THE ODYSSEY (2026)
Nolan's magnificent, bloody voyage home — for grown-ups only.
Should You Watch It?
Here is the decision in full. Christopher Nolan has made a serious, often breathtaking epic out of Homer — nearly three hours of spectacle, horror, poetry, and, by the end, some of the most moving scenes of family reunion you will find in a theater this year. The movie honors much of what Scripture honors: a husband fighting his way home, a wife whose faithfulness outlasts a decade of pressure, a son growing into courage, hospitality treated as sacred, evil answered by justice.
It also earns its R rating. The worst violence is brief but very strong — men eaten by a cyclops, a city sacked, a final reckoning with the suitors that doesn't look away. Three gratuitous "f" words land in dialogue that never needed them. A witch turns men into pigs. And even with most of Homer's gods cut from the story, the tale still lives in a pagan world.
So: if you're an adult who loves great filmmaking and can watch hard scenes without harm to your conscience, take the voyage. If you're choosing for children or young teens, choose something else — this one was never for them.
The Story
NO SPOILERS — WE KEEP THE SURPRISESTroy has fallen. Odysseus (Matt Damon), the strategist whose wooden horse won the war, sets sail for Ithaca, his wife, and the son he left as an infant. The sea has other plans.
Ten years on, he still hasn't come home. More than a hundred suitors have moved into his palace, devouring his wealth and demanding that Penelope declare him dead and remarry. His son, Telemachus, now nineteen, sails out to learn the truth. Between father and family lie monsters, temptations, and the deep — and that is all we'll give away.
Is It Any Good?
Three stars, and here is what they mean. Nolan fills a screen the way few working directors can: the cyclops sequence is honest horror-spectacle, the sack of Troy carries terrible weight, and when the long-delayed homecoming finally arrives — a son, a wife, an old friend, even a faithful dog — the emotion is earned and overwhelming. Those minutes are the movie's reason to exist, and they land.
The flaws are structural. Nolan tells the tale through a thicket of flashbacks, and the constant back-and-forth drains momentum from a story that is, at heart, a straight line home. Lovers of Homer will also notice how much of the poem is gone — most of the gods, and with them some of the epic's strangeness and grandeur. What remains is a very good film that stops just short of a great one.
The Worldview
Homer's epic is a pagan poem, and no adaptation fully drains the sea it swims in. But Nolan has made choices a discerning viewer should know about. He cuts most of the gods — no Olympian councils, no divine puppeteering — leaving something closer to one man's costly journey back to covenant faithfulness. What the pagan frame leaves behind is specific: Athena still appears to Odysseus, the dead are consulted in the underworld, and a witch's transformation of men into pigs brings brief occult imagery. Those scenes are part of why this review isn't cleaner than it is.
What the film exalts, though, is largely what Scripture exalts. A marriage worth crossing ten years of ocean for. A wife whose faithfulness is the story's quiet glory. Hospitality as a sacred duty — and its abuse by the suitors as the story's true villainy. Odysseus even comes to regret the slaughter he unleashed at Troy; Nolan reads that regret in humanist terms rather than as repentance before God, but an epic hero with a conscience is not nothing.
The film also recasts several of Homer's Greek characters — including Helen of Troy — as African, and casts a woman in one of the poem's male warrior roles. We found these choices distracting and unfaithful to the history behind the poem; readers should weigh that for themselves.
Underneath it all runs the ache this movie can name but cannot answer: the longing for home. Homer rows his hero back to Ithaca. The gospel says the longing runs deeper — "they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one" (Hebrews 11:16).
The Content Guide
The specifics — spoilers included by nature — so you can judge for your own family.
Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements
Strong mixed worldview with some strong moral elements promoting hospitality and doing the right thing and stressing family values and good conquering evil (scenes of the hero reuniting with his son, wife, friend, and hunting dog are very moving, as are scenes where some villains get their comeuppance), mixed with some references to false Greek gods, and the hero has interactions with the Greek goddess Athena, and mixed with some strong humanist, politically correct, revisionist history subtexts, and some politically correct woke casting such as some white European characters from the original epic poem are turned into black African characters, including Helen of Troy, and a major male soldier in the story is played by a woman who got plastic surgery and hormone therapy to look and sound like a man, and her character is called the bravest and most noble male soldier in the Greek army, plus some occult content where a witch turns some soldiers into pigs, but their leader convinces her to have mercy on them and change them back, and the hero speaks to some dead people in a visit to the underworld
Foul Language
Three anachronistic “f” words, two “d” obscenities, and rude and evil people are called bastards two times
Violence
Some brief very strong violences includes a giant cyclops eats some of the hero’s men and some very strong violence in scenes where the Greeks sack the City State of Troy and murder some women and in scenes where the Greeks are decimate by a race of giant armored soldiers and in scenes of Odysseus and his son battling the evil suitors (a man is hit in the neck with an arrow, for example), with lots of strong violence in scenes where the Greeks sack Troy and kill Trojan soldiers and in scenes where the Greeks battle the army of giants and in the sequences where the hero and his son fight the evil suitors
Sex
There is a scene of the hero in bed with his wife and later scenes with a woman reveal that the woman has kept the hero from regaining his memory for seven years so that she can be his lover (in the book, the woman is a demigoddess but the movie never reveals that)
Nudity
Some images of upper male nudity of men and upper male and rear male nudity of a giant Cyclops, who apparently is totally naked
Alcohol Use
Some alcohol use
Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse
No smoking or drugs in the modern sense;
Miscellaneous Immorality
Ride and selfish suitors deceive and plot against a woman and her son, who have been waiting for nine years for the woman’s husband to return from war.
Talk About It
Questions for the drive home, the dinner table, or the youth group.
Penelope spends years refusing to give her husband up for dead. What does her faithfulness cost her — and what does faithful waiting look like in your own life?
Psalm 27:14 · Hebrews 11:13–16In this story, hospitality is sacred — and the suitors' great sin is abusing a home's welcome. How seriously does Scripture take the welcome of strangers, and how seriously do we?
Hebrews 13:2 · Romans 12:13Odysseus is haunted by what he did at Troy. The movie gives him remorse — but is remorse the same thing as repentance? What's the difference?
2 Corinthians 7:10 · Psalm 51Nolan cut most of Homer's gods, but the film still lives in a world of many powers. When the Apostle Paul stood in the middle of this same Greek world, what did he tell them about the God they didn't know?
Acts 17:22–31The Final Word
Nolan has given grown-ups something rare: spectacle with a moral spine, a story that crosses ten years of ocean to honor one marriage. He has also made a violent R-rated epic with three profanities it didn't need and paganism in its bones. So here is our answer, the same one we opened with: worth the trip — adults only. Planning family movie night instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.
