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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX® film technology. The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to screens worldwide as the first feature film ever shot entirely with IMAX® Film Cameras.
The Odyssey is written for the screen and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on Homer’s Odyssey, one of two major epics of ancient Greek literature attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest surviving works of literature and remains popular with modern audiences. Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is divided into 24 books. It follows the heroic king of Ithaca, Odysseus, also known by the Latin variant Ulysses, and his homecoming journey after the ten-year-long Trojan War.
REVIEW
Nolan’s The Odyssey brings to the screen Homer’s heroic epic, a literary work regarded as the foundational text of Western culture.
Shot in six countries with an all-star cast, Nolan’s thirteenth feature fulfills a dream of many years to film an entire movie using IMAX Film Cameras, and it represents his most immersive and expansive cinematic experience yet.
“Your experience as a filmmaker informs the choices you make in a number of different ways, including what you feel prepared for, what you feel that you have the skill set for, and what will give you a new challenge but builds on what you’ve done before,” Christopher Nolan says. “The Odyssey is an incredible work that’s extremely important to the history of the world and development of culture, but it has never been adapted as a modern blockbuster. I was energized by the challenge of creating the mythic world of Ancient Greece and excited about telling its story, with all its rich themes, in a way I’d never seen.”
A massive poem of 12,109 lines attributed to Homer, whose very existence is debated by modern scholars, The Odyssey and its equally monumental prequel, The Iliad, are believed to have been composed in the 8th century BCE, though they most likely evolved in language and content as they were sung and re-sung by generations of oral storytellers. Together, they form a fantastical myth about the end of the Bronze Age.
The Odyssey is a unique saga. A non-linear narrative with many flashbacks, parallel plots, stories within stories, and meta-commentaries
The poem is structured around two central figures: Odysseus of Ithaca, king of a rocky Greek isle, who wins the war for Agamemnon with his iconic gambit, the Trojan Horse; and Telemachus, his young adult son, who was an infant when his father left for Troy. As Odysseus embarks on a crucial leg of a homecoming journey troubled by gods and monsters, storms and tragedy, Telemachus searches for hope that his long-lost father is still alive amid a mounting crisis on Ithaca threatening him and his mother, Penelope: a pack of wolfish princes and noblemen have taken residence in the family palace and are pressuring the queen to give up on Odysseus, marry anew, and make one of them king.
Central to The Odyssey are a pair of interconnected themes expressing ideals and values crucial to the culture of ancient Greece. The first is xenia (“guest friendship”), the practice of extending generous hospitality to strangers. Also known as “the law of Zeus,” this code of conduct was considered a civic and divine duty, and its violation by host or hosted was considered shameful and impious. The custom helped Greece cultivate allies and build a network of trade. The second major theme, nostos (“homecoming”), was understood to be a literal voyage of return and a spiritual process of rebirth, in which a quest for home and any of its rewards—reuniting with loved ones; reclaiming lost titles and riches; forging a more mature, life-giving identity—requires trials that test or reshape character.
“Whether it’s the narrative through-line of Odysseus or the singular episodes that make the entirety of the epic, The Odyssey underpins almost all of cinema,” Nolan says. “It’s certainly there in every movie I’ve ever made, to a degree I never before realized. It was a fun thing to discover as I got into the work of adaptation.”
Like many people of his generation, Nolan first encountered The Odyssey in abridged form during his elementary school days
He recalls watching kids in the older grades performing a theatrical adaptation; he was captivated in particular by the tale of the Trojan Horse and the poem’s overtly fantastical elements, like the Cyclops, a one-eyed giant, and Sirens, nymphs who cause sailors to run aground by enchanting them with song. “For a lot of us, it’s always there, in the back of the mind,” Nolan says. ”And it’s very present when you encounter elements that have been reinterpreted for modern stories.”
“There’s certainly been some incredible, innovative work done in earlier eras of Hollywood in the area of Greek mythology,” says Nolan, citing in particular his admiration for Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1984), both of which featured the artistry of special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen. “But the more I thought about it, the more I was intrigued by the idea of taking on the biggest of stories, with a top-level budget, a top-level cast, and pouring all the modern techniques and resources of a massive Hollywood production into this world.”
While The Odyssey presents a daunting task for a writer seeking to adapt it, Nolan’s previous work had prepared him well for it. The poem’s non-linear narrative and parallel quests of two enmeshed characters, Odysseus and Telemachus, resembles Nolan’s approach to Oppenheimer. It has many distinct episodes, set in varied extreme environments, much like Inception, and it has an array of action sequences, from a massive battle involving opposing armies to stealth missions into dangerous locales, all challenges that Nolan has met before in his films Dunkirk and Tenet.
