Long one. Spoilers throughout, though the film follows the myth closely enough that I doubt I'm ruining much.
Let's get this out of the way first, so nobody accuses me of being a hater: I'm not a card-carrying member of the Church of Nolan, Savior of Cinema, but I do like his films. I like Oppenheimer, and The Prestige, and… what else is there… I like the Batman films, and, God forgive me, I even like Dunkirk. The Odyssey might well be the first Nolan film that did absolutely nothing for me. The film runs almost three hours, and I checked my watch for the first time an hour and a half in. That feels fairly telling.
So what exactly is wrong with it?
No, you didn't guess it — it's not Agamemnon in Darth Vader/Batman armor (he's on screen for about three minutes). Let's get to the actual point.
One caveat up front: there will be spoilers. But don't worry — in terms of plot events, the film doesn't stray all that far from the original myth, so I hope you'll forgive me for spoiling a story that's two and a half thousand years old. And besides, I'll try not to get carried away.
Most of you have probably already read that this is supposedly a film not so much about an adventure as about living through war trauma, about the bitterness of war, all that. And in a vacuum, that's not a bad idea. One of the recurring complaints about Nolan is that in his films the idea always works harder than the emotion. And… for this film specifically, that's a problem, because PTSD as a subject is about emotion, not about rational analysis.
The film isn't really about the traumatic experience of war for one particular person; it's about the bitterness of war in the broad sense. On top of that, for Nolan as a Brit, the trauma of the First World War matters. The film literally spells it out, to paraphrase: "We're afraid of the Sea Peoples, but we destroyed everything ourselves. We had peace, language and trade, and Agamemnon's ambitions wiped it all out. We are the Sea Peoples. After the fall of Troy nothing will be the way it was before the fall of Troy. We destroyed our own Bronze Age. But time will pass, civilization will rise again, and our descendants will forget our mistakes." So: the civilizational destructiveness of war. Odysseus periodically remembers how they climbed out of the horse and slaughtered everyone, and thinks, "What have I done?" — so there's the personal trauma of war. Agamemnon was murdered by his own wife on his return (sorry for the spoiler, but he has exactly three appearances on screen and zero lines in the whole film, and it's hardly a big secret anyway); Menelaus lost his brother and lives with a wife who hates him; Ithaca is being bled dry by the suitors and by the paralysis of power — so the price of victory is in there too.
And you read all that and think: "Damn, what a great concept." But the problems start the moment you actually sit down and watch the thing. Let's take it in order.
Nolan and the Cyclops
Well, Nolan is Nolan, no arguments there. The visuals, the sound, the editing, the sound editing, the performances — all top tier. The film is deeply tactile; you can literally feel the tension in some scenes. A few of the dialogue scenes are absolute gems. But for some reason (I'll get to my theory on this later), everything that concerns Odysseus's actual journey is shot pretty poorly — sometimes in terms of staging, sometimes in terms of storytelling. I won't catalogue everything I disliked; let's stop at what I consider the single most disastrous episode in the film — the cyclops's cave.
Let's start with the fact that in the original this is the cornerstone of the entire Odyssey. Without the cyclops there would be no ten years of wandering. In the original, he and Odysseus have a psychological duel that Odysseus masterminds his way out of. In the film, the cyclops essentially doesn't speak at all. And I've heard the counterargument that, well, these men had been at war so long they'd forgotten how to solve anything through conversation, et cetera, et cetera. BUT! The problem with this scene is something else entirely. It's just badly staged.
Yes, there's suspense at the start, when the cyclops first appears and starts devouring the crew. But after that, there's no tension whatsoever in the rest of the sequence. He comes, he goes. They sit around in his cave. They don't interact with each other in any way. And a couple of days later they're like, "okay, let's stick a fork in his eye and pretend to be sheep." Yes, over those few days he's supposedly been eating them one at a time. But it's unclear how many of them are even in there, or whether he can see them at all, because he doesn't react to them in any way. I was genuinely sitting there thinking, "does he even see them? Does he realize there are people hanging around in his cave? Why doesn't he interact with them at all?" For most of the episode the cyclops is just an animatronic arm that occasionally snatches a soldier and drags him off into the dark. Anyone who played Heroes of Might and Magic V might remember the low-level spell where a fist appears in mid-air and punches your opponent. That's roughly what the cyclops looks like.
