Let me be clear about the scale before I say a word against this film. I’m grading it nine to ten. Not one to ten. Anything I flag here I’d let slide in a lesser movie without a second thought — I’d never subject a Tubi thriller to this kind of autopsy. But Christopher Nolan didn’t ask for that grace. He shot the whole thing on IMAX film, called it an event, and stood on his own floor-beats-most reputation to do it. When a filmmaker reaches for greatness, you owe him the honesty of measuring whether he got there. This one didn’t. It’s a good movie. It is not the epic everyone was promised, and the gap between those two things is worth understanding.
Because the failure is coherent. It’s not a grab-bag of gripes. About halfway through I noticed I kept writing down the same complaint in different costumes, and by the end it had a name: Nolan cut the wanting. The engine of the Odyssey is a man who wants to go home so badly he’ll refuse immortality for a rocky island. Strip that out and you’re left with three hours of extremely well-made events happening to a man whose desire was never established. That’s the movie.
The scandal of the star power
Start with the casting, because that’s where the discourse lived for months and it’s the least interesting problem in the film. The Helen controversy was noise. Lupita Nyong’o as Helen was jarring for a hot second and then completely irrelevant — and the movie itself tells you why. It makes a point of saying the war was never really about her, that it was stupid to fight over a woman, that Helen was the pretext men gave themselves. Homer already knew this. The old men on the wall in the Iliad admit she’s worth the war and that it’s absurd in the same breath. So the “face that launched a thousand ships” test doesn’t even apply — she isn’t the engine, she’s the excuse. Any actress can carry an excuse. Honestly her role could have been cut entirely and you’d have the same movie, which tells you how much the internet was arguing about nothing.
And here’s the consistency point nobody making the “woke” argument wants to sit with: I don’t think there was a single Greek actor in this movie. Not one. So holding it to a standard that says the cast should be Greek is one thing — a coherent thing, even, if that’s the hill. But holding it to a standard that says the cast should be white is a different rule wearing the first one’s clothes. You either want authenticity of origin, in which case where are the Greeks, or you don’t, in which case sit down. A principle that only fires in one direction was never a principle. It’s a preference with a costume on.
The real casting problem isn’t race. It’s wattage. This film would have been stronger with unknowns, because the star power steals from the character every single time.
I could not see John Leguizamo as Eumaeus. I saw Leguizamo. That’s not a knock on his acting — the read was fine — it’s that thirty years of accumulated persona walks into the frame with him, and the film needed a lifelong slave who’d kept faith for twenty years, and I got a recognizable actor doing faithful instead. Casting is storytelling, and he didn’t disappear. Made worse by the fact that they lightened him with makeup to sell a Greek reading, and the intervention was obvious. Which is the bitter joke of it: his natural coloring — olive, dark — was closer to a real Bronze Age Aegean than the marble-white Greece the “defend Homer” crowd imagines. They had the accurate look and painted over it. His body language in the role was wrong too, and that I lay on the director, not the actor. Nobody decided what a twenty-year-faithful body looks like, so nobody performed it.
Zendaya arrives as Zendaya and plays Athena at her normal register — no projection, no divinity, nothing of the goddess who’s been running interference for this man for two decades. It’s the same failure I’ve flagged in Rami Malek: an actor who’s genuinely effective when a role calls for withholding and coldness, and who falls apart the moment it demands outward force and projection. Athena is all projection. The performance doesn’t have that gear.
Tom Holland is Holland in a tunic, and this one breaks the spine of the film. Telemachus is supposed to be the second protagonist — a boy who doesn’t know if he’s his father’s son becoming a man who can stand in the hall and kill beside him. That arc is the entire payload of the “return of the father, elevation of the son” reading. Holland is the same sniveling kid at the end that he is at the beginning. No arc. Which is exactly why the reconciliation between father and son never paid off for me — there was no arc for the scene to conclude.
