Christopher Nolan's sweeping epic The Odyssey has finally landed, and early numbers show it's had the biggest opening weekend of any non-franchise film in Australian box office history, with more than 587,000 Australians turning out to see it. It's also carrying a 95% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest-rated film of his career.
Christopher Nolan has also confessed, in the run-up to release, that the poem had been quietly running underneath his entire filmography, through Bruce Wayne’s descent and return in Batman Begins, in Murphy’s interstellar return home.
So if – like me – you walked out of The Odyssey wanting more than just a 70mm re-release of The Dark Knight (though I can think of worse ways to spend a weekend), here's what to watch next.
The full list, in no particular order, of the best swords-and-sandals essentials the genre was built on; the films Nolan has personally named as reference points while making his own version, and a few of his own films that have all led to this.
Troy (2004)
Troy sits as the most literal connective tissue on this list: Wolfgang Petersen's film ends where Nolan's begins, and critics (whether paid for their opinion or simply festering in the comments) reviewing The Odyssey are all unable to watch one without referencing the other. I had to rewatch this classic as part of my Odyssey homework, and it’s still one of the best retellings I've seen.
Brad Pitt's Achilles never gets an Odyssey of his own; he dies at Troy, which makes this required scene-setting for everything Damon's Odysseus is fleeing when he finally gets in his ship. Interestingly, Nolan opts not to include Achilles in his epic, who we should have met in Hades alongside Odysseus’ men.
Gladiator (2000)
Ridley Scott's five-Oscar juggernaut is the film that resurrected this entire genre from the dead, and if you stop and think, the similarities with Homer’s epic go far beyond the costume design.
The film stars Russell Crowe as a general (the Commander of the Armies of the North and General of the Felix Legions, to be exact) who wants nothing more than to return home after years of war. Sound familiar? Well, his homecoming is denied by Commodus before it can happen; the rest of the film is what's left when the Odyssey is denied you.
Damon's Odysseus gets his ending; in Gladiator, Crowe's Maximus only gets to imagine his. Both men walk through fields of wheat in their heads to survive what's in front of them.
Kingdom of Heaven (2005, Director's Cut)
Only watch the extended cut – the theatrical release gutted the character motivation to the point of incoherence, and Scott himself has said the longer version is the film he actually made. I still remember watching this when it came out as a 10-year-old and thinking it was the best film I had ever seen. It’s still in my Top 5. Top 10, maybe.
Starring Orlando Bloom as Balian, his journey to Jerusalem is less a homecoming than an exile from one – we first meet him as a blacksmith, running from grief, and ending up defending a city instead of a family.
There are obvious parallels with The Odyssey in that we’re rooting for a man affected by war, but compelled to fight. Damon's Odysseus and Bloom's Balian are both soldiers who've begun to distrust the gods (or God) who supposedly sanctioned their actions in battle. Currently on Disney+ in Australia – that’s your weekend sorted.
Ben-Hur (1959)
Still the enduring watermark of the genre for pure scale, Ben-Hur was one of the first religious epics on screen, taking audiences through a story of revenge and return as the protagonist is wrongly enslaved and finds himself clawing his way back to Jerusalem and his family. The chariot race remains the standard every subsequent epic is quietly measured against, Nolan's included.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Nolan has described Stanley Kubrick's blockbuster as a modern echo of Homer (you could have probably guessed it by the name), and its influence on The Odyssey is more than just a passing reference.
According to Nolan, he first saw the film at aged 7, taken by his father to a cinema in London's Leicester Square, and has called it his favourite film ever since. In 2018, for its 50th anniversary, Nolan personally oversaw a restoration of the film, stripping away decades of digital cleanup and producing new 70mm prints from Kubrick’s negative.
The Return (2024)
The most direct precursor to Nolan's film, and released close enough that the two are already being compared, The Return strips back the myth of Homer’s epic and focuses on its final act. You could have probably guessed that from the title.
What we’re treated to is an absolutely jacked Ralph Fiennes washing ashore as a broken, PTSD-riddled shell of the "young strapping hero" rather than Ithica’s conquering king. Where Nolan goes maximalist with monsters and gods, Pasolini goes the other way entirely – no Cyclops; no Sirens. Just a war veteran who doesn't know how to come home. On SBS for Australian viewers.
300 (2006)
Zack Snyder's stylised, slow-motion take on Thermopylae is the version of this genre least interested in homecoming – King Leonidas and his 300 Spartan guards know they have no hope of return, outnumbered by a staggering Persian army of more than 300,000 soldiers. It almost makes it the anti-Odyssey. Though Damon’s Odysseus wasn’t exactly promising a glorious homecoming to the men he marched towards the Trojan gates.
300 ultimately put Snyder on the map, and proved there was still commercial appetite for ancient warfare on screen. You could say it paved the way for everything that followed it.
Spartacus (1960)
Stanley Kubrick's film about a slave leading a doomed revolt for freedom isn't a homecoming story in The Odyssey sense, but it belongs on any serious swords-and-sandals list for the sheer weight of its production.
