The Odyssey (2026)

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey shows mastery in appealing to rudimentary senses, particularly grief and horror. It fails wherever it attempts to rationalise those sensations into a unified theory that Homer couldn’t have given a shit about. Of course, had the reframing of Odysseus’s narrative been skilfully executed, deviation from the original would have been fine. But the unmistakable “fall of the West” subtext was presented superficially and barely elaborated upon anywhere outside some Batman-esque five or ten minutes, rendering the whole thing anticlimactic and somewhat cringeworthy.

The scenes that relied on Nolan’s pre-ideological mind were stunning. I speak, for instance, of the Cyclops’s first appearance; of Circe’s slow-burning sequence of body horror; of the despair-inducing silent sail through the Sirens’ sea, which brought tears to my eyes; and even of the chaotic glory of the massacre in Ithaca. The temporal jumps here and there were also exceptionally well handled, giving the story a timeless, ethereal quality entirely suited to its mythopoetic frame.

Wherever Nolan subjected his narrative to demagogy, however, it was inevitably stripped bare. His attempt to explore the nuances of war might have made for an interesting interpretation had he actually followed through with it. Instead, whether as a commercial concession or simply out of authorial cowardice, the film resorted to some “preserve-sympathy-for-the-antihero-by-hiding-the-actually-appalling-shit-he-did” manoeuvre, reducing the “horrors of war” mostly to collapsing buildings and a few civilian murders here and there.

Yes, murder is bad, yadda-yadda. But far more happens in war to make it horrific than this film ever permitted itself to show. The result felt sanitised and incapable of conveying viscerally what it ostensibly set out to describe. This was its fatal flaw, repeated everywhere it attempted ostensible apology in place of true evocation.

In essence, this is a masterclass in cinematography that excels where it refrains from appealing to modern sensibilities, yet taints those very successes when it doesn't. In attempting to modernise a classic whose appeal is, by definition, less temporally bound – even down to its unnecessary scepticism towards magic – the film had little of comparably remarkable to offer in exchange. What remains is dull, liberalesque jibber-jabber, better suited to Batman’s fascism than to anything from Ancient Greece.