HACK! What’s that sound?? HACK! COUGH! CACOPHOny of coughs in The Senator Theatre as the sun set on July 17, 2026, and some 800 Baltimoreans took in Christopher Nolan’s new film, The Odyssey. After sweeping the Oscars and making a billion dollars with Oppenheimer (with the help of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a more profitable film that was forgotten almost immediately), Nolan took his blank check and put it all on Homer. Why not? You’d think more filmmakers would’ve tried to make The Odyssey by now, but it’s a short list: Helen of Troy (1956), Ulysses (1954), Nostos: The Return (1989), and several Italian and French silent films (along with an even longer list of mid-century Italian “peplum” films and spaghetti westerns). The Coen Brothers did their own version with 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Guy Maddin drew from The Odyssey for one of his curlicues in 2011, but the list of proper cinematic adaptations of The Odyssey is shorter than you’d think. If you’ve read it, you can imagine why.
Nolan had $250 million at his disposal, and boy does it show. The Odyssey boasts some of the most impressive and often stunning visual effects of the century, a rare answered prayer for everyone wondering why CGI not only hasn’t improved since the millennium but has somehow gotten worse. Steven Spielberg should be ashamed of himself—released only four weeks ago, his Disclosure Day feels like a non-event, a fine film that only became laughable in its last minutes, already forgotten and thrown into PVOD oblivion. Spielberg’s naive boomer plea is no match for The Odyssey, a film plagued by backlash before its release and manufactured controversy from Homeric purists. The fact of the matter is Lupita Nyong’o (Helen of Troy) and Elliot Page (Sinon) are in the movie for a combined five minutes. If you’re bothered by the presence of Himesh Patel and a handful of black actors, you’ll be even more annoyed that the film is in English, and the actors speak… in American accents!
This was never going to be The Passion of the Christ, which I saw 22 years ago at the same theater; just a few months later, we went to The Senator again to see Troy, Wolfgang Petersen’s adaptation of the Iliad, with Brad Pitt as Achilles. As far as I can recall, that’s the last major Hollywood sword and sandal film before this past weekend—but who knows, I never cared for the genre. It must’ve been torture as a moviegoer in the 1950s when you couldn’t go to the movies without catching some Biblical epic by osmosis, much like the 2010s superhero trend that’s finally coming to an end. Nolan knows he isn’t innocent: after Oppenheimer, this is his second film about a man of great ambition whose accomplishments drive him further and further from the world he once knew, what he once had but lost, from a place called home. Sitting like Atlas, with the future of celluloid itself resting on his shoulders just 12 years ago, now ready to take “at least three years off” before making another movie. Rest then. God is smiling down upon you. Remember that thinking about the past and worrying about the future is only a way of avoiding the present. Backwards and forwards, the dark knight who launched a thousand franchises.
2026 is the first post-pandemic year with a healthy box office, regular theater attendance, and an entire generation that used what control they had and turned a horror film that cost $750,000 into a watershed moment on the level of Easy Rider. Colin Farrell says, “Moviegoing never lost any of its verve,” and girl you know it’s true! I haven’t seen Troy or The Passion of the Christ since 2004, but I remember going to The Senator to see them. I remember sitting there and watching, surrounded by hundreds of people. Not unusual. It still doesn’t feel normal, six years out from the start of the pandemic, but then again I didn’t see a single mask at The Senator—not for coronavirus, but the Canadian wildfire smoke currently consuming the East Coast and giving the afternoon sky an orange hue that I’m sure Christopher Nolan would love. Throughout The Odyssey’s 173 minutes, I heard rough coughs throughout the theater, but people contained themselves. They were locked in. They’ll remember seeing The Odyssey at The Senator on July 17, 2026 for the rest of their lives. Go to any nursing home and start asking questions about Cary Grant. You’ll be able to reconstruct the entirety of Operation Petticoat after talking to a few nice, young women. They’ll remember where they were even if they can’t remember their own names.
Jean-Luc Godard once compared John Wayne saving Natalie Wood in The Searchers to “Odysseus being reunited with Telemachus,” a magnificent and emotionally overwhelming moment that Nolan flawlessly executes here. You could hear people crying as Tom Holland realized Matt Damon, disguised as a beggar, was his father. I was one of them. It’s a primal moment worthy of its epic source; it’s a moment so simple, so universal, and so powerful that it transcends cinema itself. When I was in ninth grade, someone asked our English teacher why Shakespeare was still taught and performed. I’ll never forget her answer: a colleague saw a production of Hamlet and a single sentence brought forth the memory of his brother’s death. At that moment, the stage doesn’t exist; when Holland tells Damon, “You are my father,” you are not at the movies, you’re watching your life flash before your eyes. In a film full of exceptional craft and stupendous images, it’s this moment that stands out and makes you feel Odysseus’ burden and the awesome expanse of time separating father and son. Forget the atom bomb: the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus is the pinnacle of Christopher Nolan’s achievements thus far, and perhaps the most powerful single scene in an American movie this decade.
Still not convinced? Matt Damon has never been better, and Tom Holland, who I’ve never liked, distinguishes himself for the first time here, and not in an insignificant part. Others with considerable screen time—including Himesh Patel, Samantha Morton, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway, John Leguizamo—come prepared for the fight of their lives. Most of the cast have little to do and even less to say: Benny Safdie, Elliot Page, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, and Mia Goth essentially have cameos. Like all Nolan films, The Odyssey moves fast, rarely letting up its bracing jumps in chronology or its constant music, a much-criticized Nolan tic that I happen to love. In a world of cowards, moralists, and literalists, Nolan remains one of the few who understands that film’s a medium of the senses, and memory. Does it really matter that the dialogue in his movies is “hard to hear”? I’ve never noticed. Every time I’ve left a Nolan movie—ever since he stopped with the Batman, at least—I feel satisfied and wiped out. His is a cinema of sensations, grand spectacle, and epic emotions people the world over understand intimately. Adapting Homer wasn’t a gamble: he’s been working towards The Odyssey for over a decade, and it’s something.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM
