There is a word the ancient Greeks had for the homecoming of a warrior, nostos, and a second word for pain, algos, and when you set them beside each other you get the thing we have since worn smooth into a lesser feeling. Nostalgia. We use it now to mean a fondness for the past, a warm ache for a song or a summer. Homer meant something closer to a wound. He meant the pain that lives inside the return itself, the discovery that the home you fought ten years and wandered ten more to reach has aged without you, and that you have aged too, and that the reunion you dreamed of is not a restoration but a reckoning with everything the years quietly took. That is the true subject of the oldest adventure story in the Western world. Not the journey. The cost of arriving.
I have seen a great many films (249 this year alone). I have never seen one hold that particular ache in its hands as steadily, as unflinchingly, and as beautifully as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I want to say at the outset, plainly, so there is no suspense about where this is going, that I believe this will be understood as one of the great films of the 2020s, if not certainly the 21st century, long after the discourse of its initial theatrical run has subsided. I loved it, and was gripped from beginning to end. And while I love Oppenheimer more, and will return to it more frequently than The Odyssey, and marvel at its existence and success in the era of streaming and on-demand movies, it is undeniable that this Homeric epic is the film Nolan’s entire career was rehearsing for, and he knew it, and he told us so.
Consider the shape of the work. For twenty-five years Christopher Nolan has made films about one subject above all others, and that subject is the deformation of time under pressure. Memento told its story backwards because memory is a wound and the wound is the structure. Inception stacked its dream-levels so that minutes on one floor became years on another and buried a dead wife at the bottom of all of them. Interstellar, the most nakedly Odyssean thing he had made until this year, sent a father into the cosmos and brought him back to a daughter grown old, a man who crossed a galaxy to get home to his child and found that the getting home was the tragedy. Dunkirk braided three timelines, a week and a day and an hour, and its entire subject was survival as a form of return, the evacuation of men who wanted only to reach the far shore of home. Tenet ran time backwards through its own plot. Oppenheimer cut fission against fusion, color against monochrome, and gave us a man who released into the world a thing that could never again be recalled and then had to live inside the aftermath.
Nolan has said, of The Odyssey, that all of his films come from it. “They’re all from the Odyssey,” he told Empire, and he was not being coy. He was confessing the source code. A quarter century of movies about grief and relativity and inversion and consequence, about the past intruding on the present in transformed and unbearable ways, turns out to have been a long approach to the one story that is itself, in its very architecture, about a man out of time trying to find his way back into it. And there is a smaller signature buried in the casting that tells you Nolan has been circling this on purpose. Matt Damon has now worked with him three times, in Interstellar, in Oppenheimer, and here, and each time he has been bound to time and to consequence. In Interstellar he was the coward frozen on an ice planet, a man who could not bear his own solitude. In Oppenheimer he was General Groves, the institutional will that commissioned the terrible device. Now he is Odysseus, the maker of the cleverest and most terrible device in the Western canon. Nolan did not cast Damon as the wanderer by accident. He cast the actor he has used to embody the weight of decisions that cannot be taken back.
Here is the thing that ought to have made this collaboration inevitable, and that almost no one says out loud. The Odysseyis not told in order. It never was. Homer opens in the middle, in medias res, with Odysseus already seven years marooned and his son Telemachus grown to a fatherless manhood. The great set pieces we think of as the spine of the story, the Cyclops, the Sirens, the descent into the underworld, are not narrated by the poem. They are narrated by Odysseus himself, in flashback, trying to remember what led him to the island of Calypso, recounting his own past to strangers. The most famous adventures in literature are a man telling the story of what already happened to him. The Odyssey is a flashback structure three thousand years old. It is a film about memory that predates film by three millennia.
Which means Nolan did not have to impose his sensibility on Homer. He had only to recognize that Homer got there first. The nonlinear return, the past surfacing transformed inside the present, the hero as the unreliable narrator of his own legend, all of it is already in the poem, and Nolan’s genius here is restraint. He trusts the ancient architecture. He shot the whole thing on IMAX 70mm film cameras, the first blockbuster ever made entirely that way, more than two million feet of celluloid, and he shot on real black-sand beaches in Iceland for the underworld and on real water for the sea, because he understood that a story about memory needs to be made of something physical enough to remember. Hoyte van Hoytema’s images do not look like the past. They look like the way the past feels when it will not leave you alone, too vivid, too present, more real than the room you are sitting in. Ludwig Göransson’s score does not accompany the film so much as haunt it, a low insistence beneath everything, less melody than memory, the sound of something trying to surface and never quite breaking through. It works the way the past works, felt before it is recognized. This is a $250 million picture, the most expensive of Nolan’s life, and every dollar is on the screen in service of a feeling most blockbusters would not risk: the sorrow of a man who cannot get back to who he was.
Because the film is about memory, Nolan makes it out of things that are physically present. He has spent his career refusing the weightlessness of computer effects, and here that refusal becomes a kind of argument. The Cyclops is a practical creation, a towering menacing puppet with real mass, and it frightens in a way a computer-rendered giant never could, because some part of the eye knows it stood on the set. The Trojan Horse is an enormous built object, timber and rope and scale, and you feel its weight in every frame. The ship is a real ship on real water in the Mediterranean. The passage through Scylla and Charybdis was staged with cranes and a practical whirlpool, modest in scale but genuinely there, actual machinery churning actual sea, and the peril reads as peril because it was, in some measure, real. Nothing floats. Everything has heft.
The descent into Hades is the most astonishing of these. Nolan shot it on the black volcanic sand of Iceland, and he buried stunt performers in that sand, breathing through specially-built straws, and had them rise up out of it, the dead clawing back toward the light of the living. The image is so simple and so physical that it lands with a force no digital underworld has ever found. These are not effects laid over the film. They are the film’s insistence that myth happened to real bodies in real places, that the past has weight, that it can be dug out of the ground. And Nolan shot much of it where the story remembers itself. The sequences filmed in Greece are the most beautiful in the picture, the light and the water and the dry stone of the islands rendered on 70mm with a clarity that is almost unbearable, as though the land were a character that outlived everyone who ever walked across it. To see Ithaca in the Greek light is to understand why a man would cross the world to come home, and why the coming home would break his heart.
And yet one structural decision organizes the entire film and holds, in miniature, everything it is trying to do. Nolan shows us the notorious sack of Troy twice.
The first time, it is event. It is the horse, the trick, the opening of the gates, the cleverness working exactly as designed. It is pure kinetic present tense, some of the most remarkable action filmmaking of Nolan’s career, and it plays like triumph because in the moment triumph is what it is. You are inside the adrenaline of the metis, the cunning intelligence, the plan coming together. You feel the thrill of the maker watching his device do precisely what he built it to do.
The second time, near the end, it is memory, and it is one of the most profound and moving passages of filmmaking I have encountered this year. Nothing on the screen has fundamentally changed. It is the same fall, the same fire, very nearly the same footage. What has changed is you. You have now traveled the whole distance with this man. You have seen the men who did not come home. You have followed him into the land of the dead. You have watched twenty years pass over a house in Ithaca. And so the second telling of the fall of the great city arrives carrying everything the first one cost, and the triumph curdles into horror, and you understand that the thing separating the two sequences was never on the screen at all. It was time. It was knowledge. It was the difference between living a thing and remembering it.
That is nostalgia in its original and terrible sense, staged formally rather than explained. Nolan has built a machine that makes you feel the exact gap the word was invented to name, the gap between the event and the ache of the event, between Troy as it burned and Troy as it is carried. Homer knew this trick too. In the poem, Odysseus sits at the Phaeacian court and a blind bard sings the tale of Troy, and the great man weeps, because to hear your own glory turned into a song is to hear it turned into the past, into a thing you can never re-enter. The first sack is the war. The second sack is the survivor. And the whole film lives in the distance between them.
