The Odyssey Review: A Vast Epic That Never Quite Breaks Your Heart

Yes, The Odyssey is worth watching, and it is the rare blockbuster that earns the three hours it asks for. Christopher Nolan's Greek epic is vast and strangely cold. Critics have almost nothing but praise for it, and audiences mostly agree, though the one dissenting number points at the film's real weakness before you have seen a frame of it.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it, and pay for the best screen you can find. A 173-minute epic shot entirely on IMAX film, carried by Matt Damon. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 94 percent from 515 critic reviews and Metacritic has it at 88 from 63 critic reviews. You need no plot summary before pressing play. The film does not stop to explain itself.

What The Odyssey is about

Odysseus has been away from Ithaca for twenty years, and the island has been ruled by nobody since he left for Troy. Penelope (Anne Hathaway) holds the house together while suitors eat her food and drink her wine and wait for her to pick one. Their son Telemachus (Tom Holland) is a young man who has decided to go and find his father. The film opens in a banquet hall with a man standing on a table telling a story, and Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com notes that his choice of episode covers the Trojan Horse. Then the film starts rearranging time.

What follows is the return journey and its consequences: Athena (Zendaya) on the island of Ogygia where Calypso (Charlize Theron) keeps Odysseus in a state of chemically forgetting who he is, the crew blinded out of the Cyclops's cave and then killed by the gods for eating the cattle of Apollo, the passage through Circe (Samantha Morton), and the land of the dead where the shades of the men he got killed talk to him. The structure is a deck of cards. Distant past, recent past and present are shuffled. Bradshaw noticed how the Trojan horse arrives, "not rolled into the fortified city on casters as a gift, but dragged inside by its own victims as a precious object from the surf, half hidden in the sand."

Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian named the subject, and it is not the monsters. He called it a "colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion", and he said the film "speaks to the generational pain of PTSD". Odysseus is not cursed. He is a man who cannot get home because of what he did in the war.

Cast and performances

Matt Damon plays Odysseus with a face that has been worn down to a mask, and Peter Bradshaw noticed the technique exactly: "his boyish, almost cherubic face turned into a careworn mask of sadness." He is a trickster who keeps breaking his own code of honour, and the film plays that as a character flaw rather than as a wink. The film lets him be tired and out of his depth, which is rarer than it sounds in this genre.

Anne Hathaway's Penelope is the most surprising piece of casting. Her Penelope is not a patient ornament. She is furious, and she runs the room while the men in it drink her wine. Charlize Theron's Calypso is the other surprise, a woman who genuinely wants him to stay. Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, the lead suitor, as a smooth and sneering piece of work. Lupita Nyong'o doubles as Helen and Clytemnestra, and Elliot Page plays Sinon, the soldier Odysseus used and discarded. John Leguizamo is Eumaeus, the blind swineherd, and Benny Safdie is Agamemnon in a permanently masked helmet. Travis Scott plays the storyteller who opens the film and who cowrote the closing credits music.

What works

The physical fact of it. This is the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX film and the first feature-length commercial film released entirely in 70mm IMAX. The difference shows in the way a body feels heavy. Bradshaw described "gasp-inducing, Imax-sized landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema", and noted that he "avoids the sea's traditional cliched colour". The ships have weight. The horses strain. When a wall comes down you feel the heat of it.

The honesty about war. The sacking of Troy is not a triumph scene. Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com wrote that the fine points of production are always in service of the characters' feelings, and he used Penelope's anger at the patriarchal entitlement that lets the suitors strip Ithaca of its riches as his first example. Odysseus's guilt is the engine of the plot. He was not delayed by the gods. He was delayed by the war and by his refusal to look at what the war did.

The quietest moments. The stretches of Penelope and Telemachus without Odysseus in the room, the long table, the suitors behaving badly, are better than the monster set pieces, and the film knows it.

