The Odyssey (2026) | Black and White

“Woman, that word you said truly hurts me! Who moved my bed? It would be difficult even for an expert, unless a god himself came and, if he wished, moved it easily. But no living man, however young and strong, could move it from there easily. For there is a great secret in the construction of that bed, which I myself made, and no one else. Within the courtyard grew an olive tree with long leaves, lush and flowering; its trunk was as thick as a column.” Homer's Odyssey, Book XXIII, verses 181–191, in the translation by Frederico Lourenço

Departing and returning are only geographically opposed movements. And perhaps every return contains an illusion: Places can remain where we left them; we, almost never..

Between one and the other, a war may fit. Ten years at sea may fit, men transformed into memories, monsters that may have existed, and gods that may simply be an ancient way of naming fear. Above all, enough time may fit so that the one who returns is no longer the same one who once left.

Homer needed twenty years to return Odysseus to Ithaca. Christopher Nolan needs almost three hours to make us understand that arriving might be the easiest part.

The Odyssey It's a huge movie.

Immense in the seemingly endless sea, in the men made minuscule before nature, in the sound that makes the room tremble, in the violence and that permanent feeling that Ithaca is always a little further away than it should be. Seen in IMAX, the cinema momentarily ceases to be a window and transforms into a space. We don't simply contemplate the Mediterranean. We are placed in it.

And that sea seems to care little about who is a hero.

Matt Damon is Odysseus, king of Ithaca, a veteran of Troy, and a man condemned, after ten years of war, to spend another ten trying to return to the wife and son he left behind. Nolan, however, is less interested in the mythical hero than in the man who survived him.

It is simultaneously one of the film's most interesting ideas and one of its greatest weaknesses.

Damon offers us a repentant, wounded, guilty, and stubborn Odysseus. He is competent, sometimes moving, and physically convincing. But rarely extraordinary. And perhaps an Odysseus needs precisely that: not to appear entirely ordinary. Perhaps there is even an irony in that: The Odyssey It's such a big movie that, at times, it seems to make the man at its center seem small. Nolan gives him an immense sea, monsters, gods, war, an overwhelming image, and a sound that almost pierces through us. Faced with all this, Matt Damon too often ends up being just a part of something much bigger than himself. And perhaps it is precisely this grandeur of the film that cost him what, in another context, could have been an Oscar-worthy performance: not because he acts badly, but because it is difficult to master a film that seems determined to dominate everything, including the protagonist himself.

He lacks mêtis From Homer. That dangerous intelligence, the cunning, the vanity, the pleasure of deception, the impression that, when everyone else is looking for a sword, Odysseus has already found a way out. Achilles might have been the greatest of warriors, but Odysseus was the man capable of winning when strength alone was no longer enough.

In the film, too often we feel the suffering of the man before we admire the intelligence of the hero.

Perhaps it's deliberate. Nolan doesn't seem particularly interested in erecting a statue. He prefers to ask what remains of humanity after the myth is dismantled.

And that's where Troy acquires an importance it doesn't have in the same way in Homer. The war hasn't been left behind. It travels with Odysseus. Each island seems less like a hope and more like a station of atonement that began long before the sea. The real monster that Odysseus carries with him is perhaps the memory of the man he needed to be in order to win.

It's a modern approach, clearly. And, as far as I'm concerned, it works.

It works primarily because Nolan films everything with brutal intensity. Polyphemus, Circe, the sirens, Calypso, the storms: episodes that have belonged to the Western imagination for almost three millennia recover an unexpected sense of danger. We know that Odysseus will reach Ithaca, and yet, at times, it seems impossible that he will make it to the next scene.

And perhaps it is here that film and poem cease to compete and truly begin to complement each other. Homer gives us words to imagine the impossible. Nolan gives that impossible body, scale, noise, and matter. What we experience through imagination in the poem, comes close to us in the film, so close we can almost touch it. It doesn't replace Homer. It physically places us inside some of the images that Homer left open for almost three millennia.

Much of this effect is due to the sound.

Ludwig Göransson constructs a restless, archaic, and simultaneously modern soundtrack, blending instruments associated with the ancient world, voices, percussion, brass, and electronics. In IMAX, the boundary between music and sound design almost disappears. The sea cannot be heard: it is felt, it disturbs, it is feared.