If the two sackings are the film’s structure, its heart is a single conversation, and it is the most extraordinary scene Nolan has ever directed. It is Book 19 of the poem, brought to the screen and then quietly detonated.
Odysseus has come home at last, but in disguise, dressed as a beggar, unrecognized in his own hall. Penelope, not knowing the ragged stranger is her husband, receives him under the law her husband taught her to keep. “My husband insisted we honor guests as family,” she says, and with that line the scene arms itself, because what she is invoking is xenia, guest-friendship, the sacred bond between host and stranger that is the single most important social law in the Homeric world. It is not a courtesy. It is enforced by Zeus himself, Zeus Xenios, protector of guests. To violate it is to tear the fabric that holds civilization together. And here is Odysseus, the stranger at the hearth, being honored under that very law, in his own house, by his own wife, who does not know him. The dramatic irony is almost unbearable before he says a word.
Then Penelope tests him, as she tests every stranger who claims to have known her husband. Describe what he wore. In Homer, the disguised Odysseus describes a golden brooch worked with the image of a hound clutching a dappled fawn. Nolan changes it, and the change is the key to the entire film. In this telling, Odysseus describes a golden pin in the shape of Athena, encircled in fire, and he says of his other self that “he never took it off.” Athena is the goddess of metis, of cunning, of exactly the faculty that is Odysseus, the quality that built the horse. He wears his own cleverness over his heart, always, and in this image the cleverness is on fire, because the trick that his cleverness built is the thing that set the world alight. This is why Athena feels less like a character than a presence hovering at the edge of every frame. She is not a supporting player. She is the shape of his own mind, protecting him and damning him at once.
And then the beggar, asked why he made it home when Odysseus did not, begins to speak the truth in the third person, and the film opens all the way up. He describes the night he left the belly of the Trojan Horse and opened the gates of Troy, and what came through them. “He saw something break that night, all that’s ever sacred.” He says that “to burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire,” and that this burning consumed even the law of Zeus. He says that the breaking of this law is spreading now “like plague,” and that “our age of bronze is collapsing.” When Penelope finally understands what she is hearing, she says, “You are the people from the sea.”
I want to be precise about what Nolan is doing here, because it is breathtaking and it is easy to miss inside the emotion of the scene. He is describing the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The real one. Around 1200 BCE the interlocking civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean, the Mycenaean palaces and the Hittite empire and the whole networked world of trade and language and law, fell apart within roughly two generations, and historians have argued for a century over why, and among the culprits named in the ancient record are the mysterious raiders the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples. Nolan has taken that historical catastrophe, the actual end of an age of the world, and pinned it to a single man’s cleverness as its hinge. One trick. One idea. One night at the gates. And the sacred order that held the world together comes down, and keeps coming down, spreading outward from Troy like a contagion, until it reaches even the walls of Ithaca. The fall of Troy in this film is not a battle. It is the beginning of the end of a world, and Odysseus is the man who opened the door and let it in.
Watch, too, what Jennifer Lame is cutting together while he speaks. The confession is domestic. It happens at the hearth, under the law of hospitality, spoken softly to the wife he has crossed the earth to reach. And against those quiet interior frames she splices the sack itself, the fire, the pillage, the murder, the brutal unmaking of a city, the violation of every sacred bond there is. Home and the annihilation of home, alternating, in the same breath. The door he is standing inside cut against the gates he tore open. This intercutting is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in a film, and it is not decoration. It is the film’s nervous system laid bare. It is the reason the homecoming is impossible, rendered as pure editing: he cannot go home, because he is the man who taught the world that a home can be entered as a guest and turned into a grave. He is the reason home stopped being safe. And now he is a guest at his own hearth, trying to find his way back inside.
Here is where the film’s moral vision becomes something finer and darker than the story it could have told. It would have been easy, and false, to make this a film about a guilty man. Nolan does not do that. The film does not hold Odysseus as the author of the horror. It holds him as a man who was swept up in the rage of Agamemnon, the commander, the king, and who that night in the burning city finally saw with his own eyes what that rage truly was. The guilt does not settle on the maker. It rises, past him, onto the machinery of command he served, onto the institution, onto the king whose fury turned an opened gate into the burning of the world.
