The Odyssey Review: Every Battle Led Back to Her

I finally watched The Odyssey at IMAX after missing tickets a few days earlier, and I’m still thinking about it. Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic is being sold as an action-packed mythological adventure, but for me, it was something quieter than that. It was a love story wearing war paint.

Before we get into it, this movie was shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, built frame by frame for that format. Don’t watch this one on a regular screen; save it, wait for a nearby IMAX if you have to. Watching it any other way is genuinely watching a different movie.

Strip away the monsters and the ten-year journey, and what you’re left with is a husband trying to get back to his wife. Matt Damon’s Odysseus and Anne Hathaway’s Penelope share surprisingly little screen time together, yet their bond is the engine that drives the entire film. Every choice he makes, every trial he survives, is filtered through the same question: will this get him back to her?

It’s rare for a love story to carry this much weight while the two leads are apart for almost the entire runtime, but that’s exactly what makes it land so hard when they’re finally reunited. You don’t just understand why he fights his way home through cyclops, sirens, and sea monsters; you feel it. This is a marriage tested by everything mythology could throw at it, and it never once breaks. In a genre so often obsessed with scale, Nolan still makes room for real, patient, loyal love, and honestly, that’s the part I keep coming back to.

Now let’s talk performances, because this cast is a powerhouse.

Matt Damon delivers what I’d call the performance of his career. The physical transformation is staggering on its own, but it’s the restraint underneath it that really lands, a king and a husband carrying a decade of war without ever losing his center. Anne Hathaway matches him beat for beat. Her Penelope is quiet devastation, a queen holding a kingdom together while her heart is somewhere out at sea.

John Leguizamo was the film’s biggest surprise for me. Known mostly for comedic roles, he strips all of that away here as Eumaeus, Odysseus’s loyal and partially blind servant. The vulnerability he brings is so convincing it lingers long after the credits roll, and I’m glad he’s finally getting the recognition for it. Robert Pattinson as Antinous is terrifying in the best way, a villain you can’t look away from, easily his most commanding work to date.

Zendaya, playing Athena, did what she needed to with the screen time she had, but I’ll admit I wish premiere coverage had centred a bit more on the performances that really carried this film, Damon, Hathaway, Leguizamo and Pattinson, rather than red carpet outfits. And can we talk about Samantha Morton for a second? Her Circe is such a slow-burn, quietly witchy performance; she mesmerised me every time she was on screen. Genuinely one of the more underrated turns in the whole film.

Here’s the part that really got me, though. In an era where nearly every blockbuster leans on CGI, Nolan built The Odyssey largely by hand. The cyclops was brought to life with an actual 60-foot animatronic puppet. The whirlpool sequence was created using real jet skis carving the water on set. Even the pig transformation scene, one of the most fantastical moments in the story, was achieved entirely in camera. It’s a level of craftsmanship that feels increasingly rare, and it shows in every frame, especially on the big IMAX screen it was built for.

That said, no film is without its flaws, and this one has a few worth mentioning. The dialogue occasionally slips into modern, casual phrasing; hearing “dad” and “daddy” pulled me right out of an ancient world that Nolan otherwise builds so meticulously. A couple of casting choices also felt at odds with the story’s historical roots, and pulled me out of the immersion at moments I wanted to stay fully inside this world.

The score, while beautifully rooted in period instrumentation, never quite reached the sweeping orchestral scale I wanted for a story this size. Tom Holland, stepping far outside his usual register as Telemachus, brings ambition to the role but not quite the gravity of a young prince shouldering his father’s kingdom in his absence. And the siren sequence, one of mythology’s most iconic moments of temptation and dread, came and went far too quickly to leave the mark I was hoping for.

None of that undoes what Nolan pulls off in the final twenty minutes, though. Odysseus’s return gave me actual goosebumps. Matt Damon delivers such a macho, heroic homecoming that it instantly reminds you who the true king is, both of his kingdom and of Penelope’s heart. It justifies the full three-hour journey on its own.