And Odysseus is a mythic exemplar of every Nolan protagonist: ingenious, principled yet morally slippery, defined by a complex mystery of character. “The thing I loved about the poem when I read it again, once I knew that this was what Chris wanted to do, was seeing how perfectly it fit into the way Chris tells stories,” Thomas says. “It’s nonlinear; there are scares, thrills, and great reveals.”
Contrary to some common assumptions about both The Iliad and The Odyssey, the former poem doesn’t describe the end of the Trojan War, and the latter only mentions the Trojan Horse in flashbacks. (It is likely the original audience already knew the lore, possibly because of familiarity with other epic poems of the time that are now lost to history.) Because depicting the infiltration and sack of Troy was crucial to Nolan’s adaptation, he integrated details and characters from surviving sources that do offer a more robust description of the Trojan Horse gambit, including The Aeneid, an epic poem composed in the 1st century BCE attributed to the Roman poet Virgil and Agamemnon by Aeschylus.
As Nolan locked into a characterisation of Odysseus and developed the story, an ambitious aesthetic for the production began to emerge, one rooted in the director’s pursuit of verisimilitude, no matter how fantastic the genre or story might be.
“What I’ve been doing in my films over the years, whether you look at The Dark Knight or Interstellar or Inception, is taking fanciful ideas and grounding them in reality,” Nolan says. “If the films have worked, I think some of their power and appeal come from that they earned their worlds with an audience, so the audience could believe in exciting, outlandish things.”
At the same time, Nolan wanted his version of The Odyssey, a story set almost 3,000 years ago, to be relatable to modern moviegoers. His desire is consistent with the first bards who sang their own adaptations of the poem, tweaking syntax, introducing regional vocabulary, emphasizing certain themes or altering plot points so that their audiences could see themselves reflected in the tale. “I made a decision when I was writing the script that I wanted the film to be accessible,” Nolan says. “I wanted the world of The Odyssey to feel like a world that a modern audience could relate to. We didn’t want it to look or sound like previous movies set during antiquity, as many of them take their cues from certain periods of art and music, like Neoclassical painting from 18th and 19th century Europe or Romantic Era orchestral compositions. We wanted an earthy, modern, relatable tone to ground the story.”
Nolan’s passion for finding production value in real locations, live stunt-work and practical or “in-camera” effects is well documented. But he has never been averse to using visual effects as needed—in fact, his films have won three Oscars® for Visual Effects— and he has been at the forefront of advancing techniques in both filmmaking and theatrical exhibition, particularly in his passion for IMAX. To make Oppenheimer, Nolan and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, worked with IMAX and Kodak to create 15-perf 65mm black and white film stock for the 15/65mm IMAX cameras used for that film. Coming off that triumph, Nolan recognized he was in a unique position to make The Odyssey using every technique and technology at his disposal—and incorporate some new ones, too—and on a scale that matched his previous movies if not surpassed them.
“I’m a big fan of film history, particularly the silent era,” Nolan says. “Some of the attractions of cinema to audiences back then were things that also speak to audiences now. Extraordinary sets, extraordinary locations, a cast of thousands. Part of the appeal of those spectacles was that these effects were generated practically, with real sets, locations and scores of extras. Over time, with visual effects technology, a lot of that got lost. What has long interested me is the ability to combine those two things to create the most immersive and powerful experience possible. We can return to an older era of filmmaking, where ‘in-camera’ spectacle was everything for audiences. But we can also address the fantasy through the power of visual effects. For me, this synthesis was an appeal of the project. We are trying to do it all. Which seems totally appropriate for what the Odyssey is and needs to be on screen.”
Moving into pre-production, Nolan and Thomas assembled a team of both familiar and new collaborators, all of them game for the challenge of making a movie “that felt like seven different ambitious movies all rolled into one,” Thomas says. “I think Chris was at the right point in his career to make this film. Everyone was. Everything we have done in the past prepared us for this, because everyone needed to be at the top of their game to pull this off. As a producer, I am often the person sitting at the side of the room in prep, listening to the creative conversation. There were a lot of meetings where it was like watching an orchestra play an incredibly complex symphony. It was incredible watching people analyze the problems that they were going to face and figure out the best way to attack them and achieve the seemingly impossible.”
Not that it was easy. It wasn’t, as everyone involved will tell you. Repeatedly. But this, too, is fitting, says Nolan: “It was a hard job—as it should be. It’s The Odyssey.”