The wound Odysseus carries for twenty years is not that he did it. It is that he saw it. He built the device, he supplied the cunning, he opened the gates, and then he stood in the firelight and witnessed what poured through, and the witnessing is the thing that broke him. This is recognition in the most literal and devastating sense the word can hold, the moment a man understands what he has been part of. And it is here that the film reveals itself as the completion of a thought Nolan began in his previous film. In Oppenheimer, Matt Damon was Groves, the general, the will of the state that commissions the terrible thing and then hands its use to other men. Here Damon is the maker instead, the man of cunning whose invention is loosed by someone else’s rage into a catastrophe he can never call back. Two films in a row, the same wound examined from two sides: the one who builds the thing is never the one who decides how it is used, and he must spend the rest of his life living inside what got made. The bomb and the horse are the same object in Nolan’s imagination. Both are the clever gift accepted into the home. Both are the trick that ends an age. Oppenheimer was the man carrying the bomb afterward. The Odyssey is the man carrying the horse all the way home.
Against all of this weight the film sets its most seductive temptation, and its quietest act of heroism. Calypso, played by Charlize Theron in a register so strange and luminous it tilts the whole film toward the surreal, offers Odysseus the one thing that would end his suffering. She offers him immortality. She offers him her island and her bed and an endless present with no aging, no death, and crucially no memory and no return. She offers him the chance to stop being in time.
And he refuses her. This is the moral center that answers the horror of Troy. A man who has witnessed the end of the world, who carries a wound that will not close, who knows that the home he is fighting toward may no longer exist in any form he could recognize, is offered oblivion, and he chooses instead to go home and grow old and die among mortals. He chooses time, with everything time costs, over a timelessness that would cost him nothing except himself. To accept Calypso would be to become like the gods, outside of consequence, outside of grief, and outside of love, because love without loss is not love. Odysseus chooses the ache. He chooses nostos and algos together, because they cannot be separated, and a man who refuses the pain of return has refused the return itself.
There is a surreal quality to Calypso, and to the hovering presence of Athena, and to everything Nolan shoots in and around Ithaca, as though Odysseus’s own past has already become something shrouded in memory and legend even to him. That quality is not stylistic indulgence. It is point of view. We are seeing the past the way Odysseus now holds it, luminous and unreal and impossible to touch, and it will matter enormously by the end.
Matt Damon gives what I take to be his finest performance in at least five years, and one of the most complete of his career. The astonishment of it is range held inside restraint. He ages across the film, not only in the makeup but in the body, the shoulders, the weight of the walk, a man growing old inside his own story. He is stoic in the way a soldier learns to be, holding down a grief and a guilt he cannot set on the table, and then, without ever seeming to break that surface, he lets you see underneath it: the fear of a man who has looked at the end of the world, the vulnerability of one who suspects the home he is fighting toward can no longer be there, the love that keeps him walking anyway, the regret that has calcified into the thing he carries in place of a heart. Most actors would play these as separate notes, one per scene, and congratulate themselves on the variety. Damon plays them at once, layered and simultaneous, so that a single look holds the stoicism and the fear and the sorrow together, the way a real face holds a whole life. The hearth confession is where it becomes undeniable, the still center of the film, delivered almost entirely in stillness. But the performance is not in any one scene. It is in the accumulation, the sense of a man carrying twenty years and an entire dead age in his body, and never once setting the weight down.
Anne Hathaway is his equal as Penelope. Hers is the harder task, a woman who has spent twenty years being watched and tested and worn at, and she plays intelligence under siege, a mind that has learned to give nothing away until the moment it must. When recognition finally reaches her it arrives like weather, and Hathaway lets you watch her decide, in real time, whether she can afford to believe what she is seeing. It is the best work she has done in years.
