R | 2 hr 52 min | Drama, History, Epic | 2026
Most people know the story of the Trojan Horse. Director Christopher Nolan, in his new magnum opus “The Odyssey,” depicts it as an ancient Greek version of a modern military, tier-one special operations mission.
I was immediately reminded of the four Army Delta Force operators who set up the bombing run that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the Jordanian monster responsible for the first public beheading of an American in the Iraq War).
The reconnaissance-conducting Delta teammates dug a shallow pit in the desert, covered it with camouflage, and crawled in. It soon filled with brackish water up to their necks. They all came down with dysentery, diarrhea, vomiting, and fevers.
They sat in a virulent soup of their own bodily wastes, shivering with fever, for 4 days and nights, and then painted the building al-Zarqawi was hiding in with an infrared laser. And a pair of F-16 fighter jets dropped two 500-pound laser-guided bombs and sent Mr. Al-Zarqawi straight to Hades.
Similarly, in the belly of the Trojan horse, built by the Greeks as a fake peace-offering, were packed like sardines, Greek tier-one teammates, including Odysseus. (It was his idea.) They were claustrophobic and starving. And when the tide rolled in, the guys at the bottom of the pile drowned. And no bathroom breaks.
The Helen and Achilles Casting Controversies
The buzz regarding the movie spewed controversy like a fire hose: All the depictions heretofore of Helen of Troy, the world’s supposedly most beautiful woman, whose kidnapping from Greece started the war—have been as blondes.Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o, who’s so black all the funny African jokes apply (Africans think they’re funny too): “She’s so black that when she goes out in the sun, the sun gets a tan.”
And to be fair (and realistically), Nyong’o is a fashion-model-level, polished-ebony specimen of shocking symmetry. I was prepared to be outraged at the DEI of it all, but soon acknowledged, “Okay, that actually works.” It’s really a non-issue. And I’ll take a melanistic Helen over melanistic hobbits any day.
Nolan’s New Masterpiece
I was looking forward to this one. I played Odysseus in the sixth-grade class play—I feel a kinship. I know things. Nolan does not disappoint. This is a stark, deeply Greek, ancient-feeling telling, with powerful, horse-hair-helmeted warriors often silhouetted against dark skies. It rings true, even when it mildly employs horror techniques to capture some of the numerous monsters and witches that inhabit the tale.
Odysseus—also known by the Roman version of his name, Ulysses—is on his arduous, 10-year oceanic trek from Troy to Ithaca, where he encounters a series of legendary, mythical obstacles. Of the 12 or so ordeals described by Homer, Nolan chooses a few, starting with the story of Polyphemus the Cyclops.
Trapped in the one-eyed giant’s cave, Odysseus tricks and blinds the monster to escape. Unfortunately, Polyphemus is sea-god Poseidon’s son. This will not bode well.
They next encounter the Laestrygonians: a race of armor-wearing, cannibalistic giants who destroy nearly all of Odysseus’s fleet by hurling massive boulders.
Then comes Circe (Samantha Morton). She’s a powerful sorceress who temporarily turns Odysseus’s men into oinking pigs.
Then, Odysseus travels to The Underworld (Hades), the land of the dead, to speak with the blind prophet Tiresias (James Remar) and his now-dead cousin Sinon, who reveal to him how to get home.
After this comes the well-known story of the Sirens, where Odysseus has himself tied to the ship’s mast, while his crew plugs their ears with wax, to resist the Sirens’ deadly, enchanting songs.
Next up are Scylla and Charybdis—Odysseus has to navigate between a massive, ship-swallowing ocean whirlpool (Charybdis) and a deadly, six-headed, cliff-dwelling monster (Scylla).
In Thrinacia (Helios’s Cattle), Odysseus’s starving crew slaughter and eat the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, which dooms them all to a fatal storm.
Finally, in a mash-up of the Lotus-Eaters and Ogygia (Calypso, played by Charlize Theron), Calypso feeds Odysseus intoxicating lotus flowers, which causes him to lose all desire to return home for seven years.
One of the missing episodes that I would have liked to have seen was Aeolus, where the Wind King gifts Odysseus a bag containing all the world’s winds. His curious crew opens the bag, and in so doing, after many years at sea, the fierce winds blow them all the way back to Troy.
“The Odyssey” is the number-one Western tale of spiritual enlightenment (followed closely by Tolkien’s “The Lord Of The Rings”), and the return home to Ithaca is a metaphor for returning to one’s heavenly origin.
Performances
“The Odyssey” is yet another cinematic masterpiece from acclaimed filmmaker Nolan. It’s sweeping in scale, with his trademark touches of visceral cinematography, a pulsating score, and a well-told and well-enacted story. It’s close to three hours of riveting viewing.
Tom Holland as Odysseus’s son Telemachus is perhaps a bit lightweight; would have liked to see the more smoldering version Timothée Chalamet would have contributed. This is especially so since Chalamet’s “Henry V” scenes with Robert Pattinson as The Dauphin were brilliant, and Pattinson here plays the execrable Antinous, main suitor to Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway).
Hathaway herself knocks it out of the park as the wife who weaves Odysseus’s death shroud all day, and unravels it at night, as to avoid having to choose a new husband.
Conclusion
The return to Ithaca was actually better depicted in Ralph Fiennes’s recent turn as Odysseus in “The Return.” As mentioned, Damon does an outstanding job, but this is more his wheelhouse—he’s got more history playing heroic characters (Jason Bourne). Fiennes plays effete, often evil characters, so to see Fiennes turn his non-athletic body into an impressive ancient spec ops Greek warrior and sell the complicated fight-choreography was to see real dedication and commitment to the craft.
My greatest takeaway from Nolan’s “The Odyssey” was the suggestion that Odysseus was responsible for the downfall of Greek civilization. I’d not heard that angle before. It’s argued thusly: By using the Trojan horse ruse, the Greeks violated father God Zeus’s law—the law of hospitality.
The Greek army presented it as a gift in surrender and acknowledgment of the prowess of Troy—and lied. And that was a big deal. It tore the fabric of the Greek moral law and heralded the decline of the power of the Greek gods. Like the old-force gods before them, the Titans, the Greeks would go into decline, first morphing into their Roman versions, and then fading completely, to make way for Christianity. “The Odyssey” gets one thinking about such things.