The Odyssey stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, king of Ithaca; Tom Holland as Odysseus’ son, Telemachus; Anne Hathaway as Penelope, queen of Ithaca and wife of Odysseus; Robert Pattinson as Antinous, an Ithacan suitor of Penelope; Lupita Nyong’o in dual roles as Helen of Troy, queen of Sparta, and as Helen’s twin sister Clytemnestra, queen of Mycenae; Samantha Morton as Circe, a powerful witch; John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, a faithful servant to Odysseus; Zendaya as the goddess Athena; Charlize Theron as Calypso, an immortal nymph. Jon Bernthal plays Menelaus, king of Sparta and husband of Helen of Troy; Himesh Patel is Eurylochus, the second-in-command to Odysseus’ crew; Bill Irwin plays the Cyclops, a one-eyed giant; Elliot Page is Sinon, a Greek warrior; Benny Safdie plays Agamemnon, king of Mycenae; Corey Hawkins plays Polybus, an Ithacan suitor; and Mia Goth is Melantho, a servant of Queen Penelope.
The Cinematography
The Odyssey marks the fifth collaboration between Nolan and director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema, who won an Oscar® in 2023 for lensing Oppenheimer. In addition to Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet, van Hoytema’s other acclaimed work includes Let the Right One In, The Fighter and Spectre. Despite his many collaborations with Nolan, van Hoytema didn’t know what Nolan was working on until the filmmaker handed him the completed script.
“Chris called me over and said two words: ‘The Odyssey.’ Then he gave me the script,” van Hoytema says. “He never hinted at it, which is not unusual; he is extremely discrete when he is writing something new. I wasn’t surprised by the ambition of it all. By now, I know Chris isn’t one for air-conditioned soundstages and well-heated rooms. Of course, he’s going to want to get out there in the elements, be on boats, and travel to places where it’s hard to shoot. He loves that. I do, too. So, the project felt very classic, coming from him, but it also represented something new in various ways.”
“An intimate epic” is how van Hoytema characterizes the aesthetic that he and Nolan wanted for the film. “The story itself is always described as an epic story about a journey across wide seas and long distances,” van Hoytema says. “But our focus was never on the scope, per se; the goal for us was to make an epic on a very intimate scale. It is a personal story about a man trying to get back to his wife and son, and willing to do whatever it takes to get there, set in an extremely dramatic, imminently cinematic backdrop. So, the film is designed to put people in the shoes of our heroes, in particular Odysseus, and feel what they feel, and connect with two things in particular: his yearning and longing for home; and the heavy moral dilemmas and ethical questions he encounters along the way.”
Imax innovation: “The Blimp”
Nolan has been captivated by the IMAX format since childhood and has aspired to shoot an entire feature with IMAX Film Cameras for nearly as long. “As a kid, I went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and saw Omnimax films,” says Nolan, referring to a 360-degree presentation of IMAX films projected onto hemispherical screens in domed auditoriums. ”I would also go to the Great America theme park outside Chicago and see IMAX films. Every time I watched one of those films, it was the same excitement for me. I would also wonder: What if you did a fictional film that way? Not just a great documentary, like the incredible work directors like Toni Myers did about the space program. What if you made a Hollywood action film that way? And so, for me, it has been a long-held dream since I was about 16, to do an entire film in IMAX.”
Since The Dark Knight, Nolan has shot select sequences in his films using IMAX Film Cameras, and with van Hoytema, he has been ramping up the ambition and innovation each time. “We have always been guinea pigs for IMAX,” Nolan says. Van Hoytema shares Nolan’s passion for the format. “Anybody that has ever shot even a little test on IMAX understands straight away the power it has,” van Hoytema says. “It is a camera that does not lie; it has such beautiful depth and resolution. It is a masterpiece of organic image creation.”
The most significant obstacle in the way of shooting an entire movie with IMAX Film Cameras has been the disruptive noise they generate. Before The Odyssey, that noise prevented the filming of close-up dialogue scenes because the actors had to shout to be heard over the sound of the camera. (Matt Damon once famously compared the din to someone running “a blender in your face.”) In preparation for Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet, Nolan and van Hoytema, working with IMAX engineers, came close to creating an IMAX camera muffler dubbed “the blimp:” a large, heavy casing that covered the camera. Sadly, the camera was still too loud.
