Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is, above all else, a staggering visual achievement. Its enormous landscapes, towering sets, and overwhelming battle sequences create the sense that Nolan genuinely attempted to capture the scale of myth rather than merely retell an ancient adventure. The effects are at their most memorable during Odysseus’s encounter with Circe. The transformation of his men is presented as something physical and grotesque, with their bodies appearing to soften, collapse, and reshape like wet clay. It is an unsettling sequence precisely because it feels tangible. Rather than treating magic as a burst of weightless digital spectacle, the film gives it texture, pain, and consequence. Moments like this demonstrate the immense craft behind the production and make The Odyssey feel appropriately strange, dangerous, and larger than life.

Unfortunately, the film is far less successful at preserving the ideas and traditions that give Homer’s original work its lasting power. It follows many of the poem’s recognizable events, but it frequently loses sight of their meaning. Most notably, Odysseus’s pride no longer feels like the central cause of his suffering. In the original story, his intelligence repeatedly saves him, but his arrogance prolongs his journey and brings disaster upon the people around him. Nolan’s version emphasizes external danger and heroic endurance while softening the personal failures that make Odysseus such a fascinating and deeply flawed figure.

The film also repeatedly rewrites Greek tradition through a distinctly modern perspective. Menelaus and Helen, for instance, are portrayed as having an adversarial relationship following his return from Troy, despite that not being the dominant dynamic presented in the ancient tradition. Their story was not simply a modern romance defined by personal choice, betrayal, resentment, and the pursuit of true love. The passion or divine force that carried Helen away was often treated as something mystical—an overwhelming power capable of overcoming reason, duty, identity, and even the self.

By reducing these ideas to familiar contemporary concepts of romance and marital conflict, the film makes the characters more recognizable to modern audiences but strips away much of the strangeness and spiritual complexity of the mythology. Ancient Greek stories do not always operate according to modern ideas of emotional authenticity or individual choice. Their characters exist within a world shaped by fate, divine intervention, honor, hospitality, pride, obligation, and forces greater than human will. Rewriting those traditions through a modern psychological framework may make the material easier to understand, but it also suggests that the filmmakers do not fully grasp the worldview that makes The Odyssey what it is.

This becomes the adaptation’s central weakness. The filmmakers appear interested in reproducing the events, creatures, and imagery of Homer’s poem without fully understanding the ideas connecting them. The recognizable episodes remain, but their moral and cultural foundations are weakened or replaced. The result is a story that resembles The Odyssey on the surface while often feeling disconnected from its essence.

The film does retain the broader idea that the promise of a heroic death is a lie—that glory in war rarely survives contact with its human cost. However, this theme is transferred to a different character rather than being explored through Achilles and the bitter understanding traditionally associated with him. The idea remains powerful, but its altered placement makes it feel more like a thematic echo than a fully developed continuation of Homer’s worldview. It is one of the film’s better thematic choices, even though it further demonstrates the willingness of the adaptation to separate important ideas from the characters and traditions that originally gave them meaning.

The acting is similarly uneven. Despite the remarkable cast, many of the performances feel less like fully inhabited characters and more like familiar movie stars wearing ancient armor. Several members of the ensemble rely heavily on the personas audiences already associate with them, making it difficult to disappear completely into the world of the film.

Anne Hathaway is a notable exception. She brings restraint, intelligence, and emotional weight to Penelope, suggesting years of uncertainty without reducing the character to someone who has simply waited for her husband to return. Her performance feels grounded in a way that much of the surrounding ensemble does not, and her quieter scenes provide some of the film’s most convincing human emotion. Hathaway gives Penelope an interior life that extends beyond her relationship with Odysseus, allowing the character’s patience to feel like an act of strength rather than passivity.

Robert Pattinson is another standout. He commits completely to the heightened and unsettling qualities of the material, delivering a performance that feels shaped by the world of the film rather than by his existing screen persona. There is an unpredictability and intensity to his work that makes his scenes feel genuinely dangerous. Alongside Hathaway, he is one of the few actors who appears to disappear into a character rather than present a recognizable version of himself.

This is especially noticeable when their performances are contrasted with Tom Holland’s portrayal of Telemachus. Holland comes across as a genuinely enjoyable and charismatic person in interviews, and that natural likability has served him well in roles such as Spider-Man. In The Odyssey, however, those same familiar qualities work against the character. Rather than embodying a young man raised beneath the shadow of an absent and legendary father, Holland repeatedly seems to be presenting himself. His speech patterns, mannerisms, humor, and emotional reactions feel so recognizable that Telemachus never fully emerges as a distinct person from another time and culture.

The problem is not that Holland lacks charm or screen presence. It is that his performance feels fundamentally out of place within the mythic world the film is attempting to create. Where Hathaway and Pattinson transform themselves to meet the material, Holland appears to bring the material toward his established persona. His Telemachus often feels less like the son of Odysseus and Penelope than a personable modern young man dropped into an ancient setting. The contrast makes Hathaway and Pattinson’s performances even more impressive, but it also reinforces the broader sense that much of the cast is playing recognizable versions of themselves rather than fully inhabiting Homeric characters.

In the end, The Odyssey is an extraordinary spectacle and an imperfect adaptation. It reproduces many of the famous episodes of Homer’s poem, sometimes with astonishing imagination, but it does not consistently understand—or chooses not to preserve—the moral, cultural, spiritual, and psychological ideas connecting them. Its scale is immense, its effects are frequently remarkable, and a handful of performances rise to meet the grandeur of the material. Yet the film repeatedly replaces the unfamiliar worldview of the ancient story with more conventional modern ideas.

It hits many of the expected beats of The Odyssey, but gradually loses sight of what makes the story endure. The result is a film about a man struggling to find his way home that, in a particularly fitting irony, loses its own way during the journey.