I generally don't opine here about current or recent films, mainly because I believe a movie needs to resonate with multiple generations of audiences and critics to legitimately be called a classic—thereby aligning it with the name of this blog. It should hold up over many years, even decades. But with all the hype and ballyhoo surrounding the latest cinematic swing at harnessing Homer's The Odyssey, I felt compelled to break with protocol and take a few (figurative) pugilistic swings at this much-anticipated box office behemoth after seeing it in an IMAX theater this past weekend.
The historical epic has been suffering from shrinkage since the end of its peak era, the late 1950s–early 1960s, at least in part because of filmmakers' over-dependence on CGI, resulting in drab, mock spectacles with a dearth of color, pageantry, and humanity. The promotional catchphrase once associated with the genre, "with a cast of thousands," which for a few years was so commonly used it became a cliché, hasn't applied since the 20th century. So, hearing that the newest version of The Odyssey was shot on locations around the world, and that the special effects were mostly practical rather than computer generated, I had high hopes for this 2026 revisitation to Ancient Greece.
Alas . . .
Why I was Underwhelmed by The Odyssey* (Caution: Spoilers)
*Bear in mind that I hold modern actors, art directors, directors of photography, sound designers and mixers, technicians, set designers, screenwriters, producers, and especially directors to a higher standard than those of the distant past. They are, after all, standing on the shoulders of giants, and their work should reflect that.
- While the nonlinear storytelling of The Odyssey was somewhat effective in a broader sense, it prevented narrative momentum from forming and stunted any possibility of significant character development. There were also issues with the pacing and editing, which similarly permeated Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan's previous blockbuster film. The chronically rapid-fire cutting was constant, exhausting, and at times seemed almost arbitrary. Very few shots, most glaringly during dialogue scenes, were held for more than two or three seconds, which was continually distracting. Many scenes weren't allowed to develop organically. It was almost as if this movie (as with my perception of Oppenheimer) was edited to hold the attention of 13-year-olds. Or Nolan didn't have faith in the screenplay (which he wrote), or he didn't trust his actors—or both—so he attempted to compensate by heavily leaning into these disconcerting, overused editing tricks and distractions. Consequently, there was a sense of dumbing-down and a rushed feel to the film, despite its nearly three-hour length.
- There was an excessive amount of expositional dialogue, mostly in the first half hour or so. Sometimes exposition is unavoidable, but The Odyssey bends viewers' ears with an onslaught of verbal elucidation to the point of cringe-worthiness. Movies are a visual medium; whenever possible, don't say it—show it.
- For my taste, the acting ranged from bland to hollowly ostentatious. Matt Damon was adequate as a sullen, brooding Odysseus, but he never really dominated the screen—not exactly what you want in a representation of a foundational hero of Western literature. Some performances—particularly among those of the suitors—were almost cartoonishly over the top. Robert Pattinson, whose Antinous has been praised by some, might as well have been wearing the ancient Greek equivalent of a handlebar moustache and a top hat. Anne Hathaway's sporadic bursts of emotion left me unmoved.
- The color palette was limited and dull overall, visually restricting most sets and even some locations to seemingly one-dimensional, confined atmospheres. Interior shades were particularly austere and stifling, generally limited to spectrums of amber lights at one end and muddy, burnt darks at the other, with little in between. Instead of including even a few scenes with splashes of more vibrant hues, if only to provide some contrast and a break for the eyes, the grayed tones were constant and monotonous. When Odysseus and his men were out at sea, why wouldn't a director take advantage of those beautiful, vast locations the film crew traveled so far to capture? Instead, as is the current trend in visual entertainment, most of the seafaring scenery was muted and chromatically blunted. Nolan had an opportunity to make this movie more of an epic, a spectacle in the grand sword-and-sandal tradition, but he very deliberately opted for a dreary, oppressive veneer. Yes, the effect was to serve a purpose* (this Odysseus carries a lot of guilt, suffers from PTSD, there's a dark, ominous anti-war theme running through the film, etc.), I get that. But it was too much of a bad thing. It was overdone and heavy-handed, like so much else in this movie.
*Nolan even stated in at least one interview that he didn't want his Odyssey to be like a 1950s or '60s film.
