How Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Reminded Me Why We Go to the Movies

I walked into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey completely blind. I hadn’t watched trailers or promo clips, and I had only a hazy memory of high school English class. In an era where movie marketing spoils every major set piece months in advance, sitting down in a dark theater with zero expectations turned out to be an absolute revelation. What followed wasn’t just a film. It was a thunderous, heart-stopping reminder of why movie theaters exist. From career-defining performances to quiet, breathtaking intimacy hidden inside a roaring epic, Nolan has delivered a cinematic experience that will leave you floored.

I wasn’t sitting there waiting for scenes I’d already seen in previews or comparing Nolan’s choices to a story I knew by heart. And I think that was absolutely the right way to see this movie.

Standout Performances: Surprises, Anchors, and Unhinged Villains

Elliot Page: Page is almost unrecognizable from the actor I remember from earlier films. Had I not seen pictures over the years, I don’t know that I would immediately put the actor I watched here together with the young actor in Juno. And I have to give credit where it is due because I thought Elliot Page was very good here.

Sinon is a relatively minor role, but he matters. Page makes that limited screen time count, particularly because Sinon becomes part of the enormous burden of guilt and regret Odysseus carries with him. There is something vulnerable about the performance that makes what ultimately happens to Sinon feel consequential, even though Page actually spends very little time on screen.

I have felt pretty lackluster about some of Page’s earlier performances. I never thought Juno was worth the hype it received, and Kitty Pryde in the X-Men films worked perfectly well for me because she was part of an ensemble rather than carrying the story. Here, though, I saw something different. Page takes a supporting character and gives him enough humanity that his fate continues to matter after he is gone. For me, this is easily one of Page’s strongest performances.

Robert Pattinson: Pattinson completely understood the assignment. Antinous is smarmy. He’s slimy. He’s supposed to make your skin crawl a little, and Pattinson fully commits to playing someone you should dislike.

There is no attempt to sneak in unnecessary charm to make Antinous more appealing. Pattinson lets him be arrogant, entitled, threatening, and deeply unpleasant. Every time he appears, you understand exactly why Telemachus feels the danger closing in around him.

I occasionally have to remind myself what an excellent actor Pattinson actually is. I loved him as Cedric Diggory. Edward Cullen was so problematic for me; it took a while to separate Pattinson from that role. I liked what he brought to Batman. But Antinous lets him tap into something completely different. Apparently Robert Pattinson does “smarmy asshole” exceptionally well, and I mean that as a compliment.

John Leguizamo: Good Lord, John Leguizamo. I said immediately after seeing this that this may be my favorite performance of his since To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. That is incredibly high praise coming from me because I think what he did as Chi Chi Rodriguez was phenomenal. He is insanely good here. Truly. He is a steady, anchoring presence in every scene. In a film filled with gods, kings, warriors, enormous battles, and performances that are intentionally larger than life, Leguizamo never seems interested in competing with any of it. There is a quiet confidence to his performance that draws your attention without demanding it.

What really struck me was how natural he feels in this world. I never felt like I was watching John Leguizamo playing a character in a Christopher Nolan epic. He simply belonged there. There is weight behind everything he says and a sense that this is a man who has lived through far more than what we’re seeing on screen.

Leguizamo has always been capable of disappearing into a character, and maybe that’s why my mind immediately went back to Chi Chi Rodriguez. These performances couldn’t be more different, but both remind you just how much range he has when he’s given material that allows him to really dig in.

With so many enormous performances surrounding him, he could easily have disappeared into the ensemble. Instead, he became a person I kept watching whenever he was on screen.

And when the credits rolled, he was one of the first performers I wanted to talk about.

Tom Holland: Holland continues to prove that there is a lot more to him than Spider-Man. He’s wonderful in that role because he gives us both sides of the character. He’s believable as Spider-Man, but he’s equally believable as Peter Parker. We’ve also already seen what Holland can do outside that franchise in The Impossible, where he was acting his little heart out as a kid.

