Malibu Seen: Ten Years Gone: A review of Sir Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey'

By Benjamin Marcus · Sun Aug 02 2026

Some movies are meant to be seen in theaters, on the big screen. I wish I had seen “Sinners” on a big screen. Autumn Durald Arkapaw won an Academy Award for Cinematography because she went BIG with lavish shots of the Mississippi delta. I was in Malibu when "Sinners" came out, and the only way I was gonna see it big was to break/talk my way into someone's mansion and plug the screener into their home theater. I watched “Sinners” three times on a big screen TV, but it wasn’t big enough.

The last movie I saw in a theater was “Barbie,” but that required actually leaving Malibu to go to Calabasas or Agoura or somewhere Over There to see it on a big screen in comfy chairs — and the stress of actually leaving Malibu and losing sight of the sea was too much. But I was in Santa Cruz when "The Odyssey" swept into theaters on July 17, so I got to see a movie shot entirely, expensively, extravagantly in IMAX 70 mm. 

Gods and monsters

This isn't the first attempt to cram 100,000 words, 10 years, five or so monsters — Polyphemus the Cyclops, the cannibal Laestrygonians, ship-wrecking Scylla, whirlpool-monster Charybdis, and the Sirens — plus the GOAT witch Circe and the temptress Calypso — and a divine cast led by Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, Helios, Hades, and Persephone, into one picture.

Homer's "Odyssey" has been adapted dozens of times since the silent era — a 1905 French short, the 1954 Italian "Ulysses" with Kirk Douglas, and a 1997 Emmy-winning NBC miniseries with Armand Assante among them. Its themes echo elsewhere too: "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" most notably, and even "Gravity," where Sandra Bullock's astronaut overcomes peril after peril just longing to make it back to Earth, and home.

$250 million, including an all-star cast

This picture had a price tag of $250 million, and you have to wonder how much went to the cast: A-listers Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, and Lupita Nyong'o (dual role as Helen and Clytemnestra), supported by Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, John Leguizamo as the swineherd Eumaeus, Himesh Patel, Mia Goth, Elliot Page, Bill Irwin, Corey Hawkins, and a couple dozen others.

I've always said "Lawrence of Arabia" is the greatest and most romantic movie ever made, and the only women in it get slaughtered by the Turks. "The Odyssey" is the opposite — a macho, manly-men epic of blood and monsters in which the women almost steal the show from under all that armor.

Hathaway's Penelope is the film's quiet powerhouse. Slate's critic called her work "nothing short of miraculous," a role that on paper could have been passive and static instead carrying entire stretches of the movie back on Ithaca — even while largely "trading dialogue with a totally lost and out-of-his-depth Tom Holland."

Theron's Calypso is beautifully spooky as the nymph who traps Odysseus by feeding him lotus flowers — played less as seductress-villain than as a woman whose loneliness curdles into captivity — quieter and sadder than Samantha Morton's Circe, a calmly evil sorceress not unlike Amy Madigan's banally evil Aunt Gladys in "Weapons." 

Without spoiling it: Circe invites a mob of starving sailors, just escaped being beaten and eaten, into her shack and watches them make pigs of themselves. You'll have to see the movie for the rest.

The monsters they'd just escaped are far less calm than Circe. The giant, armor-clad Laestrygonians are cannibal giants who ambush and wipe out 11 of Odysseus's 12 ships in one stroke. 

(Jon Marcus said the armored Laestrygonians looked a lot like the robots from "X-Men: Days of Future Past.")

In Homer, the giants just hurl rocks from cliffs, destroy the boats, and spear the drowning sailors like bluefin tuna — they’re good eatin’.

So this armored-robot fight-and-flee in a forest might be a nod to modern drone warfare. Maybe yes, maybe no. 

(Fleeing the Laestrygonians and Cyclops and other monsters large and small, I was ready for Ulysses to riff on Monty Python and holler "Run away! Run away!" as his crew hotfoots it from one peril to the next.)

That's a Viking ship! It's not Greek at all!

The other odd casting choice wasn't human — it was the ship Ulysses and his crew boarded to leave Troy. Big, sturdy, wood, and the whole time I'm thinking: "That's not Greek, that's Viking!" And I was right. The curled prow gave it away.

The Greeks actually used "penteconters" — narrow, curved-hull galleys around 30 meters long, powered by a square sail and oarsmen, carrying about 50 men apiece. But the ship in "The Odyssey" was “Draken Harald Hårfagre,” a modern (2012) reconstruction of a Viking-era (793–1066 AD) longship, measuring about 35 meters long, 8 meters wide, with a roughly 25-meter mast, and displacing around 80 tonnes. 

