Let’s be honest. When you hear that Christopher Nolan is tackle-directing The Odyssey entirely on IMAX 70mm, you expect scale. What you don’t expect is a fierce culture war. Between online outrage over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, and internet forums losing their minds because Tom Holland’s Telemachus dares to call Odysseus ‘Dad’ instead of some archaic Victorian title, the noise was deafening. But true to form, Nolan completely ignored the modern culture-war distraction to focus on his craft. The result? A towering, deeply conversational, and psychological examination of war trauma that feels less like a dusty history lesson and more like a fever dream. If the 1968 and 1997 television adaptations gave us the literal steps of the myth, Nolan gives us the bruised, bleeding soul of it.

What makes this adaptation so visually arresting is where Nolan drew his inspiration. In interviews, he explicitly cited Akira Kurosawa’s Ran for its sweeping, wind-swept landscapes, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev for its raw, gritty, almost tactile physical textures. You can feel the dirt under the fingernails; you can hear the canvas tearing in the wind. This isn’t the clean, CGI-sheened Greece we’re used to. It also serves as a fascinating full-circle moment for Nolan himself. Back in 2003, Warner Bros. signed him to direct the Brad Pitt movie Troy. When that fell through, they gave him Batman Begins as a consolation prize. Now, over twenty years later, Nolan has finally made his Troy sequel. But instead of celebrating the Trojan Horse as a glorious victory, he treats it as a sickening, morally compromising act of deception. It’s the ultimate catalyst for Odysseus’s PTSD.

But where the film really shifts from a standard epic to a Nolan film is in its thematic update, heavily drawing from Emily Wilson’s groundbreaking 2017 translation. Wilson’s translation famously began with the words ‘a complicated man,’ and Nolan leans heavily into that moral gray area. It also inserts a fierce debate about gender and power directly into the Bronze Age. There’s a quiet, incredibly tense scene where Anne Hathaway’s Penelope explains to her son, played by Tom Holland, why she cannot simply run the empire despite sitting on the throne for over twenty years. Surrounded by 108 predatory suitors, she has to navigate the suffocating rules of Bronze Age succession and ‘Zeus’s Law’ of hospitality. It’s a genuine, brilliant question for a modern adaptation: how does a woman rule in a world that only respects the sword?

The structure of the film is a game of two halves. The first half is a visceral, borderline horror movie. The Cyclops sequence is claustrophobic and terrifying, and the Underworld, shot on Iceland’s black sand beaches, is utterly haunting. But the second half is what we really paid for. Much like Interstellar, Nolan weaponizes his screenplay to target our tear ducts. The score, composed by Ludwig Göransson rather than Hans Zimmer, builds a devastating, ticking tension that elevates the emotional stakes. And we have to talk about Zendaya’s Athena. In a brilliant, psychological twist, she isn’t a magical, glowing goddess. She is a silent, haunting psychological projection wearing the face of a Trojan priestess whom Odysseus watched his men brutally execute. She is his conscience, his guilt, and his judge. If I had one critique, it’s that I deeply missed the backstory of Odysseus trying to avoid the war in the first place—the famous ‘plowing the salt’ sequence from the myths. Bypassing that felt like a missed beat for showing his initial resistance to violence.

Ultimately, The Odyssey is a masterpiece of deconstruction. It takes the oldest adventure story in Western literature and strips away the romanticism of war. It shows us that the hardest battle Odysseus ever fought wasn’t against monsters, but against his own monstrous ego. As Odysseus tells his son in one of the film’s most haunting lines: ‘Don’t look for gods in men. You’ll just be disappointed.’ What did you think of Nolan’s psychological take on this ancient myth? Let me know in the comments below, and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more deep-dive film analysis.