I Watched 'The Odyssey' So You Don't Have To!
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After watching The Odyssey (don't worry, I pirated it), all I can say is that the hatred it fomented was ultimately to its benefit. It caused a reactionary response that amplified the hype surrounding the movie, with the hate-posting ultimately serving as free publicity. It needed it because the movie was extraordinarily mediocre. A solid 4/10, and that's only largely because the source material innately provides such a compelling story.
As someone whose heritage is Greek, I completely understood that outrage. Hearing people complain about "cultural appropriation" when the foundation of Western civilization is built on my own culture always comes across as absurdly ironic to me. Every time I hear some liberal NPC bitching about cultural appropriation, I always wait for them to bring up voting to ask them how engaging in democracy isn't an act of cultural appropriation, which they of course just respond to by defaulting to some empty platitude they've been programmed to say.
Nevertheless, the rage-posting over the movie became really tiresome to me. It's Hollywood. What would you expect? If you're going to look at a commercially driven film from Christopher Nolan as if it should be the paragon of artistic integrity, then you really only have yourself to blame. There is an abundance of amazing film out there, past, present, and future. Art, whether it's film, music, or any other medium, needs to be something that is a catalyst for self-exploration; it should be sought out by an audience, not served to them. Depending on an industry to curate that experience is about as rational as depending on CNN or Fox News to deliver you the truth in their news coverage. All the same people complaining about "woke" movies are ultimately assimilating into the paradigm that promotes them. They'll be the first to watch Citizen Vigilante or some empty movie marketed to the right wing for the same commercial motives and laud it despite it being awful and the only value of the film triggering their confirmation bias.
Having said that, people critical of the casting in Nolan's The Odyssey were entirely merited in their vitriol. The virtual signaling done by the casting decisions is made clearer as the film plays out. Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra are really just used to show off Lupita Nyong'o being black. It's clear their characters weren't sought out by Nolan to play a particularly important part rather than being plot devices, which makes it hard to believe there was any real imperative to casting her on the basis of her ability as an actress. What makes that even more obvious is that each of those characters play incredibly important and compelling roles in Homer's epic poem, with much more focus being on Helen, of course. Helen is minimized far more than Clytemnestra, which is incredible considering she's the impetus of the Trojan War itself.
Then there's Elliot Page as Sinon. This is perhaps the most obvious example of forced casting, as Sinon is not a character in Homer's epic poem. Instead, Sinon is depicted as the Greek spy who tricks the Trojans into bringing the Trojan Horse into the city of Troy in Virgil's The Aeneid. There was really no reason to have Sinon other than for the plot device Nolan utilizes him as later in the film. The addition of Sinon is the second biggest departure from the source material as far as the plot of the story is concerned, other than the ending which Nolan rewrites to name Telemachus as king and have Odysseus and Penelope exiled from Ithaca for breaking the Greek law of xenia, or hospitality, which is for some reason called the Law of Zeus rather than the Law of Hestia, but I digress. Nolan has worked with Page in the past, when she was the secondary lead in the woefully awful 2010 science fiction movie Inception, so there is an element of familiarity behind the casting, but the publicity behind casting someone transgender comes across as the motive behind the casting more than anything else.
La escena de Elliot Page que me quedé esperando de La Odisea pic.twitter.com/xR7p6S3Z9h
— Njord (@VikingoArtico) July 18, 2026
The flaws in the casting don't just have to do with the apparent DEI initiative behind many of the choices, though. The acting was woeful other than Anne Hathaway and John Leguizamo. Even their contributions to the film aren't acted out with any sense of nuance. Their performances are largely just amplified by being juxtaposed against very stunted and hollow acting displayed by the rest of the cast.
That sense of emptiness isn't exclusive to the acting. As is the case in all Christopher Nolan films, there was an overarching sterility behind the whole thing that made it very hard to invest in any of the characters or storylines, which says a lot considering it's The Odyssey. Odysseus bidding farewell to Argos is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in any work of literature ever, yet it came across as obligatory and, due to the gravity it plays in the plot, made for a very anticlimactic ending.
