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That Christopher Nolan! What an unpredictable guy he is, with his “movies told out of order” games, “is it a dream or reality” stories, “what timeframe are we witnessing things happen in” trickery, and his “screw it, let’s just run time backwards” hijinks.
All of which is to say, for someone with such a notably wacky outside-the-box storytelling track record, it’s a bit surprising that Nolan’s next movie is seemingly a straight-up adaptation of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey.
Sure, we don’t really know all that much about the film yet. Matt Damon is playing Odysseus, who is of course the main character of Homer’s story, and an extensive group of noteworthy actors have been cast in as-yet unannounced roles in the film, including Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Charlize Theron, among others. The Odyssey is shooting now and has a release date of July 17, 2026, with Universal Pictures calling the film “a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology.”
Matt Damon is Odysseus. A film by Christopher Nolan, #TheOdysseyMovie is in theaters July 17, 2026. pic.twitter.com/7a5YbfqVfG
— odysseymovie (@odysseymovie) February 17, 2025
Real quick for those who skipped it in high school, The Odyssey tells the 10-year story of Odysseus’ attempt to get home to the Greek island of Ithaca after the events of the Trojan War, an effort that is made all the more difficult when he angers the god of the sea, Poseidon. And this after already being stuck at Troy for 10 years! Waiting for him at home are his now adult son Telemachus and his ever-faithful wife Penelope, although things have grown increasingly dicey for both of them as a group of “suitors” vie for Penelope’s hand in marriage. As he fights to get home, Odysseus encounters all manner of mythological creatures and challenges.
It’s freaking great, and one of my favorite books. But it’s also proven challenging to properly adapt to the screen. There have been a bunch of attempts over the years, dating back at least as far as the 1911 Italian silent film L’Odissea, but often the scope of Odysseus’ story has been truncated or mismanaged in translation to movie or TV form. However, Nolan, fresh off the financial and critical success of the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, is perfectly placed to finally get Homer’s story right on the big screen.
But again, what exactly is the director drawn to in this story? He’s often got sci-fi or sci-fi adjacent concepts in his films, and while Odysseus certainly exists in the realm of the fantastical, that’s not quite the same vibe. (A cyclops is not sci-fi, sorry!) Still, I think there’s a good chance that Nolan’s real obsession… no, not dead wives, his other obsession… could be why he’s making this movie, and also why he’s perfect for this movie: It’s his interest in playing with time, or how the viewer perceives time in relation to the story being told, that is perhaps the key to nailing The Odyssey.
One of the reasons why The Odyssey has always been a challenge to properly adapt to movies and TV (aside from the obstacle of convincing visual effects until relatively recently) is the nature of the main character’s story. While his time away in the Trojan War isn’t technically part of The Odyssey (that’s The Iliad, for those who also skipped that class), those first 10 years away from his family are a necessary bit of backstory that infuses The Odyssey with a lot of its emotion. Add to that the 10 years that it takes Odysseus to finally get back home and then the actual re-taking of that home when he battles the suitors (this last part was its own movie alone just last year – The Return starring Ralph Fiennes), and you’ve got a lot of story taking place over a very long period of time.
I’ve always thought that biopics always run the danger of being the CliffsNotes version of a person’s life, which is why when a movie like James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown focuses in on just a few years of a historical figure like Bob Dylan’s life, it can be a much more effective way of telling a story. Equally, trying to do The Odyssey in, what, three hours? It’s a tall, tall order.
But here comes old Chris Nolan with his timey-wimey and, let’s be fair, highly creative ways of dipping in and out of a story, using the very nature of time as a tool rather than an obstacle. Look at Interstellar, where Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper takes off into outer space for what is basically a one-way mission where time gets all kinds of weird for him and his crewmates, even while his children grow to adulthood back on Earth and, eventually, mourn their apparently lost father. There are certainly Odyssey parallels right there in terms of the missing father on a lost voyage, whose family faces disaster back home, but it’s the way that Nolan tells the story, despite the challenges of, well, time, that is so affecting. He’s not deterred by the vast gulf between the father and his children, but instead uses it to his advantage.
Odyseuss fights a giant Cyclops, sees a bunch of his men turned into pigs, and confronts a bunch of other crazy shit in his story, but he also faces time as an enemy, and in a variety of ways. Not only is he literally 20 years away from his family by the end of his journey, but seven of those years see him trapped on the island of the nymph Calypso, who loves him and offers him immortality (another aspect of time or the perception of it) if he’ll stay with her. He and his crew’s visit to the realm of the Lotus-Eaters plays with time in a different way, in that those who eat the fruit of the land lose any interest in returning home, content to stay and eat the fruit forever. And then there’s our hero’s trip to the Underworld, where he finds lost friends and family, including his mother and his comrade Achilles, who are doomed to exist, if not quite live, for eternity as mere shades of their former selves.
Then there’s the situation back home, as Telemachus was just a baby when his father left and is now a young man. Odysseus’ father Laertes is a sad shell of his former self, having lost his wife to grief over the past 20 years, while assuming his son is gone forever too. And in one of the most effective passages in Homer’s poem, even Odyseuss’ dog Argos has been waiting for him all this time!
Will Nolan be able to tell Odyseuss’ full story effectively by utilizing his particular brand of stylized filmmaking? The guy is fixated on time, and by extension memory, and that certainly seems to be a quality he shares with the hero of The Odyssey as well, a man who eventually has nothing but memories – of his family and the life he once lived – to rely on as he fights the great gulf of time to get home.