In mermaids, however, something even rarer happens: the sound ceases to accompany the scene and transforms into the scene itself. The song is truly captivating, beautiful and menacing at the same time, and for a few moments we physically understand what Homer simply needed to tell us: why a man, even knowing that that song could kill him, desperately wants to hear it. Ever since my school days, the song of the sirens has fascinated me, whether in The Lusiads or the Odyssey. What intrigued me most was one thing: what beauty could exist in a song that would make a man willing to abandon his own life just to continue listening to it? I could never truly imagine it. Yesterday, at the cinema, I understood. And, for a moment, I almost got up from my seat and walked towards the screen…

And despite this sonically brilliant moment, perhaps for the first time in a major Nolan epic, I found myself missing Hans Zimmer.

Not in terms of volume. The film has plenty of that. What it lacks, at certain moments, is a melody capable of transcending the image, a heart.

Göransson offers tension, Zimmer perhaps would have offered longing. And few stories ever written have needed it as much as this one. The Odyssey It has monsters, gods, and wars, but the force that moves everything has a much simpler name: home.

A musical theme that subtly grew throughout the journey and finally reached its full potential in Ithaca could have given the film an emotional dimension that doesn't always match its extraordinary physical scale.

The narrative structure also contributes to this immersion. Nolan doesn't present the journey as a rigid, unwavering line between departure and arrival. He tells it in fragments, interrupts events, leaves questions unanswered and then returns to them, sometimes closing a scene we thought had already ended. The past enters the present, an explanation arrives after the consequence, and the structure itself seems to reproduce the memory of someone trying to organize twenty years of war, loss, and survival. Instead of observing an ancient story being neatly retold, it seems we are sitting beside a couch, listening to a man who seeks, fragment by fragment, to reconstruct his own history., as if recounting what happened to him was also a way of discovering what he had become.

It is also when we return to Homer that we better understand the path chosen by Nolan, and what he had to leave behind to travel it. Perhaps the greatest loss is Penelope.

In the poem, Penelope doesn't simply wait for Odysseus. She is, in a way, his reflection. While he deceives monsters, kings, and gods to survive far from Ithaca, she deceives suitors to survive within it. She weaves by day and unravels by night. She observes, distrusts, calculates. And when Odysseus is finally placed before her, she doesn't simply believe him. She tests him.

She orders the marital bed to be removed from the room. Odysseus is outraged: that bed cannot be moved. He himself had built it around a living olive tree, working the trunk, still attached to its roots, to form part of the bed. Penelope then knows it is him.

Few images could better summarize the Odyssey. After twenty years of movement, ships, wars, storms, islands, and losses, Odysseus's identity is finally proven by that which remained unmoved.

A bed that cannot be broken because it has roots.

Nolan dispenses with that powerful image. And, however much I admire many of his reinventions, here Homer remains (as he could not be otherwise) a better screenwriter.

But Nolan compensates us in other areas. Circe is perhaps the best example. The sorceress who transforms Odysseus' companions into pigs could easily have resulted in an almost caricatured episode when literally transported to the screen. The opposite happens. It's one of the best sequences in the film: disturbing, sensual, strange, almost feverish. And Samantha Morton gives it a brutal presence. During those minutes, she doesn't seem to be playing a mythological creature; she seems to belong to a world where men waking up transformed into animals is a perfectly natural possibility.

Even the gods lose some of their power. The ambiguity with which Athena appears is cinematically seductive: goddess, consciousness, memory, projection of Odysseus? Nolan leaves us in this intermediate territory. But the price is to remove some of the strangeness from the Homeric world. For Homer, the gods were not metaphors. They interfered, desired, protected, punished.

Poseidon was really angry. And I say angry so as not to sound vulgar.

Perhaps contemporary cinema has some difficulty accepting gods without turning them into psychology.

But while Homer convinces me more of Athena's divine nature, Nolan offers her a presence that is hard to forget. Zendaya emerges with an almost unreal beauty, not just beautiful in the conventional sense, but serene, luminous, truly suited to a figure who must appear simultaneously woman and something more than human. And her crying at the end is a small alteration that, for me, takes on an unexpected meaning. Homer lets Odysseus cry when he hears the bard sing the story of Troy. Nolan doesn't grant him that moment in the same way. Somehow, it is Athena's tears that end up returning to the film some of that absent emotion, as if even a goddess could finally cry for everything she has witnessed.

Another choice that convinced me was Helena. In a universe that never intends to be a rigorous archaeological reconstruction of Mycenaean Greece, Lupita Nyong'o's skin tone didn't detract from the character for a second. On the contrary. Helena needed, above all else, to possess a beauty capable of justifying the legend built around her, and the choice works. Precisely because Nolan seems to be seeking in her not a historical reconstruction, but an image of almost absolute beauty. In a film populated by figures that belong more to myth than to history, demanding from Helen a physical fidelity that even Homer didn't leave us described seems to me less interesting than asking... If we believe that that woman could have been transformed into a symbol for millennia, I believed it…

And then comes Ithaca.

