Review: Odysseus Comes Home, But He’s Still Lost
By Greig Roselli | Stones of Erasmus
Spoilers ahead for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and, I suppose, for a story that has been circulating for nearly three thousand years.
“Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca. I’m just not convinced Christopher Nolan lets him come home.”
I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey last night with a friend and his son.
Beforehand, I even said something reassuring: “That’s cool. Y’all will like the story. It has these deep, familiar themes.”
Maybe I should have done my homework.
Nolan’s take on Homer is legitimate Odyssey—the bones of the ancient poem are certainly there—but this is far from the comforting version of the story I had carried into the theater. I expected Athena mentoring young Telemachus. I expected the clever “man of many wiles,” fighting monsters and gods as he struggles toward Ithaca.
What I got instead was something considerably more unsettling: an Odyssey about cognitive distortion, psychological damage, war, memory, and the frightening possibility that a person can return home without ever really coming home.
And Nolan tells us almost immediately what kind of movie this will be.
The Trojan Horse in the Sand
The film does not begin with Odysseus wandering the sea.
It begins with the Trojan Horse.
We see that iconic instrument of Troy’s destruction lodged in the landscape like some enormous effigy—a monument to the violence that has already happened and to everything that will follow.
I wasn’t expecting it.
In fact, strangely enough, I wasn’t expecting to see the Trojan Horse at all.
But its presence makes sense because Nolan is interested not merely in Odysseus’s adventures after Troy but in what Troy has done to him. The war isn’t prologue. The war follows him.
That distinction matters.
This is where Nolan’s adaptation departs most dramatically from the Odyssey I thought I was going to see.
I still have enormous affection for the 1997 television miniseries starring Armand Assante. As a straightforward screen adaptation of Homer’s adventures, I may even prefer it. Nolan is after something else.
His Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, is not simply a wanderer desperately trying to find his way home.
He is a man who may no longer know what “home” means.
Odysseus Comes Home. Does It Matter?
That is the film’s most disturbing idea.
Of course Odysseus eventually returns to Ithaca. That’s the story. Homer told us that part a few millennia ago.
But watch Damon’s face when Odysseus finally looks into Penelope’s eyes.
Has this man actually returned?
I don’t think so.
He seems almost as lost standing before Penelope as he was when he first left his family and sailed toward Troy.
That changes the meaning of the entire journey.
Homer’s Odyssey is obsessed with nostos—homecoming. Nolan seems more interested in asking whether nostos is psychologically possible after a person has been transformed by violence.
And that is where this ancient Greek story begins to feel startlingly American.
Nolan’s Odysseus looks to me less like an ancient king than a modern man disenchanted with the promises that were supposed to organize his life: war, masculinity, marriage, heroism, status, home.
He gets Ithaca back.
He gets Penelope back.
He gets the palace back.
But does he get Odysseus back?
I’m not convinced.
Circe Without the Comfort of Hermes
The same psychological unease runs through Samantha Morton’s remarkable Circe.
In Homer, Circe transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs, but the episode also gives us divine intervention: Hermes provides Odysseus with moly, the magical herb that protects him from Circe’s enchantment.
Nolan strips away much of that reassuring mythological machinery.
Morton’s Circe is terrifying precisely because she doesn’t feel comfortably mythological. She feels damaged, dangerous, unpredictable—someone whose capacity to hurt others seems bound up with her own distorted relationship to the world.
Morton plays her with gasping accuracy.
It is one of several moments when Nolan makes the supernatural feel less like fantasy than psychological horror.
The gods and monsters haven’t exactly disappeared.
But somehow the humans have become more frightening.
And Then There Is Penelope
Anne Hathaway’s Penelope may be the character that most startled me.
Homer’s Penelope is one of Western literature’s great figures of fidelity and cunning. She delays the suitors by weaving Laertes’ burial shroud during the day and secretly unraveling it at night. She survives through patience, intelligence, and an extraordinary ability to control what others know.
Nolan gives us something colder.
Hathaway retains Penelope’s intelligence and regal authority, but this Penelope seems deeply resentful—of her circumstances, of the men surrounding her, perhaps even of the husband whose absence has defined her life.
There is a monarchical aloofness to her.
At moments she seems less concerned with the sentimental preservation of marriage than with power, status, survival, and maintaining control over Ithaca.
Even her relationship with Telemachus carries an edge I wasn’t prepared for.
And then there is Tom Holland’s Telemachus.
I’ve rarely seen the boy portrayed as quite this feckless.
That may sound like criticism, but I think it’s intentional.
Homer’s Telemachus begins the poem immature and uncertain, but Athena pushes him toward adulthood. Nolan gives us a young man who seems almost painfully ill-equipped to inherit the damaged world his parents have made for him.
The old generation went to Troy.
The next generation gets the consequences.
That’s a pretty bleak inheritance.
Homer Without Homework
Here’s the good news: you do not need to know Homer to see this movie.
In some ways, knowing Homer may make the experience stranger.
I walked into the theater carrying Athena, Hermes, nostos, Penelope’s loom, Telemachus’s coming-of-age story, and decades of other adaptations in my head.
Nolan kept knocking those expectations sideways.
Someone encountering the story fresh may simply experience an enormous, brutal, strange adventure about a soldier trying to return to his family.
Someone who knows the poem may find themselves constantly negotiating the distance between Homer and Nolan.
Both experiences are worthwhile.
And My God, Look at It
Whatever reservations I have about Nolan’s interpretation, visually The Odyssey is extraordinary.
This is a movie made for enormous screens.
The landscapes don’t merely illustrate Homer. They make you understand how landscapes might have generated Homeric storytelling in the first place.
Sea.
Rock.
Dust.
Islands.
Palaces.
Bodies against enormous horizons.
There are moments when you can almost imagine Homer—or generations of singers whose stories eventually became Homer—looking upon something like these same Mediterranean landscapes and turning geography into myth.
Even the costumes have an unnerving physicality. Telemachus’s almost boyish armor seems particularly appropriate: a young man dressed for a heroic tradition he hasn’t grown into yet.
Nothing feels clean.
Nothing feels particularly safe.
And very little feels like the sanitized Greece of a museum gift shop.
Nolan’s Mediterranean is gorgeous because it is indifferent to the people struggling across it.
So, Should You See
The Odyssey?
Yes.
But not because Christopher Nolan has finally given us the definitive screen version of Homer.
I don’t think he has.
See it because Nolan has taken one of Western literature’s foundational stories about coming home and turned it into a movie about people who no longer know whether home can save them.
That makes The Odyssey feel less like a revival of an ancient epic than a snapshot of the world in 2026.
War doesn’t end when somebody announces that the war is over.
Families don’t simply resume where they left off.
Children inherit consequences they didn’t create.
People hurt one another and call it survival.
And sometimes the person who finally reaches home discovers that the most difficult distance remaining is the one between himself and the people waiting for him.
Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut once held an uncomfortable mirror up to marriage, desire, privilege, and the anxieties lurking beneath an apparently stable world.
Nolan is doing something similarly unsettling here, only with Homer.
The result isn’t always the Odyssey I wanted.
Maybe that’s the point.
Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca.
I’m just not convinced Christopher Nolan lets him come home.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters. See it on the largest, highest-fidelity screen you reasonably can. This is one movie where the scale really does matter.
