Watching Homer on a Bhavnagar Screen: A Review of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey
The Odyssey (2026) — directed by Christopher Nolan, released worldwide 17 July 2026
MKBU Department of English screening group at The Entertainment Park, Bhavnagar
About the Book
Homer's Odyssey is one of the oldest surviving stories in Western literature, composed sometime around the eighth century BCE and passed down through oral performance for generations before anyone wrote it down. It follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his ten-year attempt to sail home after the Trojan War, fighting gods, monsters, and his own pride at almost every stop. Back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope holds off a house full of suitors who assume Odysseus is dead and want to marry her for his throne, while his son Telemachus grows from a boy into a man while waiting for a father he barely remembers.
What keeps the poem alive in a literature classroom is its structure as much as its plot. Homer does not begin at the beginning. He drops the reader straight into the middle of the action, a technique later critics named in medias res, and only later has Odysseus tell his own backstory as a long flashback to strangers at a feast in the land of the Phaeacians. This nested, storyteller-within-a-story shape is one reason the Odyssey is still taught in narrative theory courses nearly three thousand years later. It also means the poem is, among other things, a story about storytelling itself.
The poem also carries a strong ethical structure around hospitality, called xenia in Greek, the unwritten rule that hosts must welcome strangers and strangers must behave honourably as guests. Odysseus is punished repeatedly for violations of this code, his own and others', and several of his most famous encounters, with the Cyclops, with the suitors, with various island hosts, are really tests of hospitality dressed up as adventure. This theme matters for the film, and I will return to it later in this review.
Nolan has said that classicist Emily Wilson's 2017 English translation shaped how he approached the script. Wilson was the first woman to publish a complete English translation of the Odyssey, and her plain, fast-moving verse stripped away much of the ornamental grandness that older translations carried, making Odysseus and Penelope read as more psychologically real and less like statues. Alongside Wilson's translation, Nolan has cited the stop-motion creature designs of special effects artist Ray Harryhausen, known for his work on Jason and the Argonauts, as an influence on how the film's monsters and gods are imagined.
About the Film
The Odyssey released worldwide on 17 July 2026, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, produced by Nolan and Emma Thomas through their company Syncopy, and distributed by Universal Pictures. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, Tom Holland plays Telemachus, and Zendaya plays the goddess Athena, alongside Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, and Charlize Theron in other key roles. The score is composed by Ludwig Goransson, and the cinematography is by Hoyte van Hoytema, who has shot every Nolan film since Interstellar, including Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer.
One production detail matters a great deal for a film studies reading of this film. The Odyssey is the first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras, filmed on location across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, and Malta rather than on green screen sets. Nolan is known for avoiding digital effects wherever practically possible, and this film continues that habit at an extreme scale, building real ships, real armour, and real burning villages instead of generating them digitally. Van Hoytema's team even engineered a custom mirror rig so that actors could look directly into each other's eyes during close-ups while shooting on IMAX cameras that are usually too large and loud for intimate scenes.
This brings me to something worth stating plainly before the review proper begins. Nolan made The Odyssey to be seen on a true IMAX screen, using the tall 1.43:1 aspect ratio that only IMAX 70mm projection can show in full. Bhavnagar does not have an IMAX theatre. The nearest true IMAX screens are in bigger cities, and our committee did not have the time or budget to travel for a single screening. So we watched the film in standard 2D at 4K digital resolution, on Screen 4 at The Entertainment Park, which is what our tickets confirm. This is not a small detail for a film studies write-up. A film shot for a format that fills your entire field of vision, projected instead onto a normal flat screen at a fraction of that size, is not quite the same viewing experience the filmmakers designed.
🎬 MOVIE AT A GLANCE (IMDb Details)
Title: The Odyssey
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan (based on the epic poem by Homer)
Genre: Action, Adventure, Epic, Fantasy
Runtime: 2h 55m (approx. 172-175 minutes)
Certificate: A (CBFC, India) / R (MPAA, international)
Release Date: 17 July 2026
Country: United Kingdom, United States
Language: English (also released dubbed in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu)
Production: Syncopy, Universal Pictures
IMDb Page: imdb.com/title/tt33764258
Official Trailer: The Odyssey (2026) — directed by Christopher Nolan
The Screening
As part of our Movie Screening Committee's activity this semester, I organised a group screening of The Odyssey along with my co-committee members Nidhi Pandya and Priya Rathod. Twenty-five of us from the Department of English attended the first-day-first-show at 10:00 AM on Friday, 17 July 2026, at The Entertainment Park, Bhavnagar, Screen 4.
Movie Screening Committee Leaders, Department of English, MKBU
Department of English, MKBU students at The Entertainment Park, Bhavnagar
The Review
Narrative Structure: Starting in the Middle
The film does not open with Odysseus at sea. It opens with a man standing on a table at a banquet, telling a story to a room full of listeners. That storyteller is played by musician Travis Scott, and the story he tells is an earlier episode from the Trojan War, the trick of the wooden horse, not the Odyssey itself. Only after this frame does the film properly begin, already deep into Odysseus's journey home, close to the story's violent climax rather than its opening.