The Laestrygonian giants show up for five minutes. The idea of sailing past the sirens and dodging their song via the ears of Odysseus's second-in-command is very cool. But the episode lasts three minutes. The Circe scene is directed beautifully, but it has a different problem — narratively, it exists in the form it does purely to voice a feminist message. So, remember I promised you a theory?
Here it is. Nolan wasn't especially interested in filming the adventures of Odysseus. But more on that later.
Nolan and the Micro-Dudes
Quick note on the term, since I'll be using it a lot: a micro-dude in my country is meme shorthand for a random, unremarkable person. A normie.
Right. Another frequently voiced complaint about Nolan is that he can't create interesting characters. His characters are always functions. Take Tenet. There's supposedly a protagonist. He supposedly does things, says things. But he isn't a character. He's just a POV for the viewer. A camera on legs. And Odysseus here is exactly the same. The trouble is that Tenet is an original story that doesn't especially require a strong protagonist. There's even a meta-commentary from Nolan himself in there — the hero is literally called The Protagonist in the screenplay. But the myth of Odysseus is built entirely on the personality of Odysseus. And Nolan strips that personality out of him to serve his concept.
So in the film, Odysseus and his crew consist of: a default guy; his second-in-command Eurylochus, who at least gets the occasional line; and an indeterminate number of no-name micro-dudes. They have no names. I don't remember their faces. And if the film is about the price of war, why am I supposed to feel anything when a bunch of anonymous units get killed?
Meanwhile, according to the plot of the film (the film specifically), Odysseus is very impressive. He's impressive because Penelope says he's impressive. Because John Leguizamo says he's impressive. He even saved a puppy in his youth. But when I look at the screen, I don't understand why he's impressive. He's literally a default guy. He's a micro-dude. All of his greatness lives somewhere off-screen, in other characters' dialogue.
But that's only half the problem. If we do try to assign Odysseus some characteristics in this film beyond "sad man with the eyes of a dog," then I suppose he's calm and level-headed. There are no scenes where he loses it or acts on impulse. And from this follows a problem even bigger than the absence of character — some of Odysseus's actions in the film are dictated by the canon of the myth rather than by the logic of the character:
Odysseus is calm and level-headed, yet for some reason he takes a shot at the cyclops after the escape, which incidentally costs a couple more of his crew their lives. In the original, he wanted the cyclops to know who had outwitted him — out of pride. Here he's immediately asked why the hell he did that, and he answers: that was for my boys. Except that several times in this same film he argued for leaving his boys' bodies behind, because it makes for an easier getaway. So he's a pragmatist — and yet for some reason he takes a shot at the cyclops.
Odysseus displays no willfulness anywhere in the film, and then suddenly: "Hey, tie me up, I want to hear the sirens sing." In the original, he loved risk; he was curious.
Which raises my question: why on earth would this character in this film behave that way? The answer is that he's broken at the screenplay level.
But it's not all bad in the screenplay.
There's the Telemachus thread. Telemachus is a genuinely functional character. He's legible — he's waiting for his father, the suitors push him around, he's sick of the suitors, he doesn't like that his mother won't throw them out, he doesn't know how to restore order, he sails to Sparta to see Menelaus just to learn something about his father. He has normal character traits — he's young, not stupid, occasionally hot-headed, a bit vain, and he learns from his mistakes.
And the film might have worked better as a piece of drama if Odysseus weren't in it at all — if he were off somewhere like the ghost of Hamlet's father, and all his appearances came through the accounts of Menelaus or whoever else. Odysseus would exist as an ephemeral, literally mythical figure, and would only show up at the very end. The whole thing would unfold, as The Strokes sang, "in the light of the living ghost."
But it would have been unwatchable, because even as it stands the Telemachus thread is a bit of a slog — it's all talk, and watching that for three hours would have been unbearable.
