Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey (2026). Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey had a reported budget of $250 million.  So, it needed to put a lot of bums on seats if its director was going to be trusted with similarly ambitious projects in the future. (If you add in a reported marketing budget of $125 and the cut taken by the cinemas, then the film needed to take between $650 and $725 million just to break even).    Indeed, 15-rated (R-rated) movies have never had this big a budget before because the commercial risks are so high.  The film has made a profit of around $100 million at time of writing.  And it is getting many stellar reviews from professional film critics and paying audiences alike.

We can draw two conclusions from all this.  First, the film was clearly made with an eye on the broadest possible global audience, not a relatively small crowd of Homer-savvy readers, students or classical scholars. Second, much of that broad audience likes what they have seen. They are recommending it to others and they are returning to cinemas to watch it again.

And there is much more at stake here than Chris Nolan’s own future plans or his reputation. The success of the Odyssey movie demonstrates the viability of a certain style of commercial film-making which is now rare.   With its IMAXian scale and spectacle, its non-CGI realism and its preference for shooting internationally and on-location (with local crews, craftspeople and extras), The Odyssey is 2026’s answer to landmark blockbuster epics which pre-date the digital age.   One thinks of Camerini’s Ulysses (1954), Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959),  Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia  (1962), Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Less obviously, Nolan’s epic owes something to pre-digital war films such as Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998).There are good old-fashioned horror-film tropes in this film too.

What the film delivers, and it does so reasonably well in my view, is the sort of collective and shared cultural experience which is increasingly hard to come by in our age of home streaming, digital devices, half-empty pubs and eye-watering ticket prices (for sport, music, festivals and theatre).  Of course, a trip to the cinema is also too expensive for many people these days and that is in itself a scandal for a form of entertainment which was always supposed to be for the masses, and not for the few.   But it is clear that an awful lot of people have somehow found the time and money see The Odyssey. As a result, both the film and the ancient narrative on which it is based are being experienced as stories which nearly everyone can know, interpret and discuss.  It is easy to lose sight of the significance of this amidst all the arguments about the director’s choices, the film’s overall quality and depth or its fidelity to its source text.

In the ancient Greek-speaking world, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey also had this status of being stories which were loved and known by all.  These two poems were often performed before large audiences at religious festivals, for example.  And as soon as these stories were fixed in writing, poets and playwrights started to create new works which offered different ‘takes’ on, and various sequels or prequels to, what we find in the Homeric poems themselves.

An average Greek citizen who’d heard rhapsodes performing The Odyssey at (say) a festival in honour of Athena in the fifth century before the birth of Christ might be a bit surprised to learn that Nolan’s version contains no scenes of the gods bickering on Mount Olympus and that it completely misses out Odysseus’ time spent on the island of the Phaeacians. But because he had also seen parts of the ‘Trojan cycle’ epics reimagined in lyric poems, and in tragic plays or satyr dramas, he would also understand that changes of medium and genre entail changes in content.  Our putative ancient citizen would  also be pleased to discover that the film has been true to the original poem’s capacity to hold a crowd and to establish itself, both as a piece of shared culture and as a universal reference point.  God knows, and the Greeks knew, that we need some shared stories, experienced collectively, if we are to prevent our communities from disintegrating completely.

This is not to deny that Nolan’s project has its problems.  Some poor ethical and political decisions were clearly made during the film’s production process.  And the final product is undoubtedly flawed from the perspective of many classicists (including myself) and other readers who know Homer’s Odyssey inside out.  It is also the latest in a series of Nolan films which centre on male preoccupations while leaving its female characters underdeveloped and somewhat sidelined.  This is particularly regrettable given that Homer’s original poem lends a great deal of agency and complexity to the story’s extensive cast of women and goddesses.  The film also contains some telling omissions and areas of emphasis in relation to the depiction of violence and peace in Homer’s original.  I explore these in a separate post.  

However, when it comes to commercial cinema, we should always remember that such shortcomings often say as much about failings or blind spots within the culture and values of its target audiences as they do about the individual film director who is aiming to entertain them.

It is also worth remembering that even Homer had his critics. In Plato’s Republic, for example, the philosopher Socrates argues that Homer’s poems represent the gods and heroes falsely, and in a way that promotes impiety and bad behaviour.  That didn’t stop people from reading, performing and enjoying Homer then and Nolan’s film is ultimately to be praised for fostering more and wider enjoyment of the Iliad  and Odyssey now.