I found this an interesting structural choice. Nolan is doing on screen what Homer does on the page, starting in medias res and using a frame narrator to deliver backstory instead of filming events in plain chronological order. Narrative theorist Gerard Genette has a term for a flashback embedded like this inside a later scene, analepsis, and the film uses it closer to how the poem does, as digression that circles back on itself, rather than as a simple flashback montage stitched in for exposition.
This structural choice also connects to a larger question in adaptation studies: what does it actually mean to adapt a text faithfully? Literary theorist Linda Hutcheon has argued that adaptation works best as repetition without replication, meaning the adapter repeats the logic and preoccupations of the original rather than copying its events word for word, which is impossible anyway across different media. Nolan cannot film Homer's exact language, since the poem exists in dactylic hexameter and depends on features specific to oral verse. What he can repeat is the poem's own interest in storytelling, its habit of nesting stories inside stories, and its concern with how a life becomes a tale worth telling.
Cinematography and Colour Palette
This is where watching in 2D on a 4K digital screen instead of true IMAX 70mm mattered most for me. The film was shot for a format that fills almost an entire wall of vision, with a taller aspect ratio than any conventional theatre screen and enough resolution to hold detail across a huge frame without losing clarity. A standard 4K digital presentation compresses all of that down to a normal rectangular screen at a fraction of the size and none of the IMAX height. Film theorists sometimes describe the effect of true large-format cinema as a kind of technological sublime, the sense of being made small by the sheer physical scale of the image. On a 4K screen, that effect is present in a diminished form. You can tell the film wants to overwhelm you, but the screen itself is not built to let it.
The colour palette leans heavily toward blue-greys, sand tones, and browns, with almost no saturated colour anywhere in the frame. This is consistent with van Hoytema's earlier collaborations with Nolan on Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer, all of which favour a similarly desaturated, almost monochromatic look. On the open sea, this palette works beautifully, turning the water into something closer to a moving painting than a literal ocean.
On land and in the night sequences, though, the same restrained palette sometimes worked against the film for me. A few scenes felt so dim that details got lost, even when projected large. This is a known pattern in Nolan's recent work with van Hoytema, and it showed up here too, and it is likely made slightly worse rather than better by 2D digital projection, which tends to lose a bit of brightness compared to native IMAX film projection.
Sound and Music
Ludwig Goransson's score leans heavily on percussion, low drums and rhythmic patterns that mimic oars striking water or a heartbeat under pressure, rather than the sweeping string themes usually associated with historical epics. This choice fits the film's overall restraint. Even in quieter dialogue scenes, the sound design rarely goes fully silent, keeping a faint ambient pressure running under conversations, which builds a low, constant tension across the film's near three-hour runtime. On a standard cinema sound system rather than an IMAX auditorium's specially tuned speakers, some of that low-end rumble likely came through as less physical than it was designed to feel, but even at reduced intensity, the sound design carried a good part of the film's emotional weight.
Theme: Hospitality and the Cost of War
One theme that stood out to me, and one that connects directly back to the poem, is xenia, the code of hospitality between host and guest that runs through the entire Odyssey. As I mentioned earlier, Odysseus is punished again and again for violations of hospitality, his own and others', and the poem treats how a person receives a stranger as a genuine moral test rather than a minor social nicety.
This scene reframes hospitality as something that can curdle into violence when an army expects welcome as a right instead of receiving it as a freely given gift. It is one of the more thoughtful additions the film makes to the poem's own concerns, since Homer's original hospitality scenes are mostly peaceful exchanges of food, shelter, and gifts, while this version shows what happens when hospitality is demanded at spear-point rather than offered. Watching soldiers ask why a village fled instead of welcoming them, while the village burns behind them, is a fairly direct commentary on how power dresses up its own violence as a broken social contract.
Theme: Homecoming and Recognition
The Greek word for homecoming, nostos, gives the Odyssey its deepest emotional structure, and the film keeps this at its centre. Odysseus spends most of the story in disguise, unwilling or unable to be recognised by the people closest to him, and the poem builds toward a series of recognition scenes where his identity is slowly confirmed, first by his old nurse, then by his son, and finally by Penelope herself, who tests him with a private detail about their marriage bed that only the real Odysseus could know. This slow, deliberate unmasking treats identity as something that has to be earned back through trust rather than simply declared.
The film handles this arc with a fair amount of restraint, letting recognition happen through small physical gestures and held silences rather than dramatic speeches. I appreciated this choice in principle, even if, as I will note under what I did not like, it occasionally left me wanting a bit more warmth at the moments that should have landed hardest emotionally.
