How the Odyssey won the culture war

It was always going to be a tough challenge to please everyone when adapting an ancient text – but Christopher Nolan has proved he was the writer-director for the job: The Odyssey has become not only his best-reviewed film to date, but a certified box office smash hit.

The director’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem was released on Friday (17 July), and it made $264m (£196m) in its opening weekend – even more than Oppenheimer managed back in 2023 off the back of the highly publicised Barbenheimer movie showdown. (For those who’ve forgotten, Oppenheimer was released on the same day as Barbie.)

This initial performance is the director’s best since The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, and it looks set to become one of his most bankable films overall, rivalling both The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010), which made $1.09bn (£815.4m) and $839m (£626m), respectively. The film has up to 18 showings daily in multiplexes around the world, many of which are either fully booked or close to it, and every single showing of the film at the BFI IMAX is sold out until mid-September.

It’s a victory not only over the box office but over toxic stretches of the internet, spearheaded by Elon Musk, which tried to take the film down based on casting announcements – namely, transgender star Elliot Page as Odysseus’s loyal soldier Sinon and Black actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, who herself brushed off the matter by declaring to Elle that “our cast is representative of the world”. Both play small but pivotal roles and fit in seamlessly.

Nyong’o said it best when she added that “the criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not”, with Nolan telling The Telegraph the unwarranted backlash was “irrelevant”, notably because the people complaining hadn’t even seen the film. He was correct – while social media posts about the film were flooded with keyboard warriors declaring the film “DOA” and predicting it would flop, The Odyssey’s huge success has proved that, in reality, movie fans were not at all put off and turned out in phenomenal numbers to see the film.

After the release of first-look images and trailers, Nolan faced swift criticism from Odyssey scholars, who were left frustrated over production details, including costume design and the use of contemporary English language. This included the fact that the male characters in the film wore trousers and not skirts, and also the use of the word “dad” over “father”. The finished film has split these purists down the middle, with some calling them key omissions and others more accepting of Nolan’s artistic licence.

It’s to be expected that the film would never be 100 per cent loyal to the poem – some of Homer’s playing pieces are moved to fit with Nolan’s thematic interpretations, which also serves to truncate the running time to below three hours. As such, The Odyssey is very much a Christopher Nolan movie – a non-linear tale of a protagonist dealing with, at varying moments, the passage of time, memory loss and a deep desire to be reunited with his loved ones. Like Oppenheimer, it also deals with the mental fallout of a figure who was instrumental in the slaughter of innocents.

While the film might have its naysayers, they are being silenced by the praise: the film is currently Nolan’s most acclaimed to date, with 95 per cent on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. On the popular film app Letterboxd, it has an average rating of 4.4 out of five. And if he hadn’t already, Nolan has cemented himself as the nexus of event cinema, just like David Lean and Steven Spielberg before him. Notably, The Odyssey exceeded in one week what Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, managed for its entire five-week theatrical run ($236.1m/£176.6m).

The Odyssey also stars Anne Hathaway as Odysseus’s wife Penelope, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus and Benny Safdie as Agamemnon. It follows Odysseus on his perilous journey back home after the Trojan War, as well as the turmoil faced by his wife and son back in his home town of Ithaca.

It has been widely praised by critics, with The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey handing the film a five-star review and writing: “As a feat of pure adaptation, Nolan has achieved something I admittedly thought was near impossible. His stamp is all over the film – this is intellectual, brutalist, muscular Hollywood fare – yet it never wavers in its commitment to, and comprehension of, its source text.

“There’s not a single decision here that’s been thoughtlessly made, nor that I imagine Nolan himself couldn’t easily defend, much to the imagined chagrin of certain lawless parts of the internet.”

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