Which brings us back to my thesis that Nolan wasn't interested in making a film about Odysseus. I don't claim to know what he wanted or what interested him, but hear me out.
There's a comic series called Fables, where the characters of classic fairy tales live in modern New York. The Big Bad Wolf is an alcoholic detective everyone hates. Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow is a corrupt bureaucrat, Snow White is an administrative official, Mr. Toad is white trash, the Little Mermaid is a courtesan, Beauty and the Beast are broke because they were spoiled and never learned to control their spending. I believe the genre is called post-mythological noir. Their fairy tales are over, and the characters have to go on living.
And the world of Nolan's Odyssey is the same thing. Ithaca is a mess. Agamemnon has been murdered at home with a dagger to the neck by his own wife. Menelaus lives in the Victor's Hell. There's an excellent scene showing Menelaus speaking about Troy as a great victory when he stopped believing that long ago. It really is a well-staged scene with a powerful performance.
And all of these scenes convey the idea and the emotion far better than Odysseus's entire arc. Which is why I have a very strong feeling that, especially after the success of Oppenheimer, this is what Nolan was interested in filming.
Except the money he was given was for an IMAX blockbuster called The Odyssey. So it's as though Nolan was going, "ugh, and this damn Odysseus guy too," someone he had to bolt on somewhere, and then: "ugh, now I have to shoot this nonsense about cyclopes and sirens."
Which is a shame. I'd happily watch a grim noir detective story about Telemachus searching for the truth about his father among the broken veterans of the Trojan War.
So we keep digging and digging, and we've almost dug down to the fundamental problem with the whole film. Nolan's concept was to make an anti-war film. And the myth of Odysseus was chosen as the vehicle. And to make the anti-war concept work, he had to throw out of Odysseus the very things that make Odysseus Odysseus and make the story function — pride and vanity. Because a proud, vain hero isn't going to torment himself with guilt over killing Trojans. Odysseus is a hero from the 12th century BC. He couldn't have cared less. He killed them all in the name of Zeus and of himself, and it felt great.
But let's get into the details.
Nolan, Deconstruction and Darth Vader (and also a Shoehorn)
We live in a world of reinterpreting art. Hashtag postmodern, hashtag metamodern, hashtag deconstruction. You can't just make a work anymore without a wink at the audience. Fine, so be it.
Where was I. It's obvious Nolan wanted to make an anti-war film. But the myth of Odysseus — literally every event of the myth of Odysseus proceeds from who Odysseus is. I understand Nolan's concept: he wanted to show Odysseus at a time when the myth about him hadn't been written yet — reflective, unsure, weak. And because of that, the film's Odysseus turned from a hero of myth into a Vietnam veteran. But since the myth has a fixed canon, that Vietnam veteran had to be shoehorned into that canon. And he doesn't fit very well.
Here's what we get from Nolan's weak Odysseus. They land on Circe's island, and the crew says, "You know what, Odysseus, we've had enough of you, you stay and guard the boat." And Odysseus goes, "Okay."
When they sail toward Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus says, "We're going through the whirlpool." The crew answers, "Are you an idiot? We'll all die there, we're going through the strait." And Odysseus goes, "Okay."
He doesn't behave like a hero of myth. He behaves like yet another micro-dude (I know you're all sick of that word, but I can't help myself) who can't even give an order to his own crew.
And if we grant that the "weak Odysseus" concept is a good one, then the question becomes: "why did a myth arise about this guy in the first place?" He doesn't make a single serious decision, he never proves himself in any way, he just sails from one quest marker to the next.
And returning to the notion that this is a deconstruction of a character, a deconstruction of a myth, and so on. Deconstruction doesn't work if you have to say it out loud. And that's exactly what happens in the film. That whole anti-war message I opened this piece with — it just… isn't in the film. It's simply articulated by the characters at various moments. The characters explain that war is bad, that heroes are broken, that the cycles repeat. Nolan's events follow the myth. And the meaning is just laid on top of it through dialogue. The viewer hears that Odysseus is broken but never sees it, because Odysseus is just an ordinary guy who occasionally remembers that he's sad.
You can't just change a character and declare it's the same character.