Gender and Penelope
I want to spend a moment on Anne Hathaway's Penelope specifically, since this connects to a reading we have discussed in class using Peter Barry's introduction to feminist literary theory. In most popular retellings, Penelope is remembered mainly for waiting, for weaving and unweaving a burial shroud each night to stall her suitors until Odysseus returns. Her patience often gets treated as the entirety of her character, while Odysseus gets the adventure, the monsters, and the narrative agency. From what I could see in this version, the film gives Penelope more visible political agency in how she manages the suitors and defends the household during Odysseus's absence, rather than presenting her only as a passive figure sitting by a loom. Whether this counts as a genuine revision of the poem's gender politics, or simply a modern gloss layered on top of an old story to make it more palatable to a contemporary audience, is a question worth debating properly in seminar rather than settling here.
Performances and the Intimate Scenes
The custom mirror rig allowed genuine intimacy within IMAX-scale production
Because of the mirror rig I mentioned earlier, scenes like this one land as genuinely intimate rather than cold, despite being shot on equipment originally built for huge, wide landscapes rather than close human faces. Matt Damon plays Odysseus as tired and weathered rather than heroic in an obvious way, which suits a character who is meant to be worn down by two decades of war and travel by the time we meet him. Tom Holland's Telemachus carries most of the film's coming-of-age material, and Zendaya's Athena functions as both a literal goddess and something closer to a conscience figure, appearing at key moral decision points rather than simply providing magical assistance.
✅ WHAT I LIKED
The frame narrative structure, which respects the poem's own storytelling logic instead of simplifying it into a straight chronological plot.
The hospitality and village-burning sequence, which gives the film's violence a clear thematic point instead of treating it as spectacle for its own sake.
The intimate close-ups made possible by the mirror rig, which balance out the film's more distant, epic-scale shots.
The percussion-heavy score, which never lets the quieter scenes go fully silent and keeps a low tension running under the dialogue.
The restrained handling of the recognition scenes, which trusts small gestures over big speeches.
❌ WHAT I DID NOT LIKE
The colour palette, while consistent with Nolan's recent style, made several night and interior scenes harder to read, and this was likely worsened by watching on a 2D 4K digital screen rather than native IMAX projection.
The pacing sags in the middle stretch of the voyage, where individual island episodes start to feel repetitive rather than building toward something.
Some of the emotional peaks, particularly the recognition scenes near the end, felt held at a slight distance rather than fully landing.
Watching this film outside a true IMAX auditorium is a real loss. A film built this deliberately around one specific exhibition format probably deserves that format to be judged completely fairly, and Bhavnagar simply does not have the infrastructure for that yet.
Connecting It Back to the Classroom
Watching this as a group made the conversation afterward, on the way out of the theatre, almost as valuable as the film itself. Odysseus is one of the texts Joseph Campbell drew on directly to build his hero's journey model in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and it was interesting to see how closely the film's three-act shape maps onto Campbell's stages of departure, initiation, and return, even with the frame narrative shuffling the order around.
We also discussed Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope, the way a specific kind of space and time, here the sea voyage, generates its own particular kind of story, full of chance encounters, delays, and tests that would not make sense in a different setting. The film's episodic structure, moving from island to island and threat to threat, is exactly the kind of chronotope Bakhtin used the Odyssey itself to illustrate in his own writing on the novel's historical forms.
For a Third Semester film studies unit, this screening worked well as a case study covering several things at once: adaptation theory and what fidelity to a source text actually means, narrative structure and the function of frame narratives, and a more practical, less discussed question about the gap between how a film is designed to be shown and how most audiences actually encounter it. A film like this, shot entirely for a specialised large format that most cities in India, including ours, simply do not have access to, raises a real question about who a film of this scale is actually made for, and what gets lost for everyone watching outside a handful of major cities.
📚 KEY THEORETICAL CONCEPTS APPLIED TO THE ODYSSEY
In Medias Res
Genette's analepsis -- frame narrative preserved from Homer
Hutcheon's Adaptation
Repetition without replication -- logic over copy
Bakhtin's Chronotope
The sea voyage generates its own kind of story
Campbell's Hero Journey
Departure, initiation, return -- intact beneath the frame
Feminist Theory
Barry on Penelope -- passive waiting or political agency?
Committee: Movie Screening Committee, Department of English, MKBU
Organisers: Nidhi Pandya, Priya Rathod and Sanjay Rathod
Screening details: The Odyssey (English), Screen 4, The Entertainment Park, Bhavnagar, 17 July 2026, 10:00 AM, first day first show, 25 attendees
📚 Works Cited
The Odyssey. Directed by Christopher Nolan, performances by Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, and Zendaya, Universal Pictures, 2026. IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33764258/.
Universal Pictures. The Odyssey | Official Trailer. YouTube, 22 Dec. 2025, https://youtu.be/Mzw2ttJD2qQ?si=Ye_T_jSrBNv9D3SG.
This screening report reviews The Odyssey (2026) directed by Christopher Nolan, applying adaptation theory, narrative theory, and feminist literary criticism to Homer's epic as adapted for the screen.
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