The Odyssey (Universal Pictures, 2026), directed by Christopher Nolan.

In 2007, aged nineteen, I travelled around Greece with the faintly ridiculous expectation that I might find people wearing togas and discussing the meaning of being. What I found instead was a modern European nation and the Eastern Orthodox Christianity to which I would later convert. The classical Greece I had constructed from books was nowhere to be found.

Nolan gave me back something of it: the rosy-fingered Dawn and the wine-dark sea I had carried in my head since adolescence. His great achievement is to recover this elemental density. His sea is not scenery laid behind the action but a power within which the action becomes possible. At several points during the film, I found myself with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes at such Burkean sublimity.

Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography possesses a Spielbergian in-boatedness and a Tony Scottian up-in-the-airness. The Spielbergian quality comes from Jaws: the camera is lodged among wet timber, ropes, sails and straining bodies, close to the waterline where the waves obstruct knowledge. The boat offers neither mastery nor a secure viewing platform. It encloses the men while exposing them, so that apparently empty water becomes threatening because it conceals more than it reveals: the frame is immense, but its immensity is disclosed through the isolation of the human figures within it.

The Tony Scottian quality comes from the first Top Gun: the tilting horizon, the hard glare upon skin and metal, and the cutting together of faces, machinery and open space until physical movement becomes exhilaration. Nolan’s ships sometimes cease to feel like vessels passing horizontally across the sea and seem instead to have been flung upwards into an unstable union of water, wind and sky. The camera does not merely record velocity from outside. It submits itself to the same pitching movement as the performers.

The film was the first feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, which Nolan and van Hoytema use to intensify physical presence. The actors were placed among real boats, water, weather and difficult locations; timber strains, spray hits faces, and the horizon moves behind bodies struggling to remain upright. Nolan described wanting the physical world to communicate how arduous such journeys would have been through an unmapped world.

This physicality is what made the acting so moving. Matt Damon does not present Odysseus as a stainless epic hero but as a man whose intelligence has hardened into a dangerous reflex. Cunning, vanity, exhaustion and guilt pass across his face before they become actions. He has survived through disguise, deception and command, but the qualities that preserved him abroad have made his return to ordinary life doubtful. Homer invokes the Muse to sing of the polytropos man—the man of many turns: Odysseus survives because he can adapt himself to every circumstance, though each successful transformation leaves the question of who, beneath them all, is finally returning home.

The customary Nolanian non-linearity is unusually faithful to its material. Homer does not narrate the voyage as a continuous passage from Troy to Ithaca: the poem begins near the end of Odysseus’s absence, divides its attention between Telemachus and Penelope at home and Odysseus abroad, and allows the wanderer to recover his earlier adventures retrospectively through his own narration. Nolan adopts this coiling structure without turning it into another temporal puzzle. Past and present repeatedly intrude upon one another because homecoming is itself an act of recollection: Odysseus cannot return merely by moving forward through space, but must gather together the different lives, disguises and losses through which he has been dispersed. Nolan’s fractured chronology therefore feels less like an authorial device imposed upon Homer than the recognition that Homer had already invented it.

Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is more restrained and, for that reason, perhaps still more affecting. She makes waiting into a political and spiritual discipline: the preservation of memory, household and inward sovereignty while predatory men consume the material order around her. The vast IMAX close-up enlarges no theatrical gesture because she offers almost none. It allows the slightest alteration of posture, breath or expression to bear the weight of the intervening years. There is an unexpected intimacy within the film’s unprecedented scale; Nolan’s spectacle is greatest when it makes a human face, rather than a monster or an army, appear momentous.

Nolan compresses Homer’s psychological and ethical intricacy, reduces the autonomous activity of the gods, and simplifies some of the recognitions through which Odysseus is restored to his identity. While he may not reproduce Homer’s complexity in cinematic shorthand, he compensates by transferring part of it into the embodied phenomenology of bodies exposed to weather, landscapes resistant to human purpose, faces held in silence, and physical actions allowed to reveal their moral meaning. The film is less intricate than the poem but, at its best, more immediately incarnate.

This is the danger inherent in historical fiction. In his introduction to Robert Graves’s Count Belisarius, John Julius Norwich described it as perhaps the most dangerous literary form because it must combine historical explanation and interpretation with constructive imagination. The same applies to historical cinema. It must restore the past to life without reducing it to either archaeological display or contemporary moral allegory. Its task is to allow another age to speak in its own moral voice rather than dress present assumptions in period costume.

In a deeper sense, this was already Homer’s task. He was not recording the Bronze Age as a modern historian would. He was transforming inherited memories, legends, places and catastrophes into a world capable of speaking for itself. Homeric poetry was therefore neither documentary history nor unrestricted invention, but the imaginative preservation of a civilisation already receding from view.

This is why my usual objection to colour-blind casting did not finally prevent Nolan’s choices from working. The problem with presentist casting is not simply that it is historically inaccurate. It can flatten the differences, inequalities and conflicts that historical drama ought to illuminate, treating the past as though it were merely the present in unfamiliar clothes.

Here, however, it operates more like colour- or gender-blind casting in Shakespeare. We already know the characters and their dramatic relations; the interest lies in how convincingly a new actor can embody them. Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen is particularly clever because Helen belongs less to anthropology than to myth. She is the daughter of Zeus, the object upon whom men project beauty, culpability and political catastrophe. When she turns the other cheek, the gesture neatly confounds those waiting to choke upon their grass-fed beef steaks at another instance of “go woke, go broke.” The move is just subtle enough to work.

The film’s deeper present relevance lies elsewhere, in its account of a civilisation unbinding itself. Nolan makes xenia—the sacred reciprocity between host and stranger—one of the structures separating civilisation from predation. The Trojan horse wins the war by corrupting trust. An exception justified abroad becomes a precedent carried home, until the suitors occupy Odysseus’s household like an invading army, consuming what they did not produce and treating absence as the extinction of another man’s rights. Nolan’s alteration produces a coherent political argument: violations rewarded in war become methods of domestic rule.

There is something almost Scottish Enlightenment in this understanding of collapse. Civilisation rests not only upon constitutions and sovereign commands but upon manners, conventions, reciprocal expectations and the accumulated trust that permits strangers to inhabit a common world. The liberal international order was another such imperfect achievement. Treaties, alliances, maritime law and institutions placed restraints upon immediate advantage in return for a more general security. Once every restraint is observed only when convenient, states become extortionists, ships become raiders and the sea ceases to connect societies because no passage remains safe.

We are living, it sometimes seems, through our own Age of Bronze: an age in which the ties that bind mean very little, and in which powerful men mistake the destruction of inherited restraint for the restoration of strength. Nolan’s Odyssey understands that civilisation does not collapse only when barbarians arrive from somewhere beyond its borders. It collapses when civilised people teach themselves that their own customs are for fools.

The film is too long, and its sword fights are overdone, but these are almost customary defects now. I entered expecting another expensive disappointment and left shaken by cinematography and performance.