The Odyssey (2026): Review

Watching in a packed cinema on a Friday night, I was a week late to seeing The Odyssey. Which might not sound like much, but when you’ve been seeing everyone on Substack (and beyond) with their tickets in hand, it can be hard to wait your turn on the movie merry-go-round.

But, patience is a virtue, and I was very well rewarded.

Because Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey gives the people what they want: it told an incredible story, incredibly well.

The Odyssey was released in cinemas in the UK and USA on Friday, 17th July 2026, and it’s safe to say that it was highly anticipated. Now, lots of movies get slapped with that title, and, often, you have to take it with a pinch of salt, but this was undeniably waited for by many. Christopher Nolan as director combined with an absolutely stacked cast full of Hollywood A-listers, and it being an adaptation of one of the most well-known stories: Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey. If we’re ticking film lovers’ boxes, you’ve got three big ticks right there.

There were also a couple of really exciting things surrounding the film:

• It was the first feature film ever to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to say

• Tickets for the IMAX 70mm screenings went on sale a year before the film was released, making it the first feature film in history to have pre-sale tickets available twelve months in advance (highly anticipated earning its keep as a descriptor here, for sure)

So, with history made before we even took our seats, the big question was whether the film itself could match the expectations.

So for a bit of context, the story follows Odysseus (Matt Damon), King of Ithaca, as he attempts to return home following the Trojan War; battling storms, monsters, gods, and every imaginable (and unimaginable) obstacle in an effort to reunite with his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland).

And from the very beginning, this film is grand and wondrous and gives you something to go crazy about. Mind you, it does break your heart pretty early on because of how harsh they were to the dog! I was stressed out when they left him outside. Poor Argus.

Though as heartbreaking as that was, it sets up the brutal world of these characters right away, leading into a cast that, in my opinion, delivers across the board.

Matt Damon is a leading man. I haven’t heard that phrase in a little while, probably due to my own bubble, but it’s a phrase I like. Because there are certain actors and actresses who command that stage presence. Yes, you could choose to give the stage to a lesser known actor and give them their big break, and I’m all for that, I think it’s important to champion emerging artists. But for something like The Odyssey, you needed the leading man. You needed someone like Matt Damon.

And alongside that, you needed the leading lady of someone like Anne Hathaway. I thought she was pretty much perfect casting for Penelope; she smashed it. I particularly loved the scenes between her and Telemachus. She was strong and courageous, which you could see as part of who she was, but she was also aware of her place and what the world was. Essentially, she was a realist who wasn’t afraid to show that she thought what was happening was wrong, but she would play your game because that was how it had to be.

Why would you want to marry someone who is in love with someone else?

Tom Holland was great too, I enjoyed and respected how he portrayed Odysseus’ son. Robert Pattinson always fully dissolves into every character he plays. As Antinous, he kinda gave me sort of Joffrey from Game of Thrones vibes, a character you love to watch and despise at the same time. In fact, there were certain scenes, particularly with suitors towards the end, that gave me Game of Thrones vibes in general. Then Elliot Page did a good job as Sinon too; I wouldn’t say I was necessarily blown away as such by his performance, but he was solid and delivered what was needed.

Moving onto Jon Bernthal as Menelaus - he always plays that slightly slimy, yet you’re not sure why you kinda dig it, man quite well. Just like he did as Shane in The Walking Dead.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Helen? Face that launched a thousand ships. Maybe now just five hundred.

I literally went, “aw, tight” to myself in the cinema when he said that. Lol. Clearly a professional movie critic.

And Lupita Nyong’o was brilliant in her dual role as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. It scared the absolute crap out of me when she suddenly stabbed her husband; I jumped out of my seat.

Another notable mention for me would go to Himesh Patel as Eurylochus. Who knew Tamwar from Eastenders would go on to act alongside Matt Damon in a blockbuster movie released worldwide.

Both Charlize Theron as Calypso and Zendaya as Athena were, I felt, perhaps a little bit limited in how much they could really put forward with their characters. I would have liked to have a few more bits and pieces with their backgrounds scoped out just a tad more, so they could have really shown off what we know those actresses can do. That being said, I enjoyed both of their performances.

Lastly, I would just like to mention Samantha Morton who played Circe and did an exceptional job. I was super uncomfortable and grossed out watching those scenes with the pigs, and she nailed that unsettling presence so well. And according to Morton, there was no CGI trickery involved in that scene too, which leads me nicely onto my next point.

