A compliment sandwich for The Odyssey with thick-ish bread but also a lot of fillings

I had a genuinely good time during this movie, but also a bad time, sort of like how I feel about spending more than a week at my lovely parents’ house.

Here are my thoughts on The Odyssey (2026), presented in a compliment sandwich. Sometimes I’ll send off one of these incredibly unserious emails, and I totally understand if this isn’t what you’re here for, so you can stop receiving them by going here and turning off “monthly dispatches”.

Your next deep dive is coming very very soon! Also, spoilers I guess, but not for anything important. x

I was delighted by the choice of depicting the blind prophet Tiresias as a dirty stingray crawling through the sand really, really quickly. When this guy came on screen I went through so many emotions, most of them positive. The choice to have his cloak billowing out behind him like a filthy parachute in a primary school gymnasium scratched some primordial itch in my brain. Delicious. He moved in a way that was both deeply sinister and extremely fast, and the combination hit me the way that cheese and strawberry hit that Pixar rat.

Robert Pattinson has the potential to be Gen Alpha’s Tim Curry if he stays on trajectory. I love the weird little voice he gave Antinous, playing him like a Yu-Gi-Oh villain. They also did a really good job casting Young Antinous, so much so that I’m worried that if Robert Pattinson gets too rich, he will capture this guy to use as his Blood Boy.

The way characters kept saying “Zeus’ law!” felt very contemporary, very video essayist randomly spurting out “Streisand effect!” or “Murphey’s law!” or “Triple ollie halfpipe kickflip fallacy!” I feel like Nolan was trying to hit a ‘they’re just like us’ feeling about ancient civilisations, and I certainly felt catered to as a semi-regular video essay watcher. Also, the wording of Zeus’ law (treat others as you’d want to be treated) is something we had emblazoned in gold over a picture of a diverse friend group on the wall of my Christian primary school. Does the world revolve around…me?