Nolan’s latest hype-fueled "Odyssey" already looks like a dud.
How's that ancient Greek coming along, Matt Damon?
Oy.
I can just hear my old archaeology professor at Boston University saying it.
The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s newest exercise in cinematic gaslighting is here, or almost.
If you thought Christopher Nolan peaked with a three-hour biopic about a man staring intensely at chalkboards, strap in. The first looks at The Odyssey have dropped, and it’s exactly what we feared: a $300 million IMAX-sized “hustle” from a director who has convinced the world that “confusing” is a synonym for “genius.” Nolan isn’t quite a con artist—that would require a level of charisma he lacks—but he’s certainly a high-end cinematic grifter, and The Odyssey looks like his biggest dud yet.
The Bostonian King of Ithaca?
First, let’s talk about the casting. Matt Damon as Odysseus? Really? Damon has spent his entire career playing “guy from a suburb of Boston who is surprisingly good at math or punching.” Now, he’s supposedly a Bronze Age king. The teaser confirms our worst suspicions: Damon doesn’t look remotely Greek, and he hasn’t even bothered to attempt the accent. He’s just Jason Bourne in a leather skirt, trekking through the Mediterranean with a look of mild constipation. Apparently, in Nolan’s version of Ithaca, everyone speaks with a flat, American Midwestern cadence. It’s not just “Americanized history”; it’s cultural co-opting for the sake of the domestic box office.
Anne Hathaway: From Prada to Polyphemus
Then we have Anne Hathaway. While she’s perfectly lovely in films about the high-stakes world of fashion or weeping in 19th-century France, she feels entirely out of place here. Whether she’s playing Circe or Penelope, she radiates “Met Gala Guest” rather than “Ancient Deity.” It’s hard to take a sea-witch seriously when you half-expect her to ask for a sugar-free oat milk latte between hexes.
Myth, Metaphor, and CGI Messes
Nolan, the man who insisted taking down a real Boeing 747 in Tenet, seems to have lost his “practical effects” religion. The trailers show ancient Greek sites—Delphi, Knossos, the Parthenon—so heavily modified by CGI that they look like leftovers from a PlayStation 5 loading screen.
But the real crime is the historical and mythological illiteracy.
The Trojan Horse: Historians have long suggested the “horse” was likely a metaphor for a siege engine or a literal earthquake (the “Earth-Shaker” Poseidon’s symbol). There is zero evidence a giant wooden horse ever existed. Yet, Nolan gives us a “tactical” wooden horse that looks like it was designed by IKEA — kid’s stuff, in other words, and regardless of how much it cost to make, intrinsically inauthentic.
The Cyclops: Even the ancient Greeks knew the Cyclops was pure myth, a campfire story to explain volcanic activity or found elephant skulls. Nolan treats it with the same leaden “realism” he gave the atom bomb. And pssst…wanna see a cooler ‘clops? Sit back and serve yourself a little vintage Sinbad.
The “Oppenheimer” Hangover
Frankly, Nolan is overrated. Oppenheimer succeeded because it was loud and had a lot of hats, not because it was a tight narrative. In The Odyssey, he’s trying the same trick: replace character depth with a booming Hans Zimmer-adjacent score and a non-linear timeline that serves no purpose other than to make the audience feel stupid if they don’t like it.
Nolan isn’t telling a story; he’s selling a brand of “Important Cinema” that is increasingly hollow. If you want to see a man wander around aimlessly while a director insists it’s “art,” save your $20 and watch a GPS navigation system lose its signal. At least the GPS doesn’t pretend it’s making history.
That’s all.