The final confrontation between Odysseus and the suitors is one of the sequences where I most appreciated Nolan's choice of physicality. His Odysseus may lack some of Homer's almost insolent intelligence, but at that moment we understand everything that twenty years have done to his body. It's not an elegant fight, nor a clean celebration of the hero reclaiming the throne. It's violent, tense, exhausting. The man who has returned literally needs to reclaim the space that was once his. And when the combat ends, victory tastes less like triumph than like survival.

Still, Nolan never completely loses what makes this story universal. Beneath the spectacle, The Odyssey He continues to talk about a disconcertingly simple idea: someone wants to go home, no matter the cost.

But Nolan subtly alters the question.

Homer asks how a man can return after twenty years.

Nolan asks whether, after twenty years, the man who returns is still the same man who left.

It is in this difference that the film finds its identity.

And perhaps that's also why constantly comparing Nolan to Homer ends up being less interesting than letting them converse. In some things, I still prefer the poem: Odysseus's intelligence, Penelope as his true female equivalent, the bed born from an olive tree, the gods unequivocally gods. In others, cinema adds something that literature could not add in the same way: the song of the sirens invading a room, the unsettling transformation of Circe's men, the sea occupying the entire field of vision, the brutality of the return, Athena weeping.

Perhaps "complementary" is precisely the right word. Nolan doesn't improve Homer, and Homer doesn't make Nolan dispensable. One leaves room for imagination., The other person occupies that space for a few hours and forces us to feel their weight.

The Odyssey This is not Homer on film. Nor does it intend to be. It is a contemporary interpretation of an ancient myth, less interested in the hero's glory than in the price the hero paid to survive. At times it loses humor, cunning, and poetry along the way. In return, it gains guilt, brutality, and a truly extraordinary physical intensity.

I left the cinema impressed and with a certainty that is perhaps inconvenient for those who insist on deciding whether Nolan was faithful or unfaithful to Homer: Great stories don't survive three thousand years by remaining intact. They survive because they always manage to return different and, paradoxically, continue to be the same.

Perhaps that's why I'm not very interested in some of the discussions that try to reduce the film to right or wrong choices, faithful or unfaithful, ancient or modern. Especially since a story populated by gods and men, by a Helen who has traversed centuries as an idea of beauty, and by an Athena whom Nolan makes almost supernatural precisely through Zendaya's beauty, hardly fits into such simple divisions. Myths have never been made of just one color, one version, or one truth. They were told, retold, altered, and imagined long before they reached us.

Nolan does exactly that. He doesn't put Homer in a museum. He throws him back into the sea. And, for almost three hours, he puts us right there with him.

Still, in the humble opinion of someone who has always liked Nolan and who considers this Odyssey among his best films, There was only one thing I truly missed.

And, interestingly, this one didn't need IMAX. It didn't need monsters, storms, armies, or even the sea. Zimmer wasn't indispensable.

All it took was an olive tree.

A man returns after twenty years, and a woman needs to know if he's still the same. She doesn't ask him about the battles he won, the monsters he faced, or the seas he crossed. She asks him, without truly asking, about what they built together.

And he remembers.

Perhaps because, after almost three hours in which Nolan shows us how cinema can make a myth nearly three thousand years old gigantic, Homer still keeps for himself an image that needs no spectacle whatsoever: a bed built around a tree that no one can move without cutting its roots.

Perhaps this, after all, is the measure of all returns: not recognizing the way home, but still knowing where our roots lie.

And I can even imagine an impossible conversation between the two, somewhere between Ithaca and Hollywood.

Homer would ask Nolan why, After bringing seas, monsters, gods, wars, and storms to the screen, it left out precisely that olive tree.

Nolan might have smiled before answering: “"Because it was already yours. And it was so good that it would steal my attention from Circe, from the sirens' song, from the sea, perhaps even from Odysseus himself. Leaving it with you was also my way of acknowledging your genius."”

Homer might have smiled back. After all, no one knew better than him that stories survive because they travel, but also because some things remain.

And perhaps, in the end, they would both agree that it's not worth putting everything in black and white.

Nolan gave movement to what Homer sowed in words; Homer left roots where Nolan chose to go.

And between the man who left and the one who returned, between a story told by the sea and another projected on a screen almost three thousand years later, the olive tree remains exactly where it should be.