Robert Pattinson, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of thing I’ll defend. He plays Antinous as a sleazy, greasy coward trying to steal a dead man’s throne, and he commits to it completely — no vanity, no winking, the same total submersion he’s been doing since he walked away from Twilight and went straight to the Safdies and Cronenberg. And here’s the detail that matters: the younger actor they cast as his earlier self looked like a young Pattinson. The formation lined up. You believed the boy grew into the man.
Which is precisely the problem with Elliot Page as Sinon, and the contrast makes it clear it was never about the acting. The younger version of Sinon in the film is a chubby boy who doesn’t match what the character grows into. The presence and the character’s formation don’t line up, so the production had to digitally assist the adult image to bridge it, and the assist was too obvious, and the voice does the rest. When a film has to alter the picture to sell a casting choice, that’s the same script-bending failure from the other side — the story didn’t need modifying, the frame did. And it’s the cruelest possible place to have that problem, because Sinon is the one character the audience has to be inside the deception with. Pattinson’s continuity earns your belief; Page’s discontinuity spends it.
The counter-proof is sitting right there in the same movie. Agamemnon works because you never see his face. Oversized helmet, oversized armor, no man underneath — and he’s terrifying. Your eye goes straight to him and you know he’s dangerous. Take the actor out of the equation entirely and, funny enough, that’s when the character finally shows up. Which is the whole argument against the rest of the cast, standing there in one figure. (Though why cast Benny Safdie and then bury him where any body that size would do, I couldn’t tell you. Nolan probably just wanted the man who directed Good Time on set.)
The wanting, cut scene by scene
Here’s the structural heart of it. Odysseus is polytropos — the man of twists, the one who wins by disguise and cunning rather than by arms. That’s what separates him from Achilles and it’s the whole reason he’s the one who survives. Nolan systematically removed every scene that establishes it.
The plow scene is gone. When Odysseus is drafted, he fakes madness to dodge the war and gets exposed when they put his infant son in front of his plow. It’s the first thing you’re supposed to learn about him: he lies, he’s cunning, and he can be out-thought. Cut it, and every disguise that follows arrives unearned. The sheep escape from the Cyclops, the Trojan horse, the beggar in his own hall — those aren’t three separate tricks. They’re one man running the same play three times across twenty years, and the film never established the play. So the sheep didn’t work, and the beggar didn’t work, and the suitor-killing that should have been the payoff of a lifetime of cunning read as a good action scene with the meaning drained out.
The Cyclops kill is a straight character violation. Homer’s Odysseus can’t kill Polyphemus — the rock’s too big, that’s the entire point. He wins by being “Nobody,” escapes, and then ruins himself by shouting his real name across the water, which is what earns Poseidon’s twenty-year curse. That scene exists to prove cunning has consequences. Nolan replaced it with a kill. Now the curse has no cause and the man has no flaw.
Scylla became an octopus. The passage through the strait is the darkest arithmetic in the poem: six heads on six necks, six men taken, and Odysseus knows the count going in, steers into it deliberately because the whirlpool loses everyone, and doesn’t warn the crew. That’s a commander spending six lives he already counted, not a monster fight. Turn it into a generic tentacle creature and all of that math evaporates into a set piece. And in IMAX, a bad design doesn’t hide — it magnifies. This was the single worst thing in the film to look at.
Calypso gets no room. Seven years on her island, a goddess offering him immortality, and he says no because he wants his wife and his rock. That refusal should be the film’s thesis statement — the purest test of the wanting. Matt Damon gives nothing in the scene. Charlize Theron sells her love for him; he gives her nothing back. If he doesn’t want Ithaca there, he never wants it anywhere, and the engine is dead at the source.
Circe is announced, not dramatized. In Homer the pigs are what men already are — she reveals appetite, she doesn’t lecture. The film plays it as a forced “all men are pigs” beat, and Odysseus’s rescue of his crew lacks any emotion. Theme stated instead of shown. (Samantha Morton apparently got best-in-show notices from more than one critic, which makes me think the scene was written that way, not played that way.)
This is where it clicked for me, somewhere around the Cyclops. Every scene where Odysseus is supposed to be cunning got rewritten so he’s merely capable. In the poem he wants to go home; in the film he’s got PTSD and doesn’t especially want to, which is a legitimate story someone could tell — just not this one. The name on the poster is a contract, and the wanting is what it promises.
