realism left the equation the minute Homer himself wrote the poem.

In terms of adaptation, it isn’t an exact 1:1 recreation, and we doubt that even a director of Christopher Nolan’s stature and power would have a studio sign-off on a 6-hour-long Greek language epic.

There will be some sniffing among the purists that Nolan didn’t put their favourite character or bit in, but adapting an ancient work is also about compromise.

A quick note on the technical aspects: the good folks at Universal screened this for critics at the Irish Film Institute in 70mm.

Advertising has touted that every frame of this movie was filmed for IMAX, but there is no right or wrong way to see this movie.

In truth, you’ll probably want to see this film multiple times anyway (because it’s just that good), but if you get the opportunity, see the film in 70mm.

While this is just this writer’s personal preference, a film this epic and grand in scale should be savoured in 35 or 70mm for the first viewing, and once you are familiar with the beats of the film, check it out in IMAX.

It goes without saying, but this is the kind of film tailor-made for the cinema and will lose a lot of power if you watch it at home.

Movie-going audiences have become quite particular about what they do and don’t see in the cinema; this is the film that makes cinema-going worth it.