THE ODYSSEY (2026): WHEN THE HERO IS ALSO THE PROBLEM
Long after the end credits of The Odyssey rolled, I kept asking myself two questions.
Is Odysseus really the hero of this story?
Or is he simply the antagonist who has been given more screen time?
That may sound harsh. But Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus is easily one of the most flawed protagonists I have seen in a movie in recent times. He is intelligent, courageous and determined. He is also arrogant, manipulative, reckless and, at times, unbelievably selfish.
In other words, he is a walking human disaster with excellent leadership skills.
We are used to protagonists who make mistakes. Usually, they make one terrible decision in the second act, regret it during a rain-soaked montage and return as better people before the climax.
Odysseus is different.
His flaws are not temporary obstacles on his journey.
His flaws are the journey.
He lies. He manipulates. He makes decisions that place everyone around him in danger. Men suffer because of him. Men die because of him. Yet he continues moving forward, driven by the belief that reaching home somehow justifies everything that happens along the way.
And somehow, despite all this, I wanted him to reach home.
That is where Nolan’s writing becomes fascinating.
The film does not ask us to blindly admire Odysseus. It asks us to understand him. There is a major difference between the two. You may not always like him. You may occasionally want one of his crew members to gently throw him overboard. But you understand his desperation, his guilt, his pride and his refusal to accept defeat.
It raises an uncomfortable question.
What makes someone a protagonist?
Is it goodness?
Is it morality?
Or is it simply the fact that the story follows them?
Odysseus may be the central character, but he is also responsible for much of the pain surrounding him. In another version of the same story, told from the perspective of one of his exhausted crew members, he could easily be the villain.
Imagine surviving a war, boarding a ship for home and then realising your captain has enough pride to turn a straightforward journey into a ten-year nightmare.
I would have resigned.
Of course, there was probably no resignation form available in ancient Greece.
Nolan does not provide a simple answer to whether Odysseus is a protagonist or an antagonist. Instead, he allows him to exist somewhere between the two. He is a hero capable of terrible choices. A victim who creates victims. A man fighting monsters while slowly becoming one to the people who follow him.
That complexity is what makes him so compelling.
Christopher Nolan has always been interested in damaged men.
Leonard in Memento was trapped inside memory. Cobb in Inception was trapped inside guilt. Cooper in Interstellar was trapped between love and duty. Oppenheimer was trapped beneath the consequences of his own brilliance.
Odysseus may be trapped inside something even more dangerous.
His own belief in himself.
Adapting Homer’s classic was already an enormous challenge. The Odyssey has been interpreted, reinterpreted, studied and discussed for centuries. Most filmmakers would probably approach it with extreme caution, quietly polish the mythology and hope nobody from a university classics department becomes angry.
Nolan does something braver.
He humanises it.
He does not treat Homer’s work as a sacred museum piece that must be admired from behind glass. He enters the story, takes the mythology apart and rebuilds it through recognisable human emotions.
Pride.
Fear.
Love.
Grief.
Guilt.
The desire to return home, even when home may no longer recognise the person returning.
Nolan’s screenplay respects the original story, but it is not afraid to question it. It challenges the idea of the legendary hero. It asks whether history remembers great men honestly, or whether it simply edits out the inconvenient parts.
Legends usually become cleaner with time.
Nolan makes Odysseus dirty again.
And I mean that as a compliment.
The film’s greatest achievement is that the gods, monsters and mythical creatures never overshadow the human beings. The mythology remains powerful, but it is always connected to fear, temptation, grief and consequence.
One of the most inspired examples is the sequence involving the Sirens.
Most filmmakers would probably approach the Sirens as an opportunity to create the most seductive song ever recorded. There would be haunting voices, dramatic close-ups and perhaps a soundtrack album released immediately after the premiere.
Nolan chooses something far more interesting.
He presents much of the sequence from the point of view of Odysseus’ crew, who have blocked their ears with wax to avoid being tantalised by the singing.
They cannot hear the Sirens.
And because we are placed with them, neither can we fully experience what Odysseus is hearing.
Instead, we see him reacting to something invisible.
We watch him struggle, twist and desperately fight against the ropes restraining him. The crew can only observe their captain being consumed by a sound they cannot hear and a temptation they cannot understand.
It is terrifying.
By withholding the song from us, Nolan makes it more powerful. We are denied the beauty that is driving Odysseus mad. We only witness the madness.
That is brilliant filmmaking.
The scene also says something important about Odysseus. He knows the danger. He prepares for it. He orders his crew to protect themselves.
But he still wants to hear the song.
That is Odysseus in one decision.
Wise enough to understand temptation.
Arrogant enough to believe he can experience it safely.
The performances are excellent throughout the film.
The entire cast manages to make this ancient world feel inhabited by human beings rather than statues brought to life. Nobody appears to be performing mythology. They perform exhaustion, loyalty, fear, resentment, love and survival.
Even the smaller roles carry emotional weight. You feel that every member of the crew has lived through the war and is now slowly realising that surviving the battlefield may have been the easier part.
But the film belongs to Matt Damon.
Damon gives one of the strongest performances of his career as Odysseus. He does not play him as a conventional warrior king. There is no effort to make him permanently heroic or endlessly noble.
His Odysseus is tired.
He is stubborn.
He is frightened.
He is brilliant.
He is selfish.
He is broken.
Sometimes all within the same scene.
Damon has always been very good at playing intelligent men under pressure. Here, he adds something darker. You can almost see Odysseus calculating the cost of every decision, even when the cost involves the lives of others.
Yet Damon never allows him to become completely cold.
There are moments where the mask slips and we see the man beneath the legend. We see the burden of command. We see the guilt he refuses to express. We see a man who desperately wants to return home, but may no longer remember how to be the husband, father or king who left it.
The performance works because Damon does not beg for sympathy.
He earns our attention instead.
Even when Odysseus makes a terrible decision, Damon makes us believe that he has already found a way to justify it to himself.
That may be the most frightening thing about him.
The cinematography is magnificent.
Although I watched the film on an average screen, I could still feel the spectacle and epicness of what Nolan had created. This is clearly a film designed for the enormous canvas of IMAX 70mm, but its power is not limited to the size of the screen.
Even on a normal screen, the film feels huge.
The sea appears endless.
The skies seem to weigh heavily over the characters.
The ships look fragile against nature.
The landscapes do not merely provide beautiful backgrounds. They make the characters look small, vulnerable and temporary.
That visual contrast is important.
Odysseus may believe he can outthink gods, monsters and fate itself, but the images constantly remind us that he is still only a man standing beneath an enormous sky.
The cinematography also has a physical quality that I loved. The world feels rough, wet, cold and dangerous. You can almost feel the salt on the characters’ skin. The ships creak. The wind has force. The waves do not look like visual effects designed to impress us. They look like something capable of killing everyone before the next scene.
There is beauty in the film, but it is never comfortable beauty.
The camera often holds on faces long enough for the mythology to disappear. In those moments, these are no longer legendary figures from an ancient poem. They are simply frightened men wondering whether they will ever see home again.
The score is equally powerful.
It does not merely announce the scale of the film. It carries the emotional weight of the journey.
At times, the music is thunderous and overwhelming. At other times, it becomes quiet, mournful and almost intimate. It understands that The Odyssey is not only an adventure.
It is also a tragedy.
The score does not constantly ask us to celebrate Odysseus. Sometimes it asks us to fear him. Sometimes it asks us to pity him. Sometimes it seems to mourn the people being dragged behind his ambition.
And sometimes, particularly during the quieter moments, the music feels like the memory of home itself—distant, fragile and slowly fading
What I thoroughly enjoyed most was the humanisation of the classic.
Nolan gives us spectacle, monsters, battles, seas and myth. But beneath all that, he gives us a deeply human story about a man trying to return to the person he once was.
The tragedy is that the journey keeps changing him.
By the time Odysseus reaches closer to home, the real question is no longer whether he will arrive.
It is whether the man who arrives is still Odysseus.
Perhaps that is why I found the film so powerful.
It is not merely about returning home.
It is about whether home can survive what you have become.
And whether you deserve to enter it.
The Odyssey is a brave, visually breathtaking and emotionally complex retelling of Homer’s classic. Nolan delivers the epicness expected from the material, but refuses to let spectacle become the heart of the film.
The heart remains Odysseus.
A hero.
A liar.
A survivor.
A destroyer.
A protagonist who frequently behaves like his own antagonist.
And perhaps the greatest monster he encounters on the journey is not waiting on an island, beneath the sea or inside a cave.
Perhaps it is the man tied to the mast.
A must-see.
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