Forced, unwelcome hospitality of the louts… at the very least, it will leave one irked, if not fuming. Imagine, then, what years of it might have done for young Telemachus (Tom Holland).

If anything, he just might “wanna do somethin’ ’bout it.” Fed up with entertaining hordes of rowdy, drunk, well-fed suitors, Telemachus whispers to his mother, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), the queen of Ithaca, that at the very least he “wanna” remind them whose wine they’re drinking.

Telemachus’ father, King Odysseus, aka Ulysses — the Latin name of Odysseus (Matt Damon) — has been away for a decade, fighting — and winning — the Trojan War. Angering the Greek gods, he is cursed to be lost at sea. The people of the kingdom, and those partying in his house, do not know this. By law, Penelope is duty-bound to remarry, ergo the drinking and the suitors.

Antinous (an excellent Robert Pattinson), despicability oozing out of his every motion, tells Telemachus, “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know,” effectively rolling together modern-day language and absentee-father traumas into one powerful gut punch… for the audience. Suffice to say that the visuals of 1200 BCE do not sit well with the 21st-century common era language, or the old school filmmaking.

In writer-producer-director Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the talent, the effort and the scale are very much on-screen, as are the usual directorial preferences that make and break the film

For a film that seemingly looks like it was made in old-school ways, one would be a fool to think that writer, producer and director Christopher Nolan is an old-school filmmaker. One could argue that he clings to conventions such as wearing suits to sets like old Hollywood directors did. Or that, like the greats, he hauls impossibly bulky equipment to locations (though the greats didn’t have the luxury of today’s advanced miniaturised technology). Or that he is adamant about sticking to difficult technology, such as shooting on 70mm film (beautifully shot by Hoyte van Hoytema), just so it can be flaunted during publicity that something miraculous and pristine has been done with — and for — the medium of film and cinema.

But Nolan is, without a doubt, a filmmaker of today — celebrated and heralded as a once-in-a-lifetime genius. However, with that declaration come caveats. Things go to your head.

His Odyssey isn’t ground-breaking, and while it’s not at all as bad as people make it out to be, it has the usual Nolan hitches. The mix of Foley sound effects drowns out the dialogue. The very Nolan-esque past-and-present intercuts — he still prefers to make things ‘interesting’ by shoving linearity out the window — is not a good call every time. Shooting everything with beautiful open vistas (even his indoor sets are shot with grand depth and dimension) coupled with the seriousness of the performances — everyone is mighty serious all the time — guts every ounce of emotion one should be feeling for the characters.

Then there’s the casting, which triggered a lot of hullabaloo. At times, that’s not as big of an issue. ‘At times’ meaning: there’s still doubt. Himesh Patel does not fit Eurylochus, the challenger of Odysseus’ plans. Although John Leguizamo performs well as Eumaeus (then again, everyone performs well), this casting choice feels as odd as Lupita Nyong’o’s dual role as Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra.

Still, Nyong’o feels like a better casting choice than Charlize Theron as the nymph Calypso and Zendaya as Athena, the goddess of wisdom, warfare and handicrafts, who protects Odysseus. For the latter, though, Nolan adds some logical groundwork that works in the film’s favour.

Elliot Page as Sinon — borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid, and not a part of Homer’s poem — fits excellently into the story. Like most characters, Page is a minor entry, as are Samantha Morton, Jon Bernthal and Benny Safdie.

Holland, Hathaway, Pattinson and Leguizamo are very good choices, but the best, in my opinion, is Damon as Odysseus. Now, some might fault him for being vanilla, but I disagree. The character, despite headlining and carrying the weight of the film, is written with a sense of detachment. It is a writing choice that impacts and reflects what one sees on the screen.

The bigger deterrent, in my opinion, is how they speak. The decision to forgo neutral English or British accents — a universal staple that works best for one’s ears — and choose modern-day American intonations and lingo (the ‘wanna’, ‘pining’ and ‘daddy’ lines) creates an unsettling audio-visual disparity.

But then again, leaning into jarring personal preferences is a very Nolan thing to do. That is perhaps why The Odyssey doesn’t look like a Homeric epic. Very deliberately forgotten are its elements — the fantastical and the magical. In fact, the first words we see on the screen when the film opens are: “In the time of apparent magic.” Emphasis on ‘apparent’.

Most of The Odyssey sticks to Homer’s base story that other adapted versions have already delivered. Kirk Douglas starred in and as Ulysses. It was a 1954 Italian, French and US co-production. Another was the 1997 Francis Ford Coppola-produced, Armand Assante-starring The Odyssey — a three-hour-long feature split into two parts for the Hallmark channel. It was fairly popular because Hallmark — and I think HBO (but don’t quote my fading memory on the latter) — used to run it quite frequently.

Two years ago, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche starred as Odysseus and Penelope in the low-budget, bloody, minimally designed film, The Return. In 1989, director Franco Piavoli made the critically acclaimed, near-silent, picturesque Nostos: The Return (which you can find on YouTube). There was also a 1968 Italian series.

Because film is a creative field, several deviations also exist, such as Odysseus and the Isle of the Mists (2008), starring The Mummy’s Arnold Vosloo and Italian sword-and-sandal ‘fun epics’— I use those words in the kindest way possible — Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (1963) and Ulysses Against the Son of Hercules (1962), that have nothing to do with Homer. There’s also the 2004 Brad Pitt-starrer Troy, in which Sean Bean plays Odysseus — a film, to paraphrase my own review, designed to make sure you flunked history, mythology, literature and philosophy simultaneously.

However, my favourite divergence is Ulysses 31 (1981) — a French-Japanese anime series about Ulysses and his spaceship, The Odyssey, getting lost in unknown galaxies, after invoking Zeus and Poseidon’s wrath for killing the one-eyed machine-monster Cyclops. In the series, Telemachus, Ulysses’ young son, is with him on their journey. It is an epic in the true sense of the word.

Nolan’s preference, however, is to make an ‘anti-epic’ that trades glory and heroism in favour of telling a gruelling study of guilt and PTSD. Odysseus’ journey is framed as a triumphless victory, with heavy, unremitting emphasis on the psychological and moral costs of survival. The paralysing guilt of war, the cycle of vengeance and the illusion of closure that is just out of reach, will likely take a heavy toll on the audience’s patience. This is not a fast movie.

That’s not to say that The Odyssey is a bad, lumbering snooze-fest. The underlying source material has too much going for it. The talent, the effort and the scale are very much on-screen, as are the usual Nolan directorial preferences that make, and simultaneously break, the film.

Released by HKC, The Odyssey is rated PG. Parents are strongly cautioned: your child will grumble and be fidgety through the show. With the loud sound design, there is no chance for them — or for you — to doze off

The writer is Icon’s primary film reviewer

Published in Dawn, ICON, July 26th, 2026