- The much-discussed use of modern American speech (in an effort to make The Odyssey's world seem more palpable and palatable to modern audiences) didn't work for me. It was just another distraction.
- This borders on nitpicking perhaps, but Odysseus' statement to his wife Penelope (Hathaway), near the end of the film, that "Our Bronze Age is collapsing" must be mentioned, even though it has already been thoroughly lambasted across social media. The Bronze Age, of course, was not called that until much later in history. It's kind of like someone saying, "Man, this World War I is really taking a toll on Europe" while the war is still going on. (Pedantic notation: It was called The Great War until a June 12, 1939 Time magazine article used the phrase World War I for the first time, nearly 21 years after that conflict ended.)
- The sound design was bad. I don't know if it was the volume level, the mix, or both, but I couldn't make out a lot of the dialogue, and the din of the ambient sound effects was grating, sometimes overwhelming. I assumed the problem might be with the theater's sound system, or even my (aging) ears, until I read similar complaints from others online.
- What was physically taking place in many of the action sequences was unclear or poorly defined. The scene in Polyphemus' cave, for example, was difficult to follow; where Odysseus and his men were in relation to the Cyclops wasn't consistently clear, and neither was the reason for some of them returning to the cave after they'd just left. The fact that the crewmembers were nondescript, seemingly interchangeable and expendable, and had no individual identities or personalities, didn't help. Going back to the sound design, the echo was so excessive in the cave that I couldn't understand what most of the actors were saying, adding to the overall lack of clarity. The action in the underlit climactic slaughter of the suitors was shrouded in semidarkness, making this crucial scene more nebulous and confusing than dazzling and pulse-accelerating.
- The vaunted special effects were a disappointment. Polyphemus should have been terrifying; the scraggy animatronic puppet of the film was not. The fleeting appearance of the Laestrygonians was a nonevent. Even Circe's transforming Odysseus' men into pigs, raved about in early reviews, was unremarkable. While Odysseus' encounter with the Sirens was admittedly portrayed in a creatively unconventional manner—instead of hearing the Song of the Sirens, our aural perception is that of the crew, whose ears are stuffed with wax, while we witness Odysseus' agony—we only get what appears to be a fleeting, distant glimpse of a Siren among the rocks. Although the Battle of Troy was likely intentionally shot to convey a visceral, claustrophobic pall (telegraphing Odysseus' inner turmoil and guilt over his deceptive gift of the horse and the sweeping societal collapse it triggered), the fact that it was a confined, limited set piece could not be disguised. The structures symbolically collapsing in the background (on the nose much?), though reportedly full scale, looked artificial, visually diminishing the scope of a scene that represents the turning point of the film.
I have chosen not to address some of the more contentious hot topics, like rivet counting 3,000-year-old period detail (the armor in particular), grumbling about story compression decisions (Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey Nolan used for reference in his screenplay, has bashed the film for some of the liberties taken in it), or angry accusations of "woke" casting choices. It's a reinterpretation of a literary work, not a documentary.
Ultimately, I was never able to suspend disbelief enough to fully accept the world portrayed in the film as its own reality, or to care much about its inhabitants. If I weren't already familiar with many of the scenarios in The Odyssey (the poem), what is depicted on the screen might easily have come across as a random series of dissociated episodes that don't quite add up to anything substantive, for the reasons listed above. The film is being promoted as an epic, but it doesn't resonate as one, lacking the flair, the scope and breadth, and the visual grandeur traditionally associated with epic films. As such, it was an underwhelming moviegoing experience. Making a dark, anti-war film is fine, but the one-note tone and drab presentation of The Odyssey draped it in a shroud of monotony, a cardinal sin for a three-hour movie. I wanted to like it, but I can't give it any higher praise than calling it an ambitious effort that's just OK.
Perhaps David Denby put it best in his recent essay in The New Yorker, "Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers," anticipating Nolan's then-upcoming adaptation: "Do we need a big movie of The Odyssey at all? Filming it is like filming the Bible, or Huckleberry Finn—books so closely woven into us that some part of us doesn't want to see them externalized as spectacle. The epic has been adapted many times, but the stiffness of most attempts makes one wonder whether the difficulties aren't insurmountable."
© Jon Oye, 2026
Ulysses screen shot source.