Of course, we all know Christopher Nolan’s preference for doing as much as possible practically and not relying on CGI, and that, in turn, is what leads to my main praise of The Odyssey: there was so much care and dedication that went into it.

I don’t think anyone could say it was done slapdash, or a bit of a cash grab, or as a movie to simply fill out the calendar for the year. It was well thought-out and took some serious graft by all involved.

When you consider the type of content-crazy world we live in now, with everything optimised, and we all hear business bros banging on about efficiency and productivity and how we can do everything ten times faster if we just submitted our brains to a machine, it’s just so so nice to watch a film where people cared enough to put the work in. Nolan, the cast, the crew, everyone could have taken the easy way out. They could have relied heavily on AI to bring this story to, I want to say, life but that would be a bit of a big jump, but they didn’t. They wanted to do it right.

For example:

• The guys playing Odysseus’ crew were put through real rowing and sailing training, so they learnt what it really took to control and push that boat forward

• Cyclops Polyphemus is a six-by-six-metre-tall anthropomorphic animatronic puppet, brought to life by Bill Irwin (who I always think of as Nate Haskell from CSI)

• Anne Hathaway put in weeks with a loom specialist in Northern California to learn ancient-style weaving, so she could accurately play out the weaving scenes that are so integral to Penelope’s character

And the attention to detail went even deeper across the production too:

• John Leguizamo, playing the blind Eumaeus, pitched the idea himself that his character’s cataracts should each be a different colour rather than matching, to give that more obvious unsettling look

• The costume department spent time studying how saltwater corrodes bronze, how linen falls apart after years of wear, how dye fades under Mediterranean sun, and how battle-damaged armour gets patched up over and over, so they could get as many things as possible right

Matt Damon also grew a full beard for a year, but that probably wasn’t as taxing on him as it might have been on his wife.

Now, I’m not saying that other movies don’t put in that level of effort, as they totally do, and this isn’t like oh, The Odyssey did everything the best (I’m aware that there are historical inaccuracies etc), it’s more just a celebration of how it was all approached. With something of this scale, it could have been simpler to solely rely on CGI and all that jazz, but it was that firm stamp of fk no from Nolan that I really respect. And so The Odyssey proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you can still do it without CGI, even in 2026.

Speaking of the scale of the film, it had a run time of 2h 53m, which is long; there’s no denying that. However, I’m always of the opinion, with stories, with films, with songs, something should be as long as it needs to be. If you can tell the story in 1 hour, then it only needs to be an hour. If it needs 3 hours, then it needs 3 hours. There should be no set rule for how long things should be. If you firmly said songs should only be 3 to 4 minutes long, Stairway to Heaven wouldn’t exist as it does.

And I did feel like The Odyssey needed the run time it had. Yes, you could have absolutely made it shorter, but then what would you have had to take out to get there? There was nothing I felt was unnecessary. If anything, like I said about with the characters of Athena and Calypso, it could have done with a bit more. Plus potentially, which may be my only slight gripe with the film overall, we didn’t really see some of the physical effects of being at sea as such. On the beach, where the men eventually succumb to eating the cattle, perhaps there could have been something between them running out of provisions and then actually slaughtering the cattle, to really show the physical effects of starvation and why they reached that point.

All in all though, The Odyssey struck the right balance between everything for me. It had action, but not so much that you just felt like you were watching fight scene after fight scene. It had tension and it had scale, but, at its core, it never lost sight of what drove the story forward.

Because at the heart of The Odyssey is the fact that Odysseus never gives up. It would have been easier, at countless points, to surrender to the sea, to settle somewhere else, to accept that he would never make it home. But he doesn’t, because Penelope is waiting. Every battle and every challenge is driven by one simple thought: get home. Get back to the person you love.

And perhaps that’s why I appreciated so much of the care that went into making this film. We spend so much of our lives in recent times being told to do things quicker, cheaper, more efficiently. To cut corners, and to optimise, and to let technology do the hard bits of life for us. Yet the things we care about the most have never really worked like that. So we take our time because the end result matters, and we put the effort in because the people at the other end matter. Some things deserve the longer route.

At the end of the three hours, when the lights went up, I turned to my family, who I went to see the movie with, and asked them if they enjoyed it. And one of their answers was:

“Well... it’s a love story.”

Strip away the gods, the monsters, the storms, the mythology, the wild whipped sea, and that’s exactly what you’re left with. A story about people who love each other, who want to find their way back to one another, despite all odds. Ultimately, The Odyssey is all about love.

And, well, I guess, isn’t everything?

Have you seen The Odyssey yet? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!