“The Odyssey,” Movie Review

by George Young

The Odyssey (2026), is a new major motion picture by Christopher Nolan, director of Oppenheimer (2023), The Prestige (2006), and 87 Batman movies. Ranking the 13 films helmed by Mr. Nolan, The Odyssey comes in at No. 42. To paraphrase the brilliant cinema reviewer, Joe Bob Briggs (Texas accent is on me), “Ah had ‘bout nahn hours ta kill the other day, so ah decided to take in Christopher Nolan’s latest Oh‑Madge to woke stupidity, The Odyssey.”

Let’s start with the good things about Nolan’s epic. The cinematography. That is all.

The movie opens with a public service announcement touting the “benefits” of gender dysphoria. The “trans” actress, Ellen Page, lies on a beach wrapped in some of the worst‑designed latex armor ever produced by a costume department. She trundles down the beach exhibiting all the martial capability of a 1950s charm‑school dropout. Page is supposed to be a Greek soldier. If this is what passes for an average Greek warrior, it’s no wonder the Trojan War dragged on for years. She’s promptly skewered by the rear guard of the Trojan army.

If only the audience had been so fortunate.

Another confusing early casting choice is Hamesh Patel as Odysseus’ second-in-command, who utters, “We are Greeks from . . . “

Mr. Patel is from India. While the odds of someone from the Far East making their way to Greece in 800 B.C. are not nonexistent, the likelihood of such a person serving in the Greek navy certainly is. The Greek army, meanwhile, appears to be a collection of supernumeraries pulled straight from Central Casting, the specs for which seem to be a box‑checking exercise in ethnic diversity of United Nations proportions.

For an industry that has blasted “Cultural Appropriation!” through a worldwide SONOS system for decades, the exclusion of native Greek actors from the cast exposes Hollywood for what it truly is: a virtue‑signaling collection of hypocrites.

Casting is but one slip on the banana peel. Production design is another.

A question with which even the most fervent Nolan fan would struggle is, “Do you ever feel that you are witnessing events from 2,800 years ago?” The dialogue (Telemachus; “Mom? Is Dad ever coming home?”) is straight out of COVID-era Hallmark movies. There is no effort, as there was in Gladiator (2000) with the resurrection of the Roman Colosseum, to transport the audience to an ancient, ahem, odyssey on the Adriatic or Mediterranean seas. The locations, as beautiful as they are, exist in 2025 when the film was shot. The temples, palaces, and cities did not look that way in 800 B.C. As an aside, there is an artist’s rendering of the Sphinx in its original splendor. No missing nose. Headdress complete. Full color. Stunning.

Nolan and his design team did nothing of the sort for The Odyssey. Every scene is set in the present day with men and women in period dress populating the interiors and exteriors. The production team had every digital tool necessary to restore each location to its ancient appearance, yet no such effort was made. Had an Italian tour group wandered through while the Laestrygonians were slaughtering the Greeks, or during any of the Ithaca interludes where rubble stands in for palaces, no one would have batted an eye.

These are technical details. The worst of the film is mixing them with creative choices. Bad creative choices. Nolan scammed us. The Odyssey is a lazy man’s cinematic effort. Most disturbing is his complete ignorance of Homer’s epic poem. Penelope is a devoted wife. She is not a Columbia grad student majoring in feminist literature, expounding on the patriarchy’s lack of equity inclusion by not putting her on the throne of Ithaca. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, while a flawed and weak character in the poem, is not Beaver Cleaver complaining that Eddie Haskell is trying to score with his mother, which appears to be his acting choice.

And Odysseus isn’t some simpering weakling unable to do more than island hop from one Monty Pythonesque misstep to another. He is a hero of classic proportions and immense strength. Nolan paints him as a beta male with an IQ of 80. I am shocked he didn’t tell Calypso he went to Berkeley. To wit, upon weighing anchor at yet another island: “Landing party, look for food and supplies, and don’t piss off the gods.” And then after the landing party pisses off the gods: “Run away! Run away!” Repeat.

Finally, the poem, The Odyssey, is a foundational document of Western Civilization. It is an inspiring tale of resolve, determination, loyalty, honor, devotion, and duty. It is not some throwaway piece of source material meant to be ridiculed at a creative meeting in Malibu. Perhaps the issue is that Nolan turned apologist with his latest cinematic efforts?

Oppenheimer gave us every reason to mourn the intractable suicidal Japanese, and to hate American ingenuity and the deserved love for these United States. In The Odyssey, Nolan has gone deeper to criticize the principles that define and make great Western Man. He has, in effect, openly blasted the tenets and core values of the civilization that provides him the ability to make the film.

If only he had made it well.

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George W. Young started his professional life in 1979 as a dancer in New York City, where he worked in summer stock and musical theater. He switched to video production in 1984, working on commercials for Fortune 500 companies. He spent the next 30 years working on films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Junior (1994), Serendipity (2001), and The Internship (2013). His novels, Draculand (2022) and TIME Blinked (2021), have been published by Celestial Echo Press.

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