The special effects have been lauded, and I really have no idea why. I get why not defaulting to CGI is something people admire, but it comes across as performative when the practical effects aren't great. That is kind of a perfect distillation of the movie. Again — all hype, no substance.
One thing I was particularly interested in was how the gods were going to be handled. Their role in the Homeric epics was entirely absent from the 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film Troy, which I would recommend watching the director's cut of instead of this trash from Nolan.
Athena is the focal point of the gods' role in The Odyssey, but there's no real sense of mystique behind how Nolan presents that. Matt Damon just talks to Zendaya, and then there's a pan or cut, and it's like, "Whoa, she's gone!!!!" Only he can see her!!!! Crazy!!!!" which really is a sham considering how integrating the gods with natural phenomena would have been a great way to exercise special or practical effects. The absence of that is especially apparent when Odysseus finally returns home to Ithaca. In Homer's epic, Athena clouds the island in a mist so that Odysseus can be hidden from his enemies. In the scene from the Nolan movie, there is a mist on the shores, but there's very little done to illustrate the role Athena plays in creating it, other than her just being there. She doesn't manifest from the mist, disappear into it, or have any connection that would connect her divinity to it. It's ultimately just a perfect summation of how Zendaya plays the part of the goddess: she's just there.
Odysseus' long-awaited return to Ithaca in Book 13 of The Odyssey is also when Homer describes one of the most esoteric and mystical elements of the epic poem: the Cave of the Nymphs (no, not the one Jeffrey Epstein's brother named his property management company after). The symbolism of the Cave of the Nymphs in The Odyssey is the perfect illustration of the scale of the poem and what it and Homer mean to Greek culture. Homer was far beyond a poet; he was viewed as a completely transcendent figure bordering on divinity himself. His followers viewed his works as much as works of theology as they were poetry.
This is made apparently by the exegetical treatise of lines 102 to 112 in Book 13 of The Odyssey, in which Homer describes the cave, On the Cave of the Nymphs, written by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry (who inspired the imagery of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life). In his treatise, Porphyry navigates the symbolism and metaphysical significance of the cave, penning one of the most profound and longest-lasting analyses of The Odyssey ever written. While it would be too much to expect Nolan to echo the wisdom of Porphyry, the oversight of that opportunity just goes to show how surface level his understanding of the story is and how much that comes across on screen.
One of my favorite YouTube Channels, Let's Talk Religion, recently did an incredible examination of the allegory of the Cave of the Nymphs from The Odyssey that is worth a watch much more than Nolan's movie.
In the end, it's Christopher Nolan. He's a movie maker, not a film maker (sans maybe Memento). He's what a friend of mine calls "a cable movie director." You get a blockbuster that plays to the greatest common denominator of people; that obviously was done by someone who is technically apt and very experienced when it comes to directing. What his interpretation of The Odyssey lacks is the emotional resonance that can only be achieved when a movie is able to communicate its heart and soul to an audience. That shortcoming is the perfect way to describe the movie given how its production completely disregarded the cultural and spiritual gravity that the epic poem has to the Hellenic people.
While I think much of that was purposeful and worth maligning the film for, I also question whether someone like Christopher Nolan has the capacity to have that kind of empathy enough to actually follow through on it. Nolan has described himself as being the most important person on the set of his productions because he serves as "the representative of the audience," a completely disingenuous display of humility meant to serve as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. In the end, that is his undoing in terms of how his vision falls short of directors who are rightfully revered as auteurs. Nolan's vision is one of pragmatism, viewed through the lens of the masses but put in the hands of a director who can achieve it. It is his vision, but that perspective makes him fall very short of being a visionary. While filmmakers bring their pictures to life, he brings his to the market, which is why the box office is what his legacy rests upon. The Odyssey is just another chapter in the annals of his filmography that will be remembered for quantitative achievements like its box office receipts rather than anything qualitative that is rooted in artistic merit.
TL;DR: The Odyssey gets a 4/10 from me. It wasn't bad, but in some ways, the worst thing you can say about a film is that it's "meh."