Actors always like to say that to be able to go and do what they do, they live and walk in rarefied air.
So I can only imagine what that saccharine scene must feel like, walking onto a Christopher Nolan set, where hundreds of extras, dressed head-to-toe in the bronze and leather armour of the Greeks and Trojans, are storming the gates of a Moroccan village styled like the City of Troy.
With huge cameras, purpose-built for the sheer scale and velocity of this sweeping epic, booming past Matt Damon, John Bernthal, and Himesh Patel, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with one of the most dedicated filmmakers of his generation.
Because somewhere between The Dark Knight and Inception, a Nolan film stopped being an IMDb description and became a genre unto itself, with its own expectations; its own non-negotiables.
Ignore the controversies; this is a story from the 8th century BC, told and retold a thousand times through literature, poetry, songs, plays, TV shows, and, of course, in a 70mm IMAX film. Homer and his fictitious protagonist aren't rolling in their graves any more than Snape or the Easter Bunny are.
The Odyssey is Nolan at his absolute best, and anyone who even remotely considers themselves a fan of cinema owes it to themselves to see the Oscar-winner’s latest film on the biggest possible screen.
In the original text, Homer’s Odyssey doesn't open with Odysseus, but a plea to the story’s Muse to sing of a man of many turns, already established as clever, already established as lost, already established as the sole survivor of a doomed crew.
Before we've even met him, we're told how it ends (spoilers): his men are dead, and it's their own fault. Warned by Odysseus not to touch the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, they set up a barbecue on the beach and ate them anyway, starving and reckless on some forgotten island, and paid for it with their lives.
Homer's original structure is already elliptical – the poem begins in medias res, skips the fall of Troy almost entirely, and reaches it only in retrospect.
In many ways, it was the first time we’ve seen this technique deployed – something that’s perhaps become a blueprint for the adventure narrative – which is why many consider Homer’s epic as one of the foundational texts for Western literature and civilisation.
Nolan’s The Odyssey opens the same way Homer's does, a story told inside a story, secondhand, and already somewhat mythologised even to the people living it.
It sets the tone immediately, reminding the audience that for the near-three-hour runtime, you are seated for a classic Nolan story with overlapping narratives, told and retold through Odysseus’ returning memory, through flashbacks and flash-forwards, and a faithful adaptation of a structural choice that's nearly three thousand years old.
Of course, this is peak Nolan; whether it’s Inception or Oppenheimer, timelines are never linear. But through The Odyssey, it enables a more significant purpose by allowing the audience to forget whatever small details about the original poem they can conjure from their school days and follow the specific vertigo of Odysseus's own memory returning to him in pieces.
The film (more spoilers) starts and ends with the fall of Troy, told in fragments through Odysseus’ memories, through Travis Scott’s bard, through Athena’s betrayal. Nolan’s first glorious feat (of which there are many) is that he doesn’t treat it like a single, unbroken event, but as something the mind returns to again just when you think the story has moved past it.
The Trojan horse – arguably the most cunning piece of military strategy that establishes Odysseus’ intelligence early – is the central thread that ties the entire story, transported from the beach that held Agamemnon’s men for years and behind the enemy lines and their impenetrable wall.
The fall of Troy is staged as the fall of humanity, where chaos and barbarism engulf a city. Much like in Oppenheimer, where we see a protagonist struggling to fathom the depravity of his achievement, we see Odysseus coming to terms with his own ingenuity – the smarter you are, the less the gods forgive you for it.
Without giving too much away (seriously, you’ve had three thousand years to read it), the Greeks follow Zeus’ law, meaning to treat everyone with respect, because you never know if a god is disguised and walking among them.
Rather than a devotion to the gods, it’s a law built on doubt; you're kind to strangers not necessarily because it's right, but because you can't afford to be wrong.
In fact, throughout the film’s near three-hour runtime, there’s not a single prayer, no worship to Zeus to calm the storms, or to Poseidon to temper the waves. Odysseus does look to Athena (Zendaya) for answers, but as the smartest warrior on both sides of the Trojan War, he has the goddess’ favour - she values his efforts and aids him, calling him the best of all mortal men. But the gods are largely there to be feared.
This paranoid generosity runs underneath everything: it’s why the plate-licking beggars are welcomed in Odysseus’ home alongside Robert Pattinson’s scheming Antinous and the horde of suitors who grow slow and fat drinking his wine, trying to seduce his ever-faithful wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway).
When the reckoning comes, it isn't just a husband reclaiming his house. It's Zeus' law calling in its debt.
Damon’s Odysseus is seen in three stages: during the flashbacks, returning home with his men against the ever-angry gods and their clusters of monsters (the scene with Polyphemus the Cyclops is as tense as any horror); stranded on Calypso’s beach, played by the enticing Charlize Theron, losing his will for nostos by gorging on the Lotus leaf (there are worse ways to spend seven years); and during his triumphant return home to Ithica.
Damon’s beaten, weather-worn Odysseus carries the film, depicting the protagonist’s strength and determination. He’s not so much of a hero, but as a man three moves ahead, and visibly worn down by it.
Anne Hathaway gives Penelope the mature stoicism that Nolan said he was looking for from his female lead, rejecting Robert Pattinson’s Antinous at every turn. John Leguizamo’s depiction of Odysseus' blind advisor Eumaeus, complete with his own real-world Bronx Puerto Rican accent, was the movie’s constant, and one of the true heroes of the story.
But, for me, it's Tom Holland who walks away with the film. You can watch him mature into Telemachus in real time – a boy forced to defend his mother and home from men who mean them harm; forced to defend a father he doesn't even recognise.
It's the best work of his career because he's the only performer in it playing someone still becoming who they are, rather than someone already mythologised before the cameras rolled.
Now I should probably answer the question you’re all thinking. This isn’t Nolan's best film – that Oscar-winning gong still goes to Oppenheimer. But it’s a close second.
In his commitment to traditional filmmaking techniques – his first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras with no digital, no 35mm fallback – the audience is taken through the same epic journey as the story’s protagonist.
If you walk into the cinema this weekend, wondering about the practical effects, the meticulous scizzor-cutting of the IMAX film during Jennifer Lame’s editing process, or how Nolan will manage to shoot the Cyclops, the Sirens, or the fall of Troy, then the director has already done his job.
Twenty years and a Best Director into building his own pantheon, it’s almost impossible to now draw the comparisons between Nolan and his latest muse. You only have to look at the comment section to see that the critical conversation around The Odyssey isn't about the film in front of them; it's about where it ranks.
Every one of Nolan’s films is judged against the legend the way Odysseus is judged against Athena's favour or Poseidon's grudge: an invisible hand shaping how the thing is received before anyone's even ordered their popcorn.
The Odyssey, rather fittingly, is about a man trying to outrun a reputation for cleverness that both saves and dooms him. Twenty years into his own rare deification, Nolan might understand that better than anyone.