The Odyssey (2026), A remarkable journey

The Odyssey (2026) is a masterpiece in storytelling. Christopher Nolan has managed to take a 3,000-year-old epic that is familiar to many and still bring audiences to houseful shows, even in India. For the entire three-hour running time, I never once picked up my phone. Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway were brilliant in their roles. Mangoidiots rates the film Delicious.

Like many others, I knew Homer’s The Odyssey only through the stories of the Trojan Horse and the Trojan War. So, this film became my first real introduction to the epic. I liked the way Nolan tells the story. Instead of following a straightforward sequence of events after the fall of Troy and King Odysseus’s ten-year struggle to return to Ithaca, he centres the narrative on the longing of a wife waiting for her husband and a son who has never seen his father. That emotional thread keeps us engaged throughout the nearly three-hour film.

Nolan uses the many twists and turns in the story to hold our attention. Thankfully, he resists the temptation to rely on extravagant visual effects. Even in scenes featuring the giant Polyphemus, Circe turning Odysseus’s men into pigs, or Odysseus’s visit to Hades to speak with the dead, the visuals remain restrained and serve only the story.

Many scenes are likely to stay with me for a long time. The attack on Troy tops the list. What I had always imagined as a glorious victory is shown here as a massacre of unimaginable proportions. Equally memorable is the sequence where the giant devours men one after another. The climax is deeply satisfying as Odysseus finally takes revenge on those who betrayed his wife and son during his long absence.

Besides Nolan, Hoyte van Hoytema deserves special appreciation for the cinematography, and Ludwig Göransson for the background score. The music adds another layer to an already outstanding film.

Overall, this is an exceptional cinematic experience. If you have an IMAX screen near you, do not miss the opportunity to watch it there.

After watching the film, I became curious about the many places Odysseus is said to have travelled. Keeping in mind that this is a work of fiction, I asked AI to create a map of his journey. You can see the visual below. It suggests that Odysseus travelled about 600 kilometres on his first journey from Ithaca to Troy, and then more than 6,000 kilometres on his return voyage through places identified today with Greece, Italy, Malta, Tunisia and Türkiye.