But as he was writing The Odyssey, Nolan realized he was developing the IMAXmovie of his dreams, and so he nudged his friends at the company to start again on the blimp for its next-gen camera, which would become known as The Keighley—named for David Keighley, the late Chief Quality Officer at IMAX and his wife, Patricia, both long-time champions of the format. “I went to IMAX, without telling them what the film was,” Nolan says. “And I said, ‘I know you guys are building new cameras. If you can find a way to encase them so that I can record sound with them, we are going to commit to making the entire new film with IMAX cameras.’ And they stepped up to that.”
The result was nothing short of a game-changer. “We shot a test,” van Hoytema says, “and the moment we saw it projected with sound, it was evident that it could do something very beautiful and very special.”
Still, the filmmakers had concerns about shooting The Odyssey exclusively with their muzzled Keighleys, so much so that they entered production prepared to immediately make a switch to different cameras for certain scenes if necessary. When encased in the blimp, IMAXFilm Cameras become quite heavy, almost 300 pounds, making them difficult to haul and position. They are also bulky (“a big black box, like a refrigerator,” van Hoytema says) and can present eyeline problems for actors on set. Moreover, IMAX Film Cameras can only carry mere minutes of film in their magazines because the stock is so large and thick; after three minutes of shooting, the camera needs to be reloaded.
None of this deterred Nolan or van Hoytema or The Odyssey’s cast and crew. Solutions were found. A team of six crew members were tasked with lugging the blimped-out camera wherever it needed to go. Nolan and van Hoytema’s team created a solution to eyeline complications by rigging a system of mirrors that allowed actors to see each other while performing.
A critical test came midway through production when Nolan shot a long, tender, dialogue-heavy scene with Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway on the Ithaca palace set, a crucial scene that sets up and charges the story’s emotional context. “Whether or not we could actually shoot the whole film in IMAX hinged a bit on the outcome of that scene,” van Hoytema says. “By this time, KEITH DAVIS, my focus puller, had learned how to reload the camera so quickly, it had become a discipline. Everybody would pause, maintain calm, and Keith, in his stealthy way, would reload, and before we’d know it, we were up and running again. It all worked. That was when we knew that we could do the whole film on IMAX, no back-up plan necessary. When we traveled abroad again, we didn’t even take the other cameras with us. We went all-in on IMAX.”
The Odyssey is dedicated to the memory of filmmaker and movie executive David Keighley, the late Chief Quality Officer at IMAX and a long-time champion of the format.
Keighley and his wife, Patricia, were inspired to get into the movie business after seeing the first documentary ever shot entirely full-frame in IMAX, the 1971 short film North of Superior. In 1972, they started David Keighley Productions (later DKP 70MM) specializing in large-format filmmaking and post-production services.
In 1988, after IMAX acquired DKP 70MM, the Keighleys joined the company in executive roles. During his 37 years at IMAX, Keighley helped facilitate the company’s transformation from a maker of short films to a major producer of documentary features and he played a key role in further enhancing IMAX technology and expanding the premium theatrical experience to include Hollywood features. Keighley also helped oversee development of the new model of IMAX Film Camera used for The Odyssey, which is marked by improved functionality, lighter weight, and reduced noise. It has been named “The Keighley” in honor of both David and Patricia.
Keighley also forged relationships with Hollywood filmmakers who were equally captivated by the sharper, more vivid quality of IMAX 70mm films, which currently deliver nearly 10 times the resolution of conventional 35mm film and three times the resolution of standard 65mm film cameras. David and Patricia Keighley first met Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas in 2004 while working together on making prints of Batman Begins for IMAX theaters and they became friends.
With cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan’s longstanding collaboration with IMAX has helped drive some of the company’s most significant technical innovations, including The Keighley, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in filmmaking and exhibition. Nolan shot The Odyssey using only IMAX Film Cameras, and David Keighley, in his capacity as Chief Quality Officer, supervised the processing and printing of daily footage. Keighley finished his work on The Odyssey three weeks prior to his death on August 28, 2025, at the age of 77. He is survived by Patricia, their three children, and two grandchildren. “Our entire industry owes David a massive debt,” Nolan says. “I miss him as a collaborator and as a friend.”
Production Design
To create the world of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan once again collaborated with production designer Ruth De Jong, who earned an Oscar® nomination for her work on Oppenheimer. Her other credits include Jordan Peele’s Us and Nope. She was the first person that Nolan and Emma Thomas recruited for The Odyssey after Nolan had completed his screenplay in the spring of 2024. Her initial response to the opportunity was a mix of awe and terror.
