Christopher Nolan takes the oldest story we have, shoots it on seventy-millimetre film, and dares you to look away for three hours. I trust no one and I flinch at nothing. Reader, I flinched.
By Ignatius Vale, Critic-in-Residence · Anno MMXXVI · 7 minI do not go to the movies. I am summoned to them. I was summoned to The Odyssey the way its hero is summoned home — reluctantly, across an unreasonable distance, with the settled suspicion that something along the way fully intended to kill me. In my case it was the runtime. In his, most of the known world.
I came prepared, as I always come, to be disappointed with great elegance — one glove already half-removed in anticipation of the exit. I have seen every trick. I have named most of them. A man cannot be surprised twice by the same sunrise, and I have watched a great many films pretend to be sunrises.
And then the lights went down, and the sea came up, and I did not reach for the glove again for three hours. I resent this. I am telling you about it anyway, because that is the job, and because you deserve to know when the trick is not a trick at all.
Damon, exhausted by his own cleverness
Matt Damon is Odysseus, and it is the least vain performance a movie star has given in years. He plays the cleverest man in the ancient world as someone exhausted by his own cleverness — a survivor who has noticed that every trick he pulls costs him a friend, a year, a piece of himself he does not get back. When he weeps, and he weeps more than the poster would have you believe, it is the private grief of a man doing arithmetic on everything the journey has taken to buy him a shoreline. I went in braced against a hero. I came out having watched a husband.
Around him Nolan has assembled a cast that reads less like a call sheet than an awards-season hostage list — Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie — and, to his enormous credit, he does not let a single one of them wink at you. Nobody tells you it is silly. That is precisely why it works. Belief, it turns out, is the last special effect that money cannot fake and Nolan refuses to counterfeit.
An antagonist that finally has billing
I am now obliged to be tiresome about the technology, so I shall be quick. It is, reportedly, the first film shot entirely with IMAX film cameras — those enormous, clattering, gorgeous machines that weigh as much as a small god — and the difference is not a specification, it is a physical fact you feel in your sternum. The sea in this film is not a backdrop. It is a character with billing, a patience no computer has ever managed to render, a thing that waits for you the way the ocean actually waits: without malice, without mercy, without the slightest interest in your plans.
Belief is the last special effect that money cannot fake — and Nolan, that magnificent lunatic, refuses to counterfeit it.
And then the bow
You know the moment even if you have never read a line of Homer: the beggar in his own hall, the suitors laughing, the great weapon nobody else can string, and the terrible quiet arithmetic of a patient man who has finally, finally arrived. Nolan stages it not as a fight but as a reckoning, and I will say only that the theatre I sat in — a room full of strangers who came for spectacle — went so silent I could hear the film move through the projector. That sound, in 2026, is a kind of resurrection. I have been to the movies a thousand times. I am rarely in the room with everyone else. I was, that night, and I have not entirely forgiven the film for it.
Full, foolish, magnificent altitude.
I do not award numbers — a film is not a toaster, and I am not a scale. What I press into a review is my name, like a seal into wax, and I do not spend it lightly. Take the crest above as my whole verdict; take this as the reason for it.
But you did not ask me for a number. You asked me what it was like. So: it is Nolan spending the enormous credit Oppenheimer earned him on the least ironic thing a person can make in this decade — a sincere film about coming home. It overreaches. It occasionally mistakes its own length for grandeur. And it is, for long stretches, the closest thing to the sublime a projector has thrown at me in years. See it on the largest screen you can bully your way into.