Built Ford tough — watching it plow through heavy seas and dodge monsters, it's easy to see how Vikings sailed from Norway to Greenland to Iceland to North America and all over the British Isles and Europe in those ships. Round, round, get around, the Vikings got around: Dublin was a Norse ship base, York (Jórvík) was a Viking stronghold — the same Vikings Macbeth's Scots are fighting off at the play's opening — and "Rus" gave Russia its name, from the Swedish Varangians who founded Kievan Rus. 

In France, Viking chieftain Rollo got Normandy in 911; his descendant William the Conqueror, a Frenchified Viking, took England in 1066. Norman Vikings even carved out Sicily. And 500 years before Columbus, Leif Erikson reached Newfoundland — confirmed by the L'Anse aux Meadows site. 

African American Helen?

Lupita Nyong'o playing both Helen of Troy and her half-sister Clytemnestra has drawn some of the loudest casting criticism of the film, her Kenyan-Mexican background clashing with the traditional "golden-haired" image of Helen. Truth is, neither “The Iliad” nor “The Odyssey” physically describe Helen at all — no hair color, no face — they only convey her beauty indirectly, through the reactions of the men who look at the face that launched a thousand ships and agree: “Yep.” The darkness of the casting might double as a reflection of character: Clytemnestra vows revenge against Agamemnon for sacrificing her daughter and — spoiler alert — gets it, killing her husband when he returns from his bloody victory at Troy.

'The Warriors' Was Also a Riff on Greek Myth

Looking through the cast list — wait, James Remar is in this picture? Cool dude. He used to surf Malibu, and made a similarly Greek-flavored picture playing Ajax in Walter Hill's 1979 cult classic "The Warriors." That film isn't actually based on "The Odyssey," though it shares its DNA — it's drawn from Xenophon's "Anabasis," the true account of Greek mercenaries fighting home through hostile territory after their leader is killed. Swap Persia for the five boroughs andyou've got the plot: a small band running a gauntlet just to get home in one piece — same shape as Odysseus's journey.Half a century later, Remar's back in actual Homer territory. Still not sure which character he plays.

The music was all Greek

Nolan banned a traditional orchestra entirely, telling composer Ludwig Göransson (his third collaboration, after "Tenet" and "Oppenheimer") that he didn't want the film to sound like the sword-and-sandals epics of the past. Göransson leaned in: "It's not like the orchestra existed back then," he said. "It was a challenge and also an opening to try to make something unique."

Instead the score is built from actual ancient Greek instruments: the lyre, plucked at Nolan's request to underscore the moment Odysseus draws his bow; the aulos, a double-reed pipe Göransson calls "the most popular rock star instrument for a thousand years"; and 35 bronze gongs, layered with recordings of scrap metal and air conditioning units, plus vocals and synthesizers. Think "Full Metal Jacket" — creaking metal and that. The one modern concession: a closing song, "When I'm Home," co-written by James Blake, Travis Scott, Göransson, and Nolan. So no Zeppelin.

This picture goes to 11

The music is LOUD in this movie, as loud as a stadium booing Trump when he walked out on the pitch at the World Cup: wind and soldiers shrieking, terrified and transformed war pigs squealing, monsters bellowing, gongs banging, Polyphemus roaring as the burning stake drives into his eye, boulders splintering ship hulls, Zeus's thunder cracking the sky open, the Sirens wailing over Odysseus's own screams to be freed from the mast, bronze clashing in the final slaughter of the suitors, and surf roaring through every shipwreck. Another reason to see it in a theater unless you have one of those epic, knee-trembling home sound systems installed by John Ortiz of www.jcotechnologies.com

Boffo BO

"The Odyssey" opened July 17, debuting to $124.5 million domestically and $264.1 million worldwide, the biggest live-action opening of 2026, the year's top R-rated debut, Universal's biggest R-rated launch ever, and Nolan's largest global opening, surpassing "The Dark Knight Rises."

Critically it's sitting at 95-96% "Certified Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes from more than 275 reviews — the highest critics' score of Nolan's career — with audiences even more enthusiastic at 97% "Verified Hot," plus an "A" CinemaScore. "Oppenheimer" closed its North American run around $330 million; "The Odyssey" is outpacing that trajectory, on track to be Nolan's biggest non-superhero hit yet, critically and commercially.

The film has held remarkably well since, posting a soft second-weekend drop of just 18% worldwide and adding another $215.3 million to push its global total to roughly $640 million. Through its first four days it had already pulled in $141 million domestically — 48% ahead of "Oppenheimer's" pace over the same stretch — and posted the best Monday of any 2026 release, trailing only “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises” among Nolan's own films. Some speculation is already turning to whether it can cross $1 billion worldwide by fall.

There is Oscar buzz.