The Odyssey [Round Two] (Nolan, 2026)

My initial thoughts on The Odyssey can be found here.

I saw The Odyssey in IMAX 70MM.

I've had many good conversations about The Odyssey since it was released a month ago, and its staying power in the zeitgeist is due at least in part to its presentation. I'm not a format purist, but I hate missing any visual information—if I'm going to watch a movie, I want to see the whole image. Written out like that, it sounds preposterous, but this is the state of moviegoing in 2026: a film can be shot and distributed in a format that is specialized and cost-prohibitive for the average consumer such that a screening not presented in that format can omit some of the image. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but The Odyssey’s release, along with Sinners and One Battle After Another last year and Oppenheimer before that, manifests Spielberg’s prophecy that the movies are becoming like opera. This fact is, of course, double-edged. On one hand, it shoves movies farther down the funnel of niche interest; on the other, it allows for movies to zig against the zag of online discourse. It grants them a brief—perhaps even illusory—moment to shine as they once did in the era of monoculture.

So I felt the film warranted a second look in Nolan's preferred format. Tickets for a 2PM show on a Sunday in August were not actually that hard to score, but I left the second viewing mildly irritated, kind of when the taste of iron sticks in the back of your throat after a bloody nose. Worse, I actually have less to say about the film on a second viewing, or rather a second viewing seen bigger than big reveals (dare I?) a hollow center to this great, wooden sacrifice to the movie gods. Nolan’s greatest asset as director is his ability to blend a brutalist sensibility with a genuine sense of populism, but the brutalism also needs to suit the material. This is why Tenet is so good, and why Oppenheimer is great until it becomes a staid courtroom drama. “Structure,” Penelope says, “is nothing without people’s respect for its meaning.” The sentiment could easily apply to Nolan’s filmmaking approach: so suffocating is Nolan’s style, so rigid (yet somehow deficient in some of the basics of film grammar), many, including me, have given to calling the film Nolan's Odyssey, as if Nolan's name is part of the title. It speaks to both his auteurist bona fides and how completely he overruns the material—a suitor himself breaching the walls of Ithaca. His is a flattened, obvious, and often lumbering take on a fleet and rambunctious narrative.

It's so flat, and so hollow, it causes me to wonder whether the choice was deliberate: blow up The Odyssey so everyone can relate to it, even those in the cheap seats. But The Odyssey is already relatable, and stuffing it full of dialogue straight out of the early 2000s does not necessarily broaden its appeal. The performances do sell a lot of the pageantry—articularly Anne Hathaway, born to play Penelope and undercut (literally and figuratively) by the film’s wonky structure–but most of the characters are underdeveloped. Particularly Pattinson’s Antinous, a series of evil tics so rudimentary that the moment we see him fall, our applause is itself like muscle memory.

This is but one example of many I could trot out, and I stand by my initial contention that this Odyssey feels like a salad of disconnected episodes. I can’t speak to how it does or does not reflect the text it’s adapting, but as movie structure it does not work. The barrage of sensory detail—the huge image, the thunderous sound design, the pulsating hypnotic central nervous system realigning EDM rhythm of the score—distracts from how little there is to contend with here. This is a movie for grown-ups, something rated R and based on one of the richest texts in all of Western literature, and Zues’s Law, a variation on the Golden Rule, is the best Nolan can muster for a moral imperative?

The greatest thing that can be said for Nolan’s Odyssey, or for mid-career Nolan writ large(r), is that its sense of a world on fire stops short of nihilism. It has a well-reasoned relationship to the present moment, and Odysseus’s climactic soliloquy is more engaging than the frenetic battle that follows it—a heavy and lumbering finale with the scale of something like Infinity Blade. (Speaking of video game comps, I’m reminded that that Wind Waker is really the best Odyssey adaptation when played the right way.)

I’m finishing this piece in a McDonald’s on 8^th Ave., right across the street from Penn Station. As I sit and admire this divine cross-section of humanity knocking back sodas, dunking chicken nuggets in barbecue sauce, and cracking jokes to each other in languages I can’t understand, I wonder how many of them have watched The Odyssey. Probably a handful, I say to myself. And then I ask, how many have seen it in IMAX 70MM? Considerably fewer, maybe even none. It’s nice that a movie can draw crowds out to enjoy the theatrical experience in supersized glory, but I wish this particular movie justified the continued gentrification of a great mass art.