The Odyssey

The Odyssey hit theaters July 17, 2026, written and directed by Christopher Nolan for Universal at $250 million. It is the first feature in the history of the medium shot end to end on IMAX 70mm film. It runs 172 minutes. I spent ninety of them checking how much runtime was left. This is a beautiful movie about people I never came to care about, betting that if we just keep moving you will not notice the flaws or ask critical questions.

Nolan has been building toward this spectacle since 2008, when The Dark Knight became the first Hollywood movie to put action on IMAX cameras. Every film since handed more of the runtime to that format. This adaptation is less about The Odyssey itself, debatably, than about flag-posting for Hollywood: the IMAX flex, the casting, the story changes, the controversies around the release. Exterior noise. We are here for what is inside the frame.

Old Hollywood was built on epics. After the 50s and 60s cycle, people developed a reverence for the form: The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, Ben-Hur. Personally I think Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 was the last of that style. Nolan’s Odyssey wants that tier. What I found is a film that keeps telling you things without proving them.

You know the story. Odysseus wins Troy with a wooden horse, then spends a decade failing to get home. The film opens with him washed up where the nymph Calypso keeps him sedated on lotus so he cannot remember who he is. In Ithaca, Penelope holds off a palace of suitors while Telemachus searches for a father he has never met. The movie cuts between the threads while Odysseus talks his way back through the voyage.

Nolan’s Odyssey splits down the middle around the ninety-minute mark. The front half is Odysseus recounting the voyage to a woman on a beach. The back half is Matt Damon completing the journey home. That second half is satisfying. I liked it. Supporting wattage from Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Jon Bernthal fades; Damon takes full focus and the movie gets more interesting. That is also the problem. The front half is a slog. Odysseus and his men are lost at sea for years, and they make sure you feel those years. And-then syndrome: fight the cyclops, and then run, and then the witch, and then leave, and then the armored poster guys, and then run, and then, and then, until part two. Yes, those beats are in the poem. The poem spent more time earning the jump from one to the next.

It is a monster-of-the-week structure stretched to prestige length, and the sound mix does it no favors. The first twenty minutes of dialogue are extremely hard to parse. Atrocious mix. A movie made for subtitles. The music is not good either: loud ambient bursts instead of a proper orchestral score. Half a good movie is a bad movie with a good ending.

I do not care about Odysseus’s men. The film never gives me a reason. They get names. They get deaths staged like they matter. I felt nothing. Midway, the witch says that deep down all these men are pigs, even after turning them into pigs: the men-are-pigs trope with no rebuttal. You never root for them. They are insubordinate the whole voyage, ignore their commander, cause trouble for themselves and others. The poem has mutiny and sealed fates; here it would have been stronger to make us care first so the mutiny hurt.

Maybe that is because you do not see characters. You see actors. I sat three hours watching Matt Damon. A production this expensive stacks famous faces because famous faces move tickets. The price is that those faces have to vanish into roles. Only Robert Pattinson escapes. He outperforms the entire cast. Anne Hathaway, thirteen years older than Tom Holland, never sells being his mother, or anyone but Anne Hathaway. Matt Damon plays Matt Damon. Zendaya is Zendaya. Charlize Theron is Charlize Theron. Jon Bernthal, whom I have liked for years, phones this in so hard I reached a sad conclusion: he has the same range as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, same character, same cadence, every time. People ding the cast for sounding modern with no dialects. Fair. It is shocking to hear Bernthal as Menelaus sounding like “yeah, I’m the Punisher, I’m also on The Bear.” It does not work here.

At 172 minutes you would think the film has room to breathe. It sprints and crawls at once. Scenes flash past and nothing lands, or things happen and you cannot care. Nolan has said they filmed shots in three-minute increments for the IMAX 70mm setup: a cut every three minutes at most. Constant motion without arrival. Source scenes need more context; maybe that hit the floor because IMAX projectors top out around three hours of film. The movie suffers for it. Circe’s pig transformation is serious body-horror work, almost all prosthetics, a real effort from the witch, and then she undoes it because Odysseus asks and keeps helping with advice. Calypso holds a man in a chemical fog for seven years, assault against his will, and we gloss over it. He leaves. No resolution. Barely a reason for her to be there. The poem explains more.

In the source, magic, monsters, and gods are whimsical fantasy that the plot needs. Fantasy is not decoration; it is the hinge. Pulling those pieces out leaves holes, made worse by Nolan-fication. His trademark time shuffle: most of the runtime is recounting the past while we watch it. Remember Once Upon a Time? Present-day conflict that keeps needing a past story to make sense. I did not like it then. I do not care for it now. Bouncing between Odysseus telling Calypso the tale makes the missing pieces worse. It worked in Interstellar because the whole movie was fighting time. Here the stagger is meant to land like a right hook on revelations, but without emotional attachment, none of those reveals feel earned.

The Odyssey is in theaters now and hard to get tickets for. Not the worst movie of the year. Not terrible beyond measure. Not great. If it respected the audience’s time more, I might have rated it higher. 5 out of 10. Safe. A Midyssey, not an Odyssey.

If you go, go IMAX. Bring earplugs; the mix is offensive. I like Matt Damon and Robert Pattinson, so it was not all bad. Not bad. Not great. A movie. That is about it.