What actually works
I have almost nothing bad to say about how this was shot, and I’m holding it high. The storm at sea is tremendous — realistic, immersive, you’re on the deck. The interior of the Trojan horse is another genuine high point. Anne Hathaway as Penelope is the one performance with no asterisk: she plays real emotion, real pain under the suitors, real weight when Odysseus returns — and the fact that she can do it while everyone around her flatlines tells you the actors were never the variable. Somebody decided this film would be cool, and she’s the one who got to be warm.
Agamemnon, as I said, is the film at its best. The third act has power in stretches. The Cyclops apparently terrified people and the effects elsewhere are strong. The ambition is real and I will always spend the ticket on this over another reboot.
The problem is Nolan had no counterweight
The editing undercuts the photography, and this is the part that actually made me mad. You can shoot the most claustrophobic Trojan horse interior in the world and then cut out of it before the dread has time to accumulate, and dread is nothing but accumulated time — a single frame can’t hold it, only duration can. The storm, the horse, the horror imagery: none of it gets room to sit. There were even visible splices in dialogue, which isn’t a style choice, it’s just sloppy. The whole thing is cut in that busy modern rhythm that keeps your eye occupied and starves your nervous system, and I think that’s the real reason I checked my watch twice and found myself ready for it to end instead of wanting it to keep going. Three hours of stimulation, nothing built up in me by the ninety-minute mark. Think of No Country for Old Men — the Coens and Deakins hold on nothing happening until it’s unbearable, and that is how you do dread, that is how you do horror. Nolan shot horror imagery and edited it like an action beat. Terror doesn’t survive coverage.
And that’s the real verdict. This is what Nolan looks like with nobody in the room. Every strength he has is on screen — the IMAX, the storm, the structural conceit, the fortune spent making it real. And every weakness runs completely unchecked: emotion held at arm’s length, characters as functions, star wattage over congruence, cutting that won’t let a moment breathe. Nobody could tell him the plow scene was load-bearing. Nobody could tell him Damon had to want Ithaca on Calypso’s island. Nobody could tell him Holland can’t carry the son. When you’ve made Oppenheimer, the notes stop coming.
You can even see the hedging. Cast broadly, then fix the congruence in the makeup chair. Shoot horror, then cut it like an action film. That’s not a man executing a singular vision — that’s a man with total freedom splitting the difference with himself.
His worst is still better than most people’s best. That’s true, and it’s exactly the problem, because it’s the reason nobody stops him. Guy Lodge’s line in Variety lands harder than I think he meant it to: Homer is where the heart is not.
Now let me put my own thumb on the scale honestly, because a review this critical can read like a takedown and it isn’t one. Half of what dampened this for me is that I know the Odyssey. I walked in knowing the plow scene should be there, knowing Odysseus can’t kill the Cyclops, knowing what Scylla’s supposed to cost, knowing the man is meant to ache for home. Every deviation registered as a deviation. If you go in cold — no knowledge of the poem, no expectations of the shape — I think you’ll enjoy this considerably more than I did, because you won’t feel the absence of the things that aren’t there. You’ll just watch a big, gorgeous, well-shot adventure. My knowledge is a handicap here as much as the film’s choices are, and I want to be fair about that.
And for the record: this holds up against Nolan’s other great films. It’s not his best. But it’s probably in his top five, maybe top three. So if you read all of this and came away thinking I hated the movie — I didn’t. Everything above is me answering one question and one question only: what’s keeping a good movie from being a truly great, truly epic one. That’s a nine-to-ten conversation. On the ordinary scale, this is a good film and an easy recommend.
Go see it. It’s better than almost anything else in the theater, and it’s the kind of movie they don’t make anymore, and your ticket is a vote for the ecosystem that still lets a man shoot Homer on 70mm instead of greenlighting the next piece of superhero slush. Just don’t walk in expecting the epic. Walk in expecting Nolan — all of him, uncut, for better and for worse.