Homer Meets Group Therapy
A Review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
Hollywood is slowly getting a sense of people’s hunger for patriarchal narratives. A story of the absent father returned, of kingship restored to a kingdom wasting away—this holds perennial interest. So perennial, in fact, that there was an Odyssey adaptation starring Ralph Fiennes just two years ago. All in all, it’s surprising Hollywood hasn’t tried harder to win back men with gritty sword-and-sandal epics over the past few years.
Now comes Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated version of The Odyssey (2026). Nolan needs no introduction as the king of dude movies, and what better subject matter for the dudes than Homer’s Odyssey? Galley rowing, giant monsters, nocturnal special ops with swords—what could be more epic? Will Nolan’s Odyssey be a triumphant return to the unabashed toxic masculinity of 300, or will this be more of the namby-pamby therapy crap that Hollywood loves to shovel at us?
Rather than inspiring excitement, the film has been shrouded in a sense of foreboding since its earliest reports. With so much wrangling online about the casting choices, you have to wonder if directors have started deliberately throwing audiences these curveballs in order to drive up publicity. Now at last we can see the full fruit of these bad decisions. Yes, the casting of “Elliot” Page as a beloved boy warrior is obnoxious—if only because her delivery is so comically ham-fisted. Casting Helen and Clytemnestra as Nubian queens, or making Circe an aggrieved feminist who thinks men are literally pigs—all worth an eyeroll. But these minor parts don’t leave much of a lasting effect on the movie.
The worst casting decisions in Nolan’s Odyssey, in fact, are the two principal characters, Odysseus and Penelope, played by Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway respectively. Their bond is supposed to be the emotional and moral core of the story, but their performances are completely laughable. Their personalities and motives are nonsensical and never developed well on screen.
The Absence of God
In this “time of apparent magic” (the opening title card to Nolan’s film), there are no gods, only monsters. Odysseus is now a skeptic and a doubter. “Why doesn’t God speak in ways we understand?” he complains. (Meanwhile, Zeus dutifully thunders at every important point of the plot.) Odysseus even says he will defy the gods. Why? It’s not clear. He sees Athena following him all the time, only for the audience to discover she isn’t real, just the memory of his trauma. Now his war crimes will follow him in the form of Zendaya, scolding him, forever. Haunting.
The absence of the gods doesn’t make emotional sense in a world where monsters, witchcraft, prophecies, and communing with the dead are all clearly real. But Odysseus is for some reason wracked with guilt for having violated the law of Zeus—and yet also refuses to honor the gods at all. “We can’t live by omens and sacrifices,” he declares. But then proceeds to discover that his only path home is via omens and sacrifices. His lieutenant begs him in the midst of a storm to pray in repentance, but Odysseus won’t. He exists in such a muddle of Christian, pagan, and modernist ethics that he doesn’t seem to stand for anything. Sadly, maybe that confusion is all that modern audiences can relate to because Odysseus’s plight is their own.
We can begin to understand Nolan’s Odysseus better if we conceive of him not as a faithful representative of some ancient heroic ethos, but rather as a commentary on the bewildered present.
Odysseus in 2026 is not a pagan pirate king, endlessly cunning, hungry for glory and treasure. This character makes more sense as Matt, a veteran of the Global War on Terror. Matt has spent years making his memory fuzzy with opioids (the Lotus) and therapy (Calypso’s island), but he is still haunted by the war crimes he has witnessed. He spent a lot of time adventuring in sandy places, only to rush out once it turned into a total debacle, like Afghanistan playing out over and over.
Ultimately, he’s the only one of his crew who made it out alive, crushed by survivor’s guilt. He also feels permanently alienated from God because of his impiety, and he has no hope of redemption. Now he must endure being scolded by the ghosts of a transsexual and a black woman indefinitely. The only way for him to begin making amends is to visit home, kill the men harassing his wife, and then go on a forever cruise.