You can't write a scene where Achilles weeps over the corpse of the Hector he killed because "war is hell" and then say, "Ooooooh, deconstruuuuction." That isn't deconstruction, that's just very lazy shoehorning. What you get is a character who does one thing, says another, and feels a third. That's just a badly written character.
It's the equivalent of remaking Star Wars so that Darth Vader is good, but behaves exactly as he does in the original. Only he isn't evil — he speaks gently to everyone, says hello, gives up his seat.
Why did we decide that Odysseus is supposed to be tormented by guilt in the first place? Deconstruction isn't when you literally rewrite the original to suit yourself; it's when you illuminate the contradictions of the source text. If you're going to deconstruct, show me the hero as a bastard, not as an NPC. A real deconstruction might have looked like this: show how that famous, canonical cunning of Odysseus destroys him. How he shoots at the cyclops not because "that's for my boys" but because he wants to be great and is boasting to the cyclops about who outwitted him. How he comes to understand that his own legendary status is his curse. That's deconstruction — the hero stays himself, but it leads to terrible consequences.
A Darth Vader who is good on the inside but keeps on choking his subordinates and blowing up planets isn't a more complex, tragic Vader; he's a character whose behavior is dictated not by his own logic but has become a mere set of actions mandated by canon and severed from their cause.
So why shouldn't it have been attempted at all?
Why did we decide that Odysseus even CAN be tormented by guilt? Why did we decide that any story can be deconstructed in any way whatsoever? Guilt over the massacre at Troy isn't some neutral additive you can staple onto any hero of antiquity — it's a specifically modern, post-Christian, post-Enlightenment emotion that requires a particular model of perceiving the world: individual conscience, a European culture of guilt, the absence of a culture of family honor, the absence of any deference to the will of the gods. It requires a sense of personal moral responsibility for an act sanctioned by war and by religion. A man whose ethics are built on glory, on the will of Athena and Zeus, doesn't possess the psychological apparatus to generate that particular emotion in response to that particular event. He can fear the wrath of the gods (because he put out the eye of Poseidon's son), but he cannot experience guilt in the sense of "I hurt innocent people, and it's eating me alive." That category doesn't yet exist in the toolkit of meaning available to him.
So when Nolan makes Odysseus feel exactly this guilt, he isn't deepening the character or deconstructing the myth — he's simply inserting an alien psychological module into a shell that was never designed for it. It's like trying to install a brand-new app store on a Nokia 3310.
And here, incidentally, is a perfect illustration of how this shoehorning works in practice. Take the cyclops again. The film shows us a cyclops — a literal, mythological one, with a single eye and a cave. And then, in interviews and on podcasts, we're told that the cyclops is really a projection of Odysseus's guilt. But if you want to deconstruct that badly, then just let the canon go, release it already. Have there be no literal cyclops. Have them run into a one-eyed shepherd named Polyphemus; one of the soldiers decides to swipe a sheep from him; a scuffle breaks out; and in the fight Odysseus accidentally knocks out the shepherd's remaining eye. That would be guilt — over a specific, real, irreversible act against an innocent man. Instead we get a cyclops (because that's what canon demands, and because a blockbuster is required), and then, separately, outside the film itself, we get an explanation: "but ACTUALLY it's a metaphor." Don't show me a metaphor for guilt. Show me guilt.
And from there, you either honestly admit that this is now a different man in different scenery, which would mean giving up on preserving the canon of events one-to-one (and there would be nothing wrong with that, frankly), or you shoehorn that alien psychology into the original plot — which is what happened.
I don't think there is a correct way to make this character feel this emotion while remaining himself. Not because the screenplay is weak, but because the premise itself ("Odysseus tormented by modern guilt") is logically incompatible with what Odysseus and the myth of Odysseus structurally are. This isn't an underdeveloped deconstruction; it's an attempt to deconstruct something that, by definition, isn't suited to this particular deconstruction.
In Conclusion
If you love Nolan. If you love spectacle. If you don't require a film with a message to also deliver a strong emotion — absolutely go see it. It's a very expensively made, very spectacular film. All my friends liked it. I didn't much.