Tom Holland is a revelation as Telemachus. He carries the film’s opening, the fatherless son gone looking for a man who may already be dead, and he ages before us from a boy into someone ready to stand at his father’s side. There is nothing of his lighter roles in the work. He is grave, searching, and wholly convincing. And John Leguizamo, as the swineherd Eumaeus, gives the film its warmth, the loyal servant who shelters a beggar he does not recognize, and turns a small part into one of the picture’s most moving presences. His scenes with the disguised Odysseus hold a tenderness the film’s darkness needs in order to register.
Not everything lands. Robert Pattinson, so often the most interesting actor in any room, is miscast as Antinous. He reaches for a menace the role wants and finds only mannerism, and beside performances this precise, the shortfall is impossible to miss. And I confess I have no idea why Zendaya was cast as Athena. The conception of the goddess as a hovering presence rather than a character is inspired, but it is a conception achieved by Nolan’s framing and Jennifer Lame’s cutting, not by anything the performance is asked to do. The part gives one of the most magnetic actors of her generation nothing to seize, no scene to command, no register to play. Her particular gifts go wholly unused. You could have cast an unknown and lost nothing, which makes the presence of a star that size a real puzzle.
And so at last he comes home, and here Nolan makes his boldest and most revealing departure from the poem. In Homer, Odysseus is recognized through memory and tenderness and the body. The dog Argos, who was a pup when his master sailed and is nothing now but a ruined old animal too weak to rise, has somehow refused to die for twenty years, and when the beggar passes he lifts his head and knows him, knows him past the rags and the years and the lie, and only then, permitted at last, closes his eyes and goes. If you have ever loved a dog and had to let one go, you will not make it through this moment with dry eyes. The old nurse finds the hunting scar while washing his feet. Penelope proves him at last with the secret of a marriage bed he built with his own hands around a living olive tree still rooted in the earth, a bed that cannot be moved, the still point that the collapse of the whole bronze world could not reach. Homer let his hero be known by love.
But the bed does not appear in the film. Instead, the recognition comes through confession. Odysseus, still the beggar, speaks of what was lost at Troy, what was lost in the world, and the honor that has drained out of the Greek warrior, and Penelope hears in it a grief no bard has ever set to song. Then she declares that she will marry whichever suitor can string Odysseus’s great bow and send a single arrow clean through a row of axe heads. The suitors strain against the bow and fail, every one of them. Then the beggar takes it up, and strings it as though it were nothing, and looses the arrow through the axes, and in that instant he is known. He is recognized not through a shared and tender memory but through the one act only he can perform, the reassertion of the warrior that the war made of him. And then the hall becomes a killing floor. Odysseus cuts down the suitors, including the cowardly Antinous. The survivors surrender.
Understand what Nolan has done by making this the recognition. He has refused to let Odysseus come home solely as a husband. He lets him come home as a man scarred by killing. Violence is what Troy left him, and the homecoming he fought twenty years to reach turns out to be one more sacking, one more hall filled with the dead by his hand. The gates of Troy and the doors of his own hall become the same threshold. He cannot stop being one of the people from the sea. He arrives, and the arriving is a massacre. And the suitors are the collapse itself, arrived at last at the one door he swore to hold. They are what fills a king’s house when the king is gone, the rot that grows in the vacuum of a vanished order, the plague that spread from the gates of Troy finally reaching the walls of Ithaca. To cut them down does not end the collapse. It proves the collapse followed him home. Where Homer offered a dog and a scar and a rooted bed, three tender proofs that the man is still, underneath everything, someone who can be loved, Nolan offers a bow. The instrument of recognition is the instrument of killing. That is the whole tragedy of the film compressed into a single choice of prop.
And this is why the ending is the most honest choice in the entire movie, and why it completes the thought the whole film has been building toward. Having killed his way back into his own house, Odysseus does not stay in it. He cedes the throne to Telemachus. He hands the kingdom to the son who grew up without him, and he leaves Ithaca. He was right, in the scene by the hearth, when he said the home he was returning to could not possibly still be there. It cannot. He cannot live in it. The man who broke the world cannot simply sit back down inside the peace he broke, cannot pick up the life of a king in a hall he has just turned into a battlefield.
