FILM OF THE WEEK: The Odyssey - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Christopher Nolan has spent much of his career fascinated by time. Time folded in on itself, time experienced subjectively, time as memory, trauma and regret. The Odyssey turns out to be his most natural home for those obsessions. Homer's epic has always been about more than monsters and sea voyages; it is a story about what happens when a man returns home after twenty years of war to discover that neither he nor home are what they once were.

The word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos (return home) and algos (pain). It is not simply longing for home, but the ache of discovering that you can never truly return. That idea runs through every frame of Nolan's adaptation. Odysseus is trying to get back to Ithaca, but the film understands that the real tragedy is that Ithaca no longer exists in the form he remembers, and neither does the man trying to reach it. Beneath all the spectacle, this is a film about ageing, memory, trauma, and the impossibility of reclaiming the past.

Rather than telling the story chronologically, Nolan fractures the timeline into overlapping memories. We meet Odysseus before Troy, during his long voyage, trapped for years with Calypso (Charlize Theron), who offers him immortality if he can simply forget his wife and son. It is a structure that mirrors the way traumatic memories refuse to stay in the past, constantly intruding upon the present. At its best, the film becomes less a straightforward hero's journey than a portrait of PTSD, where the present constantly crashed into the past, and memory itself becomes another monster to survive.

It also allows Nolan to construct one astonishing set-piece after another. The Trojan Horse sequence, viewed largely from inside the suffocating wooden beast, is one of the film's finest achievements. Men lie crushed together for days, sweating, panicking, some dying before battle has even begun. As the horse is dragged through water and the soldiers fear drowning before the assault can even begin, Nolan transforms one of history's most familiar military images into something claustrophobic and horrific.

Elsewhere, the mythical episodes are spectacular. The Cyclops is brilliantly realised, terrifying yet mournful and pitiful as a lonely shepherd under siege, while Samantha Morton's Circe anchors the film's strongest sequence. Morton's performance radiates fury towards the men who have raped, pillaged and murdered their way across the Mediterranean, and the grotesque body horror of her revenge becomes one of the rare moments where the film allows female anger to feel genuinely mythic in scale.

Not every episode lands with equal force. Some encounters feel disposable, rushing through yet another monster or divine obstacle simply to remind us that danger is everywhere. But whenever Nolan slows down enough to explore the emotional weight beneath the mythology, The Odyssey becomes extraordinary.

It is frustrating, then, that some of the film's most important dramatic moments are undermined by Nolan's continued refusal to prioritise dialogue in his sound mix. The director's now notorious insistence on whispering conversations beneath overwhelming environmental noise remains as irritating as ever. The Odyssey never reaches the unintelligibility of Tenet, but several key conversations between Odysseus and his wife Penelope (Anne Hathway) disappear beneath crashing waves or roaring fire, while an essential confrontation with death itself becomes an exercise in lip-reading. Nolan has dismissed complaints about his approach to sound, but there is a difference between trusting audiences and simply preventing them from hearing the emotional architecture of your film.

Matt Damon brings a quiet sadness to Odysseus, carrying himself like a man who has survived too much, rather than conquered anything. It is an effective performance, but perhaps too effective in making Odysseus fundamentally decent. In Homer's poem, Odysseus is not simply brave or clever. He is vain, manipulative, egotistical, frequently cowardly and often responsible for his own suffering. Nolan sands away many of those rougher edges, leaving Damon to play something closer to the archetypal weary hero than the complicated trickster of myth.

That softening speaks to something that has become increasingly recognisable across Nolan's work. His protagonists become men haunted by atrocities they have enabled rather than atrocities they themselves commited. Like Oppenheimer, The Odyssey is fascinated by guilt after violence rather than violence itself. Odysseus is tormented by visions of soldiers lost through his decisions, haunted by memories of war and desperate for oblivion, symbolised powerfully through the lotus flowers that promise forgetfulness. But the film remains more comfortable showing him wrestling with remorse than placing us alongside the civilians who suffered from his choices.

