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15 Thoughts on The Odyssey

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jul 28th, 2026 · 10:21 AM EDT

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(this post contains spoilers, obviously)

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Alright, finally saw The Odyssey this past weekend at the AMC up on Route 309 in Montgomeryville. Packed house at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night. It was a normal theater but it had the kickass sound quality and the reclining seats and all of that.

The movie was good. Maybe great. Somewhere on that line. It’s not the best movie that mankind has ever made, but it’s definitely worth seeing, even just for the cultural experience and the ability to share your reaction with everybody else. Christopher Nolan made a film that feels like one of those big summer events that transcends the theater itself and really penetrates pop culture. There are vibes of the Barbie vs. Oppenheimer trend of a few years ago, when you get bashed over the head with the topic so frequently that you think to yourself , “shit, I guess I need to get to the movies and check this out.“

Background: I’m a pseudo-dork who has a lot of familiarity with Greek myth and storytelling via movies and video games. If you watched Troy, or Clash of the Titans, or played God of War or Hades or anything like that, you probably know a lot of the characters and a lot of the monsters and legends and so this won’t be your first rodeo. I think that had a significant impact on the viewing experience, the pre-existing familiarity.

Now, to the observations:

1. The cinematography was incredible. Really epic stuff. Big battles and storms and fires and shipwrecks and all of that. There was no shortage of excellence there.
2. The script writing and dialogue was just okay. It felt like some of the lines fell a little flat. For a movie that was three-hours long, it lacked a bit of emotional depth and character building. It’s almost like there were so many stars and so many big names that they couldn’t flesh out all of these characters. Some of them only got a few minutes of screen time to begin with.
3. Nolan is known for jumping around in the timeline and sort of piecing his films together, but this was easy to follow and the pacing and the chronology felt perfectly fine.
4. You probably saw some of the online chatter about “wokeness,” for instance, having a black woman (Lupita Nyong’o) play Helen. Elliot Page was cast as a male soldier. Neither one of those things stood out to me at all. Nyongo’o was barely even in the movie, while Page’s character had one of the more interesting backstories. I wasn’t sitting there thinking that someone was trying to force the “woke agenda” upon me with non-traditional casting. The Odyssey is epic poetry anyway, fiction that may or may not have been influenced by historical events or real people. So you’d expect the story to have various interpretations in which different directors and different translators picture the characters a certain way. Related, I took my kids to see the live action Little Mermaid and they didn’t give a shit that Ariel was black. They did ask about it, about halfway through the movie, and I stumbled through something to the effect of, “uh, well in the cartoon she’s white, but in this version of the movie she’s black.” And my five-year-old looked at me and said, “oh, okay,” and that was the end of it. She didn’t seem to care at all.
5. Good acting from Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and John Leguizamo. They played three of of the more compelling characters.
6. Tom Holland was fine. First time ever seeing one of his movies. Maybe I’m getting old.
7. Robert Pattinson’s character came off as a sniveling little prick, so he did a good job.
8. Jon Bernthal isn’t a bad actor, but I feel like I’ve only ever seen him play meatheads. Walking Dead, Punisher, etc. Maybe that’s on me to see him in a different role. Any recommendations?
9. Charlize Theron was… just sort of there? There wasn’t much that was interesting about her character, the nymph Calypso.
10. Zendaya as Athena was alright. Those scenes didn’t move me one way or another. It’s hard to do the Greek gods thing in these kinds of movies. Do you portray them as humans or go crazy with costuming, makeup, and/or CGI? Nolan opted to keep it simple.
11. The Polyphemus and Circe scenes were really well done. Great job by Samantha Morton with the latter. She only had a small role but gave one of the best performances.
12. The Scylla and Charybdis scenes felt rushed, considering how much time was given to the Circe and Polyphemus scenes. The siren scene felt like it got the appropriate amount of time.
13. It was pretty silly to see Odysseus stand there in the middle of his throne room and fight 100 guys at once, or whatever it is. I guess they didn’t think to bum rush him with overwhelming numbers. They thought it better to create a ring and act scared, then try to fight him one at a time. That was a little bit of an eye roller.
14. No movie is ever going to perfectly adhere to a source material. I think if you go into this with an open mind and understand that it’s one person’s interpretation, you’ll have a better experience. The nitpicking seems to be coming from classicists and historians while the film people are generally are giving this good reviews. You should go into this movie with the mindset of watching a Marvel flick, and not looking for some dead-accurate history lesson.
15. When the movie ended, I didn’t have much of a reaction. Not sure why. Maybe it’s because I was familiar with the story and so there wasn’t any sort of first-time shock value, or emotional reaction or expression. Dunno. It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t like watching Gladiator or Braveheart for the first time, where you’re like “holy shit, this is incredibly moving.” The reaction was more like, “that was a nicely done interpretation of something I was already familiar with.” But maybe you’re not a dork, and therefore this will be new and exciting for you.

I’d give the movie a 6.9 out of 10. I don’t feel like I need to see it again. But you should go see it. It’s worth it. It’s the cultural event of the summer. That, and the Sixers signing LeBron James. This will be known as the summer of LeBron James and The Odyssey.

Bonus take: if you have kids, go see Toy Story 5 but skip Minions and Monsters.