So he goes into exile, and he goes west, toward the sunset, toward the direction the ancients gave the dead, to seek some peace he could not find at home and to honor the men who never came back at all. And he does not go alone. He takes Penelope with him. This is the film’s final and quietest reversal of everything we thought nostos was supposed to mean. Home was never the island. It was never the throne or the hall or the marriage bed. Home is the person who remembers the same past you do, and so home turns out to be portable, something two people can carry out into exile together, walking west into the dark, having given the rooted kingdom away. The homecoming is real. It is simply not a place. It is her.
There is one last exchange, and it is where Nolan reveals that he knew, from the first frame, exactly what kind of film he was making. On the road into exile, Penelope asks her husband how history will remember him. And Odysseus answers that civilization will grow, that his story will harden over time into another legend, that there will be songs to remember those who could write, and that his mistakes will all be forgotten.
His mistakes will all be forgotten. Sit with that line, because it is the film turning to look directly at itself. Odysseus knows he is about to become a legend, and he knows what legends do. They keep the glory and they lose the cost. The songs will remember the horse and the cleverness and the long wandering and the return. They will forget the gates, the fire, the world he broke, the law of Zeus burning, the age of bronze collapsing outward like a plague. The legend will forget the mistake. And that is the surreal, half-remembered quality that hangs over the entire film, the sense that Odysseus’s own past has already turned to myth even as he lives it, luminous and unreal and impossible to touch. He is watching himself become a story while he is still breathing, and he knows the story will be a lie of omission.
This is Nolan’s final move, and it is the one that made me understand what he had actually built. Because his film is the correction. The Odyssey that Nolan has made is precisely the song that remembers the mistake the legend forgot. It puts the cost back beside the glory. It sets the second sack down next to the first. It insists on the fire at the gates and the guilt of the king and the plague of collapse, all the things that three thousand years of retelling sanded away until we were left with a boy’s adventure about a clever man and a big wooden horse. Nolan went back and found the wound underneath the legend, and he shot it on two million feet of film so that we would not be able to look away from it. He has not merely adapted the oldest story in the West. He has remembered it, in the full and painful sense of that word, and handed it back to us with the ache intact.
I have tried to be disciplined about my rapture, because rapture that cannot explain itself is worthless as criticism. So let me end by explaining it. The Odyssey is a film about how a person survives the collapse of their world, and it moves through that survival by an emotional arc that begins in recognition, the terrible seeing at the gates of Troy, passes into dread, the plague of collapse spreading toward home, descends into despair, the knowledge that home cannot possibly still be there, and comes out the far side into the hard grace of a homecoming that is not a place at all but a person, carried west into exile. It insists that the only road home runs directly through the pain of homecoming, and that a man who refuses the pain has refused the home. It says that our cleverest gifts are the ones most likely to end the world, and that the guilt for how they are used belongs to the kings and not only to the makers, though the makers must carry the seeing forever. It says that a legend is a mistake the songs agreed to forget. And it says all of this in the language of pure cinema, in two sackings and a scene by a hearth and a bow strung in a doomed hall, on two million feet of film, with a restraint and a grandeur that no one else working today could hold in balance.
Nolan told us his films were all from the Odyssey. It turns out he meant that they were all trying to reach it, the way Odysseus spent twenty years trying to reach Ithaca, and like Odysseus he has finally arrived, and found the thing he was looking for exactly where he left it, and discovered that arriving was not the end of the journey but the beginning of the last one. This is the capstone. This is the film the whole career was a voyage toward. I do not know when I will next see a movie that understands so completely that to come home is the hardest thing a person can do, and the only thing worth crossing the world for.
The Greeks had a word for it. We wore it down to a smaller feeling. Nolan has given it back its ancient weight. I suspect many of us will carry this film the way Odysseus carried Troy, for a very long time.
★★★★★
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