The legendary filmmaker was only 30 and still three films from The Killing's cult status when Kirk Douglas – furious after losing the lead in Ben-Hur to Charlton Heston – installed him as director and personally bankrolled the production through his own company. It earned 4 Academy Awards, and sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Nolan named Scorsese's portrayal of a flawed, human icon as the key to how he wanted audiences to see Odysseus – not as this all-conquering hero, but a man capable of failure (which he endures for two decades) and with doubt of the gods and his path home. Nolan said he screened The Last Temptation of Christ for composer Ludwig Göransson before scoring began, using it to set the emotional register for his 2026 epic.
Gladiator II (2024)
Now, I think by now you can tell that I’m a huge Ridley Scott fan (see above), so I had to include the hugely anticipated follow-up to the British filmmaker’s modern classic – even if the critics won’t agree.
Paul Mescal's Lucius was never going to exceed the original, so let’s get that out of the way already. His own version of the "return" narrative – hauled back to Rome from exile in Numidia – felt clunky, almost shoehorned into the sequel for the sake of the story. But where the film does succeed is in this dynastic revenge rather than the typical homecoming. Now on Netflix for Australians, it’s well worth a rewatch.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Alongside Kubrick’s 2001, Nolan has said that Lawrence of Arabia is one of the two formative epics that shaped his own epic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey.
He even paused filming in Los Angeles to screen a rare 70mm print of David Lean's film for his cast and crew (arranged with studio darling Tom Holland's help via Sony chief Tom Rothman).
But the connection between the two goes well beyond the mutual desert-and-spectacle of the films’ scale. Lawrence of Arabia is itself a story about a man swallowed by his own myth: T.E. Lawrence goes to fight someone else's war, becomes a legend in the process, and never really manages to come home intact.
Where Odysseus's decade away ends in a genuine, hard-won return to Ithaca, Lawrence's war never really ends for him at all.
Jaws (1975) and Alien (1979)
Nolan has grouped these alongside his own Dark Knight trilogy as part of the same creative blueprint for The Odyssey.
Undoubtedly, two films that exist in the furthest corner away from Nolan’s re-telling – one, a battle with a pesky shark; the other with a pesky Alien. But it goes to show that villains are never simple, and that the threat of monsters the audience can’t see carries just as much weight and stakes as classic tropes. Something Nolan knows all too well.
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion monsters – the skeleton army, Talos, the Hydra – are the direct ancestors of every Cyclops and Siren sequence Nolan's effects team had to reinvent for IMAX.
Jason and the Argonauts walked so every other swords-and-sandals film that followed could run – and a genuinely mythological quest (rather than a historical war epic). Watching it again, it certainly sits closer in DNA to the fantastical half of The Odyssey than Gladiator or Ben-Hur ever get.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
The Coen brothers' film is the one movie on this entire list that carries an actual on-screen credit tying it to Homer – "based upon 'The Odyssey' by Homer" – and it's the most purely joyful reinterpretation of the poem ever put to film.
George Clooney's Everett is a small-time convict scheming his way back through Depression-era Mississippi to stop his wife remarrying and reclaim his place as father to his daughters. It's the not-so-obvious pairing for this piece, but it just goes to show the unfathomable reach of Homer’s original epic. As Nolan confidently calls it, “the story”.
Clash of the Titans (1981)
I could have easily grouped Desmond Davis’ Clash of the Titans with the above Jason and the Argonauts; Harryhausen's last major stop-motion outing and the clearest bridge between The Odyssey and the more grounded epics further up this list.
The 2010 remake exists if you want a comparison point for how differently CGI and practical effects sell the same Greek monsters. It had its critics, but I thought it was still an enjoyable story retold.
King Arthur (2004)
Antoine Fuqua's "historical" take on Arthurian legend, stripped of most of the fantasy, sits here mainly for its Hans Zimmer score and sweeping action.
The most obvious Odyssey parallel is that Arthur must ask his knights on one last quest before they’re able to return to their families after years on the road. The cast is stacked – Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, Mads Mikkelsen, Ray Winstone, Ioan Gruffudd, Stellan Skasgård, and Joel Egerton – and with Training Day and The Equalizer director Antoine Fuqua at the helm (and Jerry Bruckheimer producing), you can guarantee the battles hit harder than the history does.
If you haven’t seen it, put it on the list. It still holds up more than two decades later. Come to think of it, this entry should be a lot higher.
Interstellar (2014)
This is where the list breaks its own genre rules. Instead of togas and turbulent seas, Nolan’s futuristic epic takes us beyond the galaxies to tell a familiar story. A father who bends the laws of physics to get back to his child, with Anne Hathaway along for the journey in both films.
Where Homer used sea monsters and vengeful gods to keep Odysseus from Ithaca, Nolan used relativity and a black hole to keep Cooper from his daughter. It's the clearest evidence that Nolan had been writing The Odyssey for over a decade before he ever adapted it.