Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is presented as a visually powerful but divisive adaptation that has reignited arguments between classicists and general audiences. The review argues that, despite its IMAX scale and almost three-hour running time, the film makes Homer’s epic feel intimate by focusing on Odysseus as a traumatised, emotionally fractured man seeking to return home.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, whose memories of the Trojan War emerge gradually after years spent with Calypso under the effects of lotus fruit. The film retains Homer’s non-linear storytelling and includes familiar episodes involving Polyphemus, the Sirens and Circe, while Penelope resists suitors in Ithaca and Telemachus searches for his father; Zendaya’s Athena is framed as embodying the personal reckoning Odysseus tries to avoid.