What doesn't

The emotional temperature. Guy Lodge at Variety headed his review "Christopher Nolan's Vast, Thrilling, Slightly Aloof Epic". His summary: the film "thrills generously for the bulk of its near three-hour running time", but "it's never exactly moving". The picture keeps your eyes busy and your heart somewhere else. The famous feeling of a Nolan finale is missing, and while that is a choice, it is a choice the audience feels.

The middle. Three hours of Homer has a lot of doors in it, and the film opens several it does not need. A viewer can feel the seams where one legend hands over to another.

The dialogue. Bradshaw conceded there are "broad-brush moments in the dialogue", and he was being kind. Seitz heard the same plainspoken register, with Telemachus referring to Odysseus as "my dad" and the warriors, including Odysseus, occasionally employing modern profanity, and answered it with one line: "One might as well complain that the actors aren't all speaking Greek."

What audiences say

All figures checked on October 21, 2026. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 94 percent from 515 critic reviews, with a 96 percent Popcornmeter from more than 25,000 verified ratings. Metacritic has a Metascore of 88 from 63 critic reviews, labelled Universal Acclaim, plus a user score of 5.7 from 3,346 user ratings. IMDb has it at 8.4 out of 10 from 534,000 ratings. Letterboxd's member average is a weighted 4.34 from 4,611,722 ratings, with 2,052,076 written reviews and 87,000 fans following the film. TMDB has it at 8.0 from 4,187 votes.

The Metacritic user score of 5.7 is the number to sit with. It is the only audience measure that dissents, and 3,346 ratings is enough to notice. Some of that is the 173-minute running time and the fact that the film rewards patience rather than forgiving it.

Box Office Mojo's 2026 worldwide chart, read on October 21, 2026, has the film at $624,964,305 domestic and $1,788,848,305 worldwide, second among 2026 releases. IMAX Corporation reported a record $52 million global opening weekend on July 20, 2026, the largest it had ever recorded. The Guardian reported on August 10, 2026 that the film had passed $1.1 billion to become Nolan's highest-grossing film, and on August 21, 2026, with figures compiled by The Numbers, that it had overtaken Deadpool & Wolverine to become the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time.

Where to watch The Odyssey

It is still in American cinemas, and JustWatch, which checked 376 streaming services on October 20, 2026, could not find a single streaming or rental offer for it in the United States. TMDB's US watch provider list is empty as well. Universal's own home entertainment page lists the film for digital on November 17, 2026, and for 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on the same day, and ComingSoon.net reported that announcement on October 13, 2026: rental on Apple TV and Prime Video, and physical copies at Walmart, Target, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, FYE and Gruv. No subscription date has been announced. The certificate is R, for violence and some language, and the run time is 173 minutes.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our The Odyssey streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is The Odyssey worth watching? Yes, more than almost anything else playing in 2026, and the case for it is simple. Nolan has made a war film about the end of war, with the best tools the industry has, and it earns the three hours it asks for. Guy Lodge's objection is the right one, and it is a small one: the film is a little too pleased with itself, a little too cool to let you in. Nolan's most personal picture since Oppenheimer is also his least consoling. That is a defensible choice for a story about a man who cannot go home.

Spoiler warning: the ending of The Odyssey

Odysseus washes ashore on Ithaca seven years after Calypso's lotus flowers wore his memory away, and he disguises himself, taking the name Sinon. Eumaeus tells him the suitors have sent men to kill Telemachus. Odysseus saves his son, kills the bandits, and the old dog Argos dies recognising him, which is how Telemachus works out who the stranger is.

At a feast, still disguised, Odysseus confesses to Penelope what he did at Troy, and she sends the suitors away and tells them she will marry whichever of them can string Odysseus's bow and shoot an arrow through a row of axe heads. They all fail. Odysseus does not fail. The hall erupts, Telemachus fights beside his father, and Antinous dies in the blood.

When the remaining suitors have surrendered, Odysseus does not take the throne back. He cedes it to Telemachus and leaves with Penelope. They sail west to honour the soldiers he got killed, and they talk about what the sun going to rise will mean. The last line is Odysseus saying that a new dawn will break over the darkened world, when their mistakes will once again be forgotten.