"The Odyssey"

 ☆☆☆☆

The same rule applies to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey as to every other film ever made: Is it a good story? Does it hold your attention and excite your senses and show you something that moves you, whether big or small?

Because if it does, then how it's made is irrelevant. Cinerama Holiday might be a fun novelty, but it fails as a movie. Comin' at Ya! may have shown off 3-D but it was a lousy movie. Now comes The Odyssey, the first-ever full-length movie shot with IMAX film cameras. For months, every IMAX 70mm film screening has been sold out. Over and over on social media, you'll see the posts: IMAX 70mm is the only way Christopher Nolan intends his film to be seen!

Only 41 movie theaters in the world can show The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX, so even if it's true that's the way Nolan would like people to see it, almost nobody will. The numbers don't pan out. At its height in the early 1960s, Cinerama had four times the number of theaters worldwide than IMAX has for 70mm film presentations.

So, what's going to matter most to audiences isn't the format, no matter what Nolan wants — it's the movie. Is it any good? Does it thrill? Does it excite the senses? Does it offer all the things a movie should?

Guess what? It does. This is no Amityville 3-D. It's not a gimmick. I saw The Odyssey projected in 70mm, which means I saw it projected on film more or less in the screen size and format most people over 40 grew up with. Nothing special, you might say. And the good news is, The Odyssey works. It works well.

Which isn't to say it's perfect, but as far as Nolan movies go, it's more accessible than most, it's more narratively engaging and emotionally compelling, and after seeing it I cracked open my print version of The Odyssey to read a little of what I had just seen — if nothing else, Christopher Nolan may turn a whole bunch of movie tech-heads into curious readers, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Nolan's version of The Odyssey, for which he's the credited screenwriter as well as director, begins, as so many of his movies do, with some rushed confusion. Nolan is never particularly concerned with how to accustom audiences to his stories — he throws them right in, and even though it takes some time to acclimate to The Odyssey, once that happens, the movie carries you along.

Matt Damon is Odysseus, both as a younger king and as an older man trying to make his way home after he's victorious in the Trojan War, thanks to that horse. Anne Hathaway is Penelope, his patient wife. Tom Holland is their son Telemachus. Robert Pattinson is Penelope's villainous suitor Antinous. And so forth. There's Zendaya! There's Charlize Theron! There's John Leguizamo! There's Lupita Nyong'o!

It's a wonder the poster for The Odyssey hasn't put all their faces into little boxes at the bottom. This is about as close to an old-fashioned "star-studded" cast as you're likely to find today, and sometimes the movie feels a little like a "spot-the-cameo" disaster movie, but I think that's part of the fun. Yes, it's serious stuff. Yes, it's made at a very high level of quality. But, still, it's a movie — and not just any movie, but one with gods and adventurers, a witch, a cyclops and a whirlpool, sirens and monsters and even a trip to the underworld (which looks an awful lot like Iceland).

In truth, The Odyssey could probably use a little of the levity of those old Ray Harryhausen films where Odysseus' first cousin Jason leads the Argonauts and fights all sorts of monsters on his way to the Golden Fleece. Nolan's Greek mythology is pretty grim and realistic by comparison.

At times, it can also be hard to follow. Nolan's movies are rarely straightforward, and The Odyssey can sometimes suffer from clunky editing that renders the action a little unclear and Nolan's favorite technique of muddying dialogue and overwhelming it with ear-throbbing sound design. It can be an overwhelmingly aggressive movie, at times, and its battle sequences can get pretty confusing.

But The Odyssey always finds its way back to a story that has survived 3,000 years. Nolan doesn't botch it. If anything, he adapts it with, on the whole, so much excitement and flair that he's done something important: Brought Homer into the 21st century and tied it, especially in the film's final few minutes, loosely but pointedly enough to the world as we know it today that suddenly these gods and monsters, who exist in a changing world rocked by war and betrayal, feel excitingly vibrant, real and relevant. In IMAX ... or not.

Viewed July 18, 2026 — American Cinematheque Director's Village

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