The sacking of Troy, like the atomic bombings in Oppenheimer, becomes something adjacent to the protagonist rather than fully embodied through him. Nolan is fascinated by morally compromised heroes, but often keeps the worst of their actions just beyond arm's reach. They facilitate devastation and live with its consequences, but they rarely force us to watch them inflict it with their own hands. It makes his protagonists easier to empathise with, but less morally unsettling than they could be.

The film does gesture toward a richer interrogation of violence through the experiences of women, who bear the consequences of men's pursuit of glory. Helen of Troy and her twin sister Clytemnestra, both played by Lupita Nyong'o, carry the wounds left by generations of heroic ambition. Circe condemns the men who have crossed oceans committing rape and murder under the banner of conquest. Penelope has survived two decades of siege in her own home, abandoned and underestimated, holding her kingdom together through intelligence rather than force.

Anne Hathaway gives Penelope a welcome steeliness, though the screenplay could have afforded her greater agency. Her famous deception - weaving Laertes' funeral shroud by day before secretly unpicking it every night - is mentioned rather than fully explored. There is something wonderfully absurd about powerful men believing a burial shroud really takes twenty years to complete. Their ignorance of women's worlds and labour become part of Penelope's resistance, but the film hints at that irony without quite letting it bloom.

Tom Holland, meanwhile, never quite escapes bland earnestness as Telemachus. His coming-of-age journey lacks the complexity that the surrounding material promises, particularly beside the richer emotional textures given to Damon's older, broken Odysseus.

Visually, however, The Odyssey is staggering. Hoyte van Hoytema shoots oceans, cliffs and burning cities with a tactile grandeur that recalls the best of classic Hollywood epics, while remaining unmistakably Nolan. Landscapes feel physical rather than digitally assembled. The sea crashes with terrifying force, storms swallow entire ships, and every battle feels heavy enough to bruise.

Yet, for all its immense scale, the film occasionally misses an opportunity to make us feel the true weight of time. The fractured chronology is propulsive, but blunts the emotional accumulation of twenty years lost. We are told how much Odysseus has sacrificed, though we rarely experience the slow erosion of identity that such absence would produce in him or his men, which feels surprising given how effectively Nolan conveyed this idea in Interstellar. At three hours, the films isn’t short, but Nolan’s pacing makes it feel full and constantly engaging. There was room for a little more lingering, a little more stillness, which might have allowed us to feel not simply that these men have been away from home for decades, but what those decades have actually stolen from them, and who they have become to those they have left behind, and who they encounter now.

This idea of men and monsters is intelligently captured in the film’s repeated theme of hospitality. Throughout the epic, strangers are welcomed or rejected according to Zeus' sacred laws of hospitality, and civilisations are judged by how they treat those who arrive at their shores. In an era where migrants, refugees and even neighbours are increasingly imagined as dangerous threats to be treated with suspicion, Nolan's adaptation reminds us how easily people convince themselves they are heroes, while viewing everyone else as invaders. The men crossing the sea expect food, shelter and mercy wherever they land, even as they leave destruction in their wake. When heroes and monsters are said to roam the seas, how do you know which one you are?

It is incredible that theme and questions of this depth are raised during a film that is also jam-packed with action, with more encounters with different creatures and threats than a season of Widow’s Bay. Nolan captures how The Odyssey is a poem of all genres: love, war, monsters, fantasy, revenge, grief, piracy, coming-of-age, and mid-life.

For all its flaws, The Odyssey is an astonishing achievement. Few contemporary directors would attempt something this ambitious, strange or unapologetically mythic, and fewer still could deliver spectacle on this scale while remaining interested in memory, grief and the stories we tell ourselves about heroism.

Like its weary king, Nolan's film never quite reaches the emotional home it is searching for, but the journey is often magnificent.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on Homer's 'Odyssey.' Cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema. Edited by Jennifer Lame. Music by Ludwig Göransson.
Starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Lupita Nyong'o, Elliot Page, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, Bill Irwin, Corey Hawkins, Mia Goth. 173 mins.

• Watch the trailer below: