The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026)

[Matt]

That's indeed what it is, an IMAX film frame

[Mr Sausage]

The author of this magnificent list of recommended Shakespeare editions and criticism has put together a list of ten recommended books to help understand The Odyssey, ranking them in terms of how accessible and readable they are and offering healthy quotations to give a sense of the style and insights. It's full of really fascinating books. I've only read one of them myself. This is considerably more interesting and helpful than anything else the discourse surrounding Nolan's movie has thrown up.

Now he's done one for The Iliad.

[The Curious Sofa]

I’m a Nolan agnostic. I always hope to like his films, but I’m rarely on the same page as the acclaim they get. That said, I like his Batman films (in some ways I find The Dark Knight Rises the most interesting), and whatever works in Interstellar is so ravishing that I can forgive its many flaws. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, I found punishingly dull. The Odyssey is an improvement on that, and while I was never bored, it still left me cold. It’s an overwhelmingly beige film on almost every level, visually and in terms of content. Nolan makes some good choices about what to keep and what to discard to move the plot along, but the film never digs deep into its characters and offers no interesting interpretation of them.

The costumes and production design are mostly dull too. Whether or not they’re historically accurate hardly matters to me, but apart from the redesigned Trojan horse, little of it looked interesting. Nolan’s art direction often reminds me of Paul Verhoeven’s, functional and utilitarian. But Verhoeven uses that blandness to satirise America, be it the corporate dystopia of RoboCop or the backroom offices of Showgirls, while Nolan simply seems to like muted colours and earth tones.

I’m no expert in Greek mythology, but like many kids, I graduated from a fascination with dinosaurs to one with Greek myths, reading YA prose versions of the epics. And one thing I do know is that their women are fascinating, flawed, multifaceted figures, which makes it all the more frustrating that Nolan once again fails his female characters. What are Charlize Theron and Mia Goth even doing here, apart from rounding out the all-star cast? It says a lot about Anne Hathaway’s talent that she lifts a dull conception of Penelope enough to give the film’s best performance.

The film this made me think of is David Lowery’s The Green Knight. Lowery takes an Arthurian poem and, as Nolan does with Homer, updates its concerns and casts it without regard to ethnicity. But where Nolan often just edits and illustrates, Lowery interprets and in some ways, enriches his source. His Gawain is a layabout, a young man who can’t live up to the legend he’s expected to join. His mother is all but revealed as Morgan le Fay and the characters understood to be Arthur and Guinevere, are aged and frail. Camelot not at its height but at its twilight, a court where the stories have outlived the people who made them. Years later, The Green Knight still haunts me: the fox in the woods, the giants in the mist, the Lady’s speech about green taking over everything we leave behind, and that vision of a life lived badly before the axe falls. None of these ideas and images have left me. At his best, Lowery strikes me as a true poet of American cinema, and The Green Knight looks gorgeous and immensely rich on a fraction of The Odyssey’s budget. Nolan, the more prosaic filmmaker, gives us a perfectly competent Odyssey that never does more than scratch the surface.