“I couldn’t possibly say no, even as it slightly terrified me,” De Jong says with a laugh. “The Odyssey isn’t history like Oppenheimer, which was daunting in its own way. But Oppenheimer was set in a relatively recent real-world time and place. The Odyssey is mythology. There are aspects of a historicity to it, but that history is incomplete, vague or disputed. It requires interpretation. So, there’s great challenge to it because you have to set rules to create within. It was intimidating at the outset, but Chris is the best leader and coach; he knows how to navigate ambitious tasks. It was just a matter of taking a deep breath and putting one foot in front of the other.”
Aesthetic And Research
As always, Christopher Nolan was committed to making a fantastic cinematic world that felt as grounded as possible. “I wanted to bring my sensibility to the genre of Greek mythology, a type of cinematic storytelling that I really enjoy and that I think can have real power for an audience,” Nolan says. “A lot of that is about texture. And a lot of that, for me, is about using real-world solutions, getting out in nature, getting out on real locations, and using that to inform the reality. Extreme climates and landscapes were essential; I wanted to create a world where you really can imagine that you are on that boat with Odysseus, where you can understand a worldview that interpreted the conditions of nature as embodiments or expressions of stormy, mercurial gods. And part of the thrill of even doing the work was the creative process of figuring out how can we take incredible ideas and outlandish scenarios and make them real.”
Nolan and De Jong worked with LAUREN SANDOVAL (Oppenheimer, A Complete Unknown), a visual researcher who helped them delve into the culture of the Bronze Age. “It was very important to Chris to figure out exactly what we know about the era of the Trojan War,” producer Emma Thomas says. “What they discovered was that we don’t know very much and much of our understanding of the Bronze Age is based on intelligent speculation. Still, what they did learn was invaluable in creating a world that had a logic that we could tap into.”
Unearthing more concrete detail about the era would have made things easier, to be sure. “Our research was like trying to shine light into the darkness and seeing that there is not much but darkness there,” Nolan says. “That put a huge burden on the people working on the film to meet the challenge of creating a world that feels as complete as a contemporary movie, whether you’re talking about finding and building the boats, or designing costumes, sets or props. This world has to be built from research, extrapolation and informed speculation to be convincing, expressive and internally consistent.”
Nolan and De Jong spent months traveling and researching in their quest to find places where they could create the varied realms described in Homer’s poem—the beaches of doomed Troy, the cavern of the Cyclops, the underworld of Hades, and the island homes of Calypso, Circe, the Laestrygonians and Ithaca, not to mention the stormy seas between them all. Their criteria included a desire to avoid the familiar tropes formed by “sword and sandal” epics of earlier Hollywood history, many of which were shot in the deserts of Spain or took cues from Romantic art. Nolan and De Jong ultimately found what they were searching for in six countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and the United States. What they could not accomplish on location they built and shot on California soundstages.
“Odysseus travels to places which, for the original audience of the poem, were completely unknown and outside of their experience,” Nolan says. “These places would have sounded fascinatingly exotic and strange. We wanted to capture that in the film, so we didn’t limit ourselves to a very tight Mediterranean perspective of where a historical Odysseus, had he existed, might actually have gone. We knew our story started and ended in the Mediterranean, but to bring to life the places in between we needed much different landscapes and environmental conditions. Harsh seas. Wind. Rain. Snow. You want all of it for the fantastical scope that Homer’s first readers would have had.”
Getting all of that for Nolan over the course of 91 shooting days across six months wasn’t easy, but Emma Thomas, who has produced every single one of his movies, has made a career of meeting audacious challenges. “Every movie we have ever made, there has always been one big scene that everyone spends most of the time talking about how they are going to achieve it,” Thomas says. “On this one, we had so many.” She laughs. “It really did feel as though we were making the most complex element of any other movie over and over and over again. Every location we went to had incredible, seemingly insurmountable, issues. But we always found a way.”
The Music
The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s third film featuring a score by Ludwig Göransson after Tenet and Oppenheimer, which earned the composer an Academy Award®. Göransson has also won Oscars® for Black Panther and Sinners and he is the recipient of six Grammys, including Song of The Year and Record of the Year in 2019 for “This Is America,” performed by Childish Gambino.
Nolan and Göransson began discussing the music for The Odyssey during pre-production on the film. “Talking to Ludwig, I asked, ‘What can we do with instrumentation that’s related to the ancient world—the aulos, the lyre—but with a modern, fresh approach to how we use them,’” Nolan says. “And Ludwig, as he does, has created an entire unique grammar, a unique set of sounds drawn from both antiquity and contemporary sources, but using the instrumentation of the ancient world. Some of the vocal stylings of the ancient world, some of the ways he’s using voices is incredible. He went all around the world finding sounds and putting them together and making them wholly his own.”
