Friends, Grecians, and countrypersons — lend us your ears: Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey has officially landed on multiplex shores. The mega-budgeted, all-star epic will host its first showings for the general moviegoing public on Thursday, but critics are already weighing in with their takes on Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s classic saga.
This is the celebrated director’s first movie since 2023’s Oppenheimer awarded him his long-awaited Best Picture and Best Director wins among its 13 nominations. It’s also the first time that Matt Damon has headlined a Nolan production after supporting turns in Interstellar and Oppenheimer, and is widely expected to be an Oscar — as well as a box office — monster. The rest of the cast includes Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland as Damon’s onscreen wife and son, Penelope and Telemachus, and a bevy of big name players including Robert Pattinson, John Leguizamo, and Samantha Morton.
If you’ve been following along with the social reactions from reviewers, industry folks and, yes, even influencers, you’ll know that the critical winds are favoring The Odyssey. And the film is unsurprisingly debuting on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic with mighty scores, including a 99% fresh approval rating on the former and a 91 score on the latter. That places it in the upper echelon of the critical reaction to Nolan’s decades-spanning filmography. It’s worth noting that Nolan has yet to be slapped with the dreaded “Rotten” splat across the 13 narrative features that he’s made to date.
Christopher Nolan’s review history (by year of release)
| Film | RT Score | Metacritic Score |
| Following (1998) | 87% | 60 |
| Memento (2000) | 94% | 83 |
| Insomnia (2002) | 92% | 78 |
| Batman Begins (2005) | 85% | 70 |
| The Prestige (2006) | 76% | 66 |
| The Dark Knight (2008) | 94% | 85 |
| Inception (2010) | 87% | 67 |
| The Dark Knight Rises (2012) | 87% | 78 |
| Interstellar (2014) | 73% | 74 |
| Dunkirk (2017) | 92% | 94 |
| Tenet (2020) | 70% | 69 |
| Oppenheimer (2023) | 93% | 90 |
| The Odyssey (2026) | 99% | 91 |
When it comes to the overall tenor of The Odyssey reviews, be aware that there’s not really “good” or “bad” reactions — it’s more like “amazing” or “pretty good.” That’s a reflection of Nolan’s remarkably consistent track record and the level of craft involved in bringing this particular film to life. Here’s a sampling of how critics are feeling about Odysseus’s voyage home.
The Superlative
Writing at RogerEbert.com, veteran critic Matt Zoller Seitz makes it clear that he’s ready to follow Odysseus anywhere in a rave four-star review. “Technically, as you’d expect from this director, the movie is mightily impressive, for its scale, the graceful way it moves from one time period to another, and for the tactility of its imagery,” he writes. “You can almost smell the sea, the congealing blood, the flowers. That Trojan horse clearly weighs, if not a ton, exactly, then certainly a lot—and it looks as if the Trojans (and the actors portraying them) have to strain to transport it.”
“The movie doesn’t give us any ChatGPT study guide summaries of what it all means,” Seitz later adds. “It presents Odysseus’ choices, laudable and horrible, just as things that happened, with implications that both the hero and the audience must grapple with, including the question of whether we make our decisions, or our decisions make us. The grand summation could be ‘people are complicated.’ That sounds rather basic. But it feels revolutionary when it’s encoded in a rare modern blockbuster that doesn’t feed us lotus flowers.
Over at Polygon, Jake Kleinman very favorable compares The Odyssey to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, writing: “The Odyssey‘s biggest draw is its sheer visual scale, which feels on par with what Peter Jackson achieved for Lord of the Rings (minus the elves and orcs). Nolan and his team show in real-life locations across the globe, and the result is glorious to behold. Read any interview with a member of the cast, and they’ll start complaining about being forced to climb up some mountain in Greece in full armor just to reach a filming location, or get soaked while filming out at sea. Then in the same breadth, they’ll praise Nolan not just for committing to the most realistic shoot possible, but for suffering right alongside his actors.”
And Consequence’s Liz Shannon Miller bestows the grand summation “the epic we truly need right now” on The Odyssey. “There’s a lot of discussion in The Odyssey about Zeus’s law, and the importance of hospitality in honoring each other,” she notes. “Operating in direct opposition is the concept of war, depicted here as a tragic inevitability of greed and hubris, an antithesis of proper society and potentially proper society’s true ruin.”
“What The Odyssey depicts is the exact opposite of that idea; a society torn apart by war — a dying society, as a result,” she continues. “Nolan doesn’t point his finger at any particular modern-day conflict, but he makes a point of mentioning that we only know this story because it was one of the very few that were written down during that era; the world in which it was first told is long gone. It’s not a subtle message. But these are far from subtle times.”
The Measured
Interestingly, the major trade outlets are leading the more reserved praise for The Odyssey. Over in Variety, Guy Lodge calls the movie both “thrilling” and “slightly aloof.”
“A genuinely grand, gutsy vision, The Odyssey thrills generously for the bulk of its near three-hour running time,” he allows. “Every few minutes, it seems, it throws at its audience another mighty setpiece that, in almost any other summer studio spectacle, would be a climactic standout. If the language of Homer’s epic has been simplified and modernized in Nolan’s screenplay, the stakes and scale of its storytelling have suffered little corner-cutting: It’s so very big, in terms of mythological scope and human consequence, not to mention the sheer volume of incident stuffed into it, as to remind us why other, less intrepid filmmakers have stayed away.”
As you can tell, there’s a “but” coming. “But if this Odyssey is consistently involving and frequently dazzling, it’s never exactly moving,” Lodge continues. “It keeps the eyes and ears so lavishly occupied, while engaging the mind with its structural games of cat’s cradle, you almost don’t notice, or mind, that your heart isn’t quite in it. Almost. The Odyssey stirs on a scene-to-scene basis, as its haplessly drifting hero’s long-awaited homecoming is repeatedly waylaid with any number of cruel obstacles, proceeding with the frustrating, inexorable tension of a bad dream.”
The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney also expresses some discontent, indicating that he found Nolan’s film “snoozy” on occasion. “One of the issues is that the writer-director never finds much balance between the parallel journeys of Odysseus and Telemachus, making the movie feel structurally clumsy,” he argues, before taking aim at Holland’s performance. “It doesn’t help that Holland, while always an appealing screen presence, is wrong for the role. Like Pattinson, the Brit actor plays his character with an American accent. But he comes across as, well, Peter Parker in a tunic, sapping the gravitas from Telemachus’ path to maturity.”
“On the other hand, several key episodes do build tension,” Rooney allows. “The dramatic escape of Odysseus and his men from the cave dwelling of the sheep-herding one-eyed giant Polyphemus… is a horror-tinged nail-biter, which has consequences for the voyage given that the enraged Cyclops is the son of vengeful sea god Poseidon. There’s eerie poetry in the crew’s fear as they pass the island inhabited by Sirens whose songs lure sailors to their death on the rocks, with Odysseus in agony as he’s tied to the mast to resist their call.”
And writing in The New Yorker, Richard Brody feels that something is missing from this particular version of Homer’s epic. “Nolan unfolds a purely human drama,” he notes. “Told in this way, with divine intervention at a minimum, the story remains an exciting adventure filled with passion, terror, tenderness, and wonder, but it lacks the particular thrill that comes with reading Homer. …By suppressing this continuity between the natural and the supernatural realms, Nolan omits much of what makes the Homeric age so different, including the ambience of the divine and the distinctive moral realm that goes with it.”
