Cascadia Calling, 2026.7.21
"tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways,"
I went with a crew last night to see the new Christopher Nolan Odyssey. This crew was pulled together by my buddy Shane who has a true knack for organization and planning a good evening out. The eight of us gathered at Teku Tavern for a few beers and some pizza before heading over to the old Paccar IMAX theater at the Pacific Science Center.
I didn’t really know what to expect from Nolan’s Odyssey. I knew that it had made some of the worst people alive very mad, which is usually a moderately good sign. The culture war horseshit from the right around every big movie or film has gone from being irritating, through being amusing, and to being merely tedious. They say they want “historical accuracy” but they’re unwilling to get blind drunk and listen to a series of poets beholden to pagan gods recite the whole thing in dactylic hexameter? Okay, then every compromise between that and Christopher Nolan is a matter of taste, not history.
It’s fitting that in a film adaptation of the story of Odysseus that the actresses so far outshine the actors. Matt Damon plays a grumbling and uncharming Odysseus, but serves the brooding war hero role well enough. Tom Holland’s Telemachus is suitably impetuous but also incompetent and trusting in ways that strip him of a lot of the charm of the son of Odysseus. Critically, Nolan’s version relies on Odysseus to save Telemachus from the plot of the suitors, rather than Athena’s intervention and his own capable cleverness, which in the original text served to mark him out as a fitting son of Odysseus.
Two male standouts were Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, the weary king of Sparta and Robert Pattinson as the villainous suitor Antinous. Bernthal’s sneering arrogance combined with his genuinely tender advice for Telemachus made good use of Bernthal’s limited screen time. His disdain and domineering attitude towards his wife Helen drives home the stupidity and macho futility of the war. Meanwhile, Pattinson plays a wicked and oleaginous Antinous, so well that my only real complaint is that I wish his death was more drawn out on screen.
The truly stellar performances, across the board, are the female leads. Despite significant changes to all of their stories, they embody the nature of the women of the Homerian stories and really bring them to life. Anne Hathaway is incandescent as Penelope. Her sorrow, cunning, and rage all come alive on screen in turns. Lupita Nyong’o makes a wonderful, wounded Helen, buffeted about by forces outside of her control and hauled back to Greece, possibly against her will, by a husband who seems indifferent to her, except that she stay by his side as a trophy.
Nolan took the interesting tack of changing Helen’s relationship with Clytemnestra. Traditionally they are half-sisters, but Nolan instead makes them twins1. I suspect that this may have been done solely to give Nyong’o a little bit more screen time and to give her a chance to exact bloody vengeance on Agamemnon which, if so, was a solid directorial decision. More Lupita Nyong’o is an unalloyed good, and her brief scene of motherly retribution is a delight.
The most notable changes from the source material are, of course, structural. The story is told somewhat out of order, with a combination of flashbacks and reordering of events. I was skeptical going in, but I was won over. I think that the restructuring the story into, essentially, three parallel parts (Ithaca, the journey home, and the fall of Troy) makes things easier to understand in the comparatively compact format of film. It also serves the addition of a message about the cost of shattering institutions, which isn’t half as lib as it sounds, but did feel a little shoehorned in at places. This is as close to spoilers as one can get for a re-interpretation of a millenia-old tale, but Nolan turns it into a story about the importance of not betraying norms of hospitality, even if it wins you a war or solves the problem of a bunch of suitors eating you out of house and home. Odysseus doesn’t end up with PTSD, so much, as a kind of liberal guilt for not taking the high road. He seems almost more burdened with a generic sort of guilt for his schemes than for anything else.
Not very polytropos of him, if you ask me, but it didn’t really harm my enjoyment of the movie at all.
I think the inclusion of this message is where Nolan displays a little mistrust of his source material. The Odyssey has survived because of its drama and emotional impact as a story and it doesn’t need to be rewritten to have “a point”. Making it about the horrors of war and the trauma of having betrayed one’s principles is superfluous. Tying a cute bow on it about hospitality is narratively satisfying, but it really felt like an unnecessary afterthought.2
Ultimately, I think this is a fine addition to the pantheon of Homer-inspired epics. It’s not really the Odyssey, but that’s fine. The saga of the fall of Troy and its after effects are spiritually and psychologically rich and I’m honestly glad that we’re still mining them for new stories millenia later. Go and enjoy the film3, but do not expect a faithful recounting of the version of the Odyssey that has come down to us. Try to be okay with that, as it is still a great story of the Many-Turned Man.
This isn’t that big of a stretch, considering that their brothers, Castor and Pollux are traditionally both half-brothers and twins. Of course, all four of them were born from eggs, so perhaps genealogical quibbling is a bit silly.
One significant change that actually worked well was Nolan’s choice to import the story of Sinon from the Aeneid and expanding it to be a story of betrayal and revenge. I won’t spoil Nolan’s telling, but Elliott Page did a fantastic job with the role and the payoff is truly excellent.
On a large format screen, if you can.