The Odyssey Review: Did Nolan Live Up to Homer's Original?
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey landed in theatres on July 17, and it did not tiptoe in — it stormed the box office. The film delivered Nolan's biggest opening day ever in India, outpacing even Oppenheimer, and pulled in an estimated $257 million globally over its opening weekend. In India alone, the three-day haul crossed ₹61 crore net, powered by packed IMAX houses in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. Say what you want about legacy sequels and franchise fatigue — audiences showed up in force for a 2,700-year-old story.
So now that half the country has watched Matt Damon fight his way home to Ithaca, the real question is: how does the movie stack up against the actual Odyssey? And more importantly — should you read the comic book before or after? Here's our take.
The verdict: it's a genuine spectacle
Critics have largely called this one of Nolan's most ambitious films yet — a nearly three-hour epic shot across six countries, told with his usual layered, non-linear structure. Reviewers have praised the scale and craft while noting it's a colder, more distant watch than something like Interstellar — closer in spirit to Dunkirk's detached grandeur than to a warm, emotional character piece. Matt Damon's Odysseus is less swashbuckling hero, more weary survivor. Several reviewers singled out the Cyclops sequence and the final confrontation in Ithaca as genuine IMAX showstoppers.
In short: it's a technically stunning, morally complicated retelling. Not a crowd-pleasing adventure romp — a meditation on what stories do to the people who tell them.
What Nolan kept from Homer
The bones of the story are intact. Odysseus, cursed by Poseidon after blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus, spends ten years trying to sail home to Ithaca — running into Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and Calypso along the way, while Penelope fends off suitors and Telemachus comes of age searching for news of his father. Nolan reportedly leaned on Emily Wilson's acclaimed modern translation, which strips away some of the flowerier Victorian-era language earlier adaptations relied on and pushes the story's rawer, stranger edges to the front.
The framing device — a story told within the story, opening deep in the middle of the action rather than at the beginning — is very on-brand for Nolan, and it's also very Homer. The original poem famously begins in medias res too. That's not a Hollywood invention; that structure is nearly 3,000 years old.
What's different — and why the comic still matters
A three-hour film — even one shot at this scale — still has to compress a sprawling epic. Side characters get less room to breathe, some of the gods' politics get simplified, and the Trojan War backstory (which is really The Iliad's territory, not The Odyssey's) gets folded in as prologue rather than full context.
That's exactly where the comics earn their keep. Our Odyssey and Iliad adaptations give you the fuller picture — who Achilles and Hector actually were, why the Trojan Horse mattered, and what Penelope was up against for a decade alone in Ithaca. If the film left you with questions about the mythology, the comics answer them in an evening, not a semester of classics homework.
Should you watch first, or read first?
Honestly — either works, but they hit differently:
- Read first: You'll walk into the theatre already knowing who Circe and the Sirens are, and the film's compressed pacing will feel like a bonus, not a knowledge test.
- Watch first: The spectacle hits harder without knowing what's coming — and then the comic becomes the deep-dive for everything the film didn't have time to cover.
Our honest recommendation: read the comics after. Let the film's scale hit you cold, then come back to the source material once you're hungry for the full story. That's usually when it lands hardest.
Get the comics that started it all
Both The Odyssey and The Iliad comic adaptations are available now with free delivery across India on orders above ₹399. Nearly 3,000 years old, and it still sells out IMAX screens — that should tell you something about a good story.