I despair that there will ever again be heroic cinema made in my lifetime that doesn’t end up shifting its focus from big guys with swords to trauma and therapy.
A Mirror of Our Time
Departing from the epic, Nolan’s main character anguishes over his most famous stratagem, the Trojan Horse. Odysseus perceives himself to have violated the law of Zeus so completely that law and order everywhere will be extinguished and centuries of darkness will commence, as if the Trojan Horse were some kind of nuclear bomb of impiety radiating throughout the sea.
This is stated quite literally in the movie: “Our age of bronze is collapsing.” The solution offered? Sail into the sunset. Maybe you committed war crimes, destroyed civilization, slept around, but you can still live on a boat, leaving your unready son to navigate a path through the dark ages as best he can.
Penelope, meanwhile, never expresses what you would expect of an ancient queen; she only ever seems to express what Anne Hathaway would feel in a given moment, sadly proving that Hathaway’s ability to portray royalty peaked with The Princess Diaries. Wisely, the film places her tastefully behind a wooden screen in flickering firelight for many key scenes.
Tom Holland, our third principal actor, does a serviceable job in his role as the heir Telemachus, though his narrative arc is butchered—he kills only one enemy in the entire movie, and turns out to be almost entirely expendable. He never quite proves himself, and he is only helpful to his father’s self-actualization by being someone to leave behind.
The most compelling parts of the film are its scenes of mythic horror and associated action sequences. Repeatedly we witness the thrill of gigantic “boss reveals” that could fit right into a Dark Souls game. The ships, monster puppetry, and special effects for the witchcraft and necromancy are truly spectacular. If only the film had been half the length and focused on horror, a genre in which Nolan would excel.
Unfortunately, the film is nearly three hours long and must make half-hearted stabs at philosophical grandeur—to be truly “epic,” it must connect to timeless themes. Every attempt by the film to make a statement fails. Wherever there could be insight into kingship, fatherhood, homecoming, and war, we get one Hallmark card platitude after the next. Grand pronouncements about the nature of civilization, lovey-dovey scenes—it’s all baloney.
21st Century Pablum
Nolan’s Odyssey culminates in Matt Damon’s climactic speech, where he admits his newfound identity and feelings of guilt to his wife. If AI had written this speech, would you be able to tell the difference?
What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if…one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore. What if…when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night? We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that’s ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. Including his home. What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain, and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow, what if he knew exactly what he’d done? …One man’s idea. One man’s trick to break Zeus’s law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it… The breaking of Zeus’s law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn’t bear to see the ruins of what he’d done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.
The real civilizational collapse we’re witnessing here is our inability to use the English language to communicate something weighty.
You can’t claim your story is epic simply because you weave it into a moral parable about how our own misdeeds have contributed to the coming collapse of civilization. Yes, the apocalyptic mindset resonates with Americans, and yes, we do feel in our bones an unsettling sense of decline, of guilt for our own impiety. But in a story, those kinds of profundities must be earned through good characterization and subtlety. None are found here.
Nolan’s Achilles’ heel is his screenwriting. He simply cannot be trusted to write dialogue. He’s caught between two incompatible desires: wanting to convey epic grandeur, while only using casual Americanized language. Maybe audiences today aren’t worthy of beautiful language that would fit an epic scale. Maybe we wouldn’t empathize with an Odysseus who really thought like a Bronze Age king.
Nevertheless, giving up your kingdom for a seafaring journey of self-discovery and trauma healing is the opposite of how Homer concludes. This new conclusion is pablum. This is Live, Laugh, Love-level sentimentality and has no depth to its idea of manhood.
Surely, we can have films that understand masculinity, that can truthfully depict the wounds we’ve made upon the world and ourselves, and explore how to heal. But that would require coming to a knowledge of sin and repentance, of true piety and impiety, of fatherhood, inheritance, kingship—all things the modern mind can scarcely comprehend. As long as the modern mind considers Christopher Nolan’s storytelling a work of genius, it never will.