THE JOURNEY FROM TROY

21 July 2026

What can I say about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey that hasn’t already been said in the (mainly) rave reviews? And who am I to be less than inspired or moved by the film? 



It’s a classic Hollywood block buster with some impressive performances, powerful dramatic moments and rich story telling. But it’s not a film for me. Does that mean that Homer isn’t for me? Probably. I’ve never read the original but I’ve known the stories of Circe and the Cyclops, Helen and Agamemnon, Odysseus and Penelope, since I was a teenager. But this film reinforced my despair about men and war. The only characters I connected to were the women, with people like Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Samantha Morton as Circe giving nuanced and clever performances. Perhaps it’s because I have in the back of my mind all the enslaved women in Pat Barker’s brilliant Women of Troy series and it’s hard to connect to any of the Greek men given their brutality during the war. The only reason they got to Troy was when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphegnia for fair winds. There’s only two pieces of dialogue of any depth in the film. One, which I’m sure some people will call woke, is when Penelope decries the fact that women can’t be kings, and the other, when Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) confesses that he didn't come straight home because of his shame about the tricking and then the sacking of Troy. But having said that, he then proceeds to murder many more men.

It’s a story of endless loss with no lessons learnt. Filmed well, yes. Enthralling, sometimes. But moving, no.

PS Leaving aside all the 5 star reviews, here are two that I found interesting:

A classicist’s verdict: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/15/the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-classicists-verdict

An author’s perspective: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/film/2026/07/16/epic-fail-odyssey-shows-nolans-limitations-writer

As Emily Wilson said at the end of a long critical article in the London Review of Books, at least the film is getting people to read the classics and might even encourage people to study them at university, stopping the downward drift of the number of students doing arts degrees.

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