He brings that dramatic ability to Telemachus.

This is a young man who doesn’t know his father but has spent his entire life living in the shadow of his absence. Now he’s watching men surround his mother and his home, while understanding that his own existence is an obstacle to what they want. These men don’t merely want Penelope. They want the path to Odysseus’s throne cleared, and Telemachus knows exactly what that could mean for him.

Holland captures the anger and frustration of that situation, but he doesn’t lose the vulnerability underneath it. Telemachus may try to stand up to these men, but he’s still a son trying to understand a father he has never known. Holland lets both things exist at once.

Zendaya: Zendaya’s performance fascinated me because so much of what she represents reaches beyond the character herself. Her connection to Athena and to Odysseus’s guilt gives her presence a weight that continues even when she isn’t physically dominating the story.

There is an almost haunting quality to the performance. She becomes part of the emotional and spiritual consequences of what happened at Troy, particularly the things Odysseus witnessed and failed to stop. In a movie so concerned with memory, guilt, consequence, and the long journey home, Zendaya’s presence feels like one way the past refuses to remain safely in the past.

She doesn’t need enormous amounts of dialogue or spectacle to make that work. Sometimes simply seeing her is enough to remind us of what Odysseus is carrying with him.

Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and the Power of Stillness

I’ll admit it: going in, I wasn’t entirely sure if Matt Damon could carry a movie of this scale. I don’t know why I questioned it, since he’s done it before, but the story is just so epic. Anne Hathaway can carry anything. She will never surprise me because she has spent years showing us what we can expect from her. I knew she would knock this out of the park.

What makes Damon’s Odysseus so extraordinary is how Nolan structures his dual role in the past and present. You have scenes that are memory, action, and chaos, and then you have these quiet scenes of intimacy as he tries to regain his recollection of these events.

There is one scene in particular, and when people watch it, I hope they look for it, where Odysseus is telling Penelope about what happened and what went wrong. It is just beautifully done. It’s quiet acting. It’s still. He’s not moving or physically acting; it’s all his voice, his emotion, and his restraint. In a movie filled with thunderous swells and roaring soundscapes, Nolan lets two phenomenal actors hold the entire weight of the world in a quiet room.

The Visual and Aural Scale

As good as the performances are, I cannot talk about The Odyssey without talking about how this movie LOOKS and SOUNDS. Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is breathtaking. Ludwig Göransson’s music doesn’t simply accompany the movie, because you feel it. The sound, the movement of the landscape, the trees, the ocean, and the sheer physical scale of what Nolan puts on that screen all work together.

Nolan’s handling of cinematic scale relies on incredible contrast:

The Chaos: Enormous, loud, angry sequences where the sound rumbles through the theater and the images completely overwhelm your field of vision.

The Intimacy: Sudden, quiet drops into scenes so intimate that it almost feels like you’ve walked into a private conversation.

The Verdict: See It in a Theater

This is a hill I will die on: see this movie in a theater.

I am so glad I did not wait to watch this at home. Actually, I regret that the closest IMAX theater is about 60 miles away, because I would love to have experienced this in IMAX. This is one of those movies that reminds you what movie theaters are FOR.

I honestly cannot remember the last time I sat in a movie theater and felt this overwhelmed by the sheer scale of a film. I think I have to go all the way back to seeing The Lord of the Rings trilogy theatrically. That doesn’t mean The Odyssey is another Lord of the Rings. It means I haven’t had that feeling of sitting in the dark, looking up at something enormous, and thinking: Wow.

Technology has made it incredibly easy to watch movies at home, but movies were once made expecting that we would experience them together, in the dark, on a gigantic screen, with a sound that you could practically feel in your chest. The Odyssey feels made for that experience.

Hats off to Christopher Nolan. Actually, screw it. Hats, shoes, and socks off to Christopher Nolan. This was wonderful.