On 19 July 2026, I saw two wildly contrasting reviews of The Odyssey.

By Miles Salter

One was by Allan Jones (former editor of  Uncut Magazine) on Facebook, who felt the film was bloated and pretentious. The other was by The Sunday Times critic Tom Shone, who gave it five stars. I think, in terms of quality, the film is somewhere between these two extremes.

Let’s be honest: reworking an epic 24-book epic poem into a film that modern cinema-goers will enjoy is a challenge. The Odyssey may be a cornerstone of world literature, but modern cinema demands that stories be told deftly and succinctly, and the large cast and array of subplots is a challenge for filmmakers. 

Odysseus (a grizzled Matt Damon) has been away at the wars, beating up the Trojans and wanting to get home to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland). Meanwhile, suitors wait to become Penelope’s date. She’s playing hard to get, waiting for her husband to return and doing some weaving. She doesn’t bother with Tinder. Robert Pattinson inhabits the bad-guy role of Antinous, coming across a lot like Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus in Gladiator.

The first 40 minutes of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation is clunky. There’s a lot of exposition about the story and it’s not an especially smooth ride. The film moves backwards and forwards in time; there may be four separate time frames, but I am not certain. The narrative revisits scenes and sequences which also doesn’t help the storytelling. The script is patchy. Tom Holland, playing Odysseus’ son Telemachus, calls the old man ‘Dad’, a term that one suspects wasn’t widely employed in ancient Greece. 

The set pieces are really strong, though: we see inside the Trojan Horse as the soldiers pile on top of each other, trying to keep their cool while swords are plunged into their transport. A huge, deformed cyclops hangs out in a cave, bites off the heads of Odysseus’ men and must be outwitted. The sequence with the trickster goddess Circe, where she does unspeakable things to Odysseus’ men, is horrific and effective, and perhaps the best scene of the film.     

Damon is likeable as Odysseus, providing a calm, measured approach to the role of the hero. He doesn’t throw his weight around and appears to regret killing so many innocents in Troy. This doubt about his own violence gives the film a moral, pacifist angle that was intriguing… until we get to the finale when Odysseus becomes a one-man slaughterhouse, killing all of the suitors who hung around Penelope’s place, scoffing her food every night. Leaving Calypso (played by Charlize Theron) behind on a desert island where they munch lotus plants and hang out is something I would have not have had the fortitude to do.

It is nearly three hours long, though. Allan Jones reckons Nolan’s best film remains Memento, the 2000 thriller about a man with memory problems. I think Jones is right – at under two hours, Memento is much more sprightly than The Odyssey.

Nolan loves epics with big ideas and big visuals – Tenet, Oppenheimer, Dunkirk – but his films lack humour. They’re immersive but cool. I think ‘masterpiece’ is too grand a term for The Odyssey. But it’s no turkey. The gods are on Nolan’s side. Mostly.

The Odyssey is in cinemas now.