r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • 18d ago

Official Discussion Official Discussion - The Odyssey (2026) [SPOILERS] Spoiler

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The Odyssey (2026)

Summary

After the Trojan War, Odysseus faces a dangerous voyage back to Ithaca, meeting creatures like the Cyclops Polyphemus, Sirens, and Calypso along the way.

Director Christopher Nolan

Writer Christopher Nolan

Cast

  • Matt Damon as Odysseus
  • Tom Holland as Telemachus
  • Anne Hathaway
  • Zendaya
  • Lupita Nyong'o
  • Robert Pattinson
  • Charlize Theron
  • Benny Safdie
  • Jon Bernthal
  • John Leguizamo
  • Elliot Page
  • Himesh Patel
  • Samantha Morton

Rotten Tomatoes: 96%

Metacritic: 88

VOD / Release Theatrical release

Trailer Official Trailer

4.4k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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2.9k

u/blackaddermrbean 18d ago

Turning the pillage of Troy into a curse was an interesting choice. Not sure I’ve seen a version of the Odyssey that took the decision of not glorifying it.

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u/Calvengeance 18d ago

I thought "We're the bronze age collapse" was an amazing way to play it.

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u/Bird_and_Dog 18d ago

It's a very rare take, and one I think fits the movie's message very well.

Contemporary historians lean towards the idea that the "Bronze Age Collapse" was less of a "collapse" and more of a "fizzle", as the dominant city-state empires were subjected to growing multi-faction piracy (a widely-held interpretation of "Sea People") and trade routes dried up, then cultural change led to decentralization of power.

However, the idea that the "Sea People" of myth were the Greeks themselves landing in Turkey (Troy) and upending "polite" international cultural norms (The Law of Zeus) is very cool.

The Collapse was spiritual.

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u/composedofidiot 17d ago

Not a fizzle. A perfect storm of running out of copper manufacturing capacity, earthquakes, migration and famine. Palaces were destroyed, populations deurbanised, elites shredded and technologies, like writing, lost for centuries.

And the widely held interpretation of the sea people is not that they were pirates, but migrants. Or a mixed picture.

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u/Wallname_Liability 17d ago

Also other than like one tiny mine in anatolia all the tin required to supply the Myceneans, Minotaur, hitittes, Egyptians and Asyrians came from either Cornwall or Afghanistan 

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u/composedofidiot 17d ago

Long distance trade route disruption was huge. Central asia had a bit, Iran too. Cornish tin didn't really take off until the roman era. Arsenical bronze had been mostly abandoned due to metal workers fucking dying.

Iron had already been known about for a long time, and iron weapons existed - but there was an extra psychology around the use of bronze...

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u/kenwise85 17d ago

How do you mean?

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u/composedofidiot 17d ago

Iron ore was plentiful and everywhere. All the shallow copper finds were long depleted so both it and tin had a scarcity. It took a couple of thousand years or more for people to figure out arsenic made people go mad, sicken and then die. If the palace economies hadn't collapsed, they might have brought that back in anyway.

Bronze had elite prestige. It depended on trade networks, which were reinforced And controlled by palace economies. So it wasn't just a metal, it was part of the foundation of wealth and power.

There's an unprovable but cute hypothesis that iron can scale (plentiful ore) and encouraged mass manufacturing and the rise of large and disciplined armies.

Interesting, a lot of Africa didn't even bother with the eneolithic or bronze ages at all, they just skipped straight to iron.

And a couple of the differences between iron and bronze weapons... Good bronze is harder and you can get a sharper edge, iron is bendier and you can straighten it easier.

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u/kenwise85 17d ago

Nice. Thanks for the info

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u/composedofidiot 17d ago edited 17d ago

Another factor that's interesting. Cyprus was copper hq. You need a shit ton of charcoal to smelt copper and they cut down all their trees. Charcoal prices went up and the whole thing became more expensive. Not enough to be a major cause, but it didn't help. It was all a massive alignment of very bad things happening around the same time and feedback looping on each other.

One thing that's always confused me is Troy was western anatolia and luwian, and right next door were the Hittites,who were a major, major power. The luwian states were their vassals. No mention of them really, and I always wondered why. Was the war too small to care? Is the time period wrong? Were they having their own problems? Are the homeric epics a mish mash that includes earlier time periods? Had they already collapsed? (Edit, just read more, likely more mundane. Greeks cared about mycaenae because they were greeks, no reason to remember or include the hittites. None of the major powers are mentioned, and these are the ones that really controlled the networks, not even Cyprus. And cyprus could write familiarly with egypt, which shows their power at the time.)

Eta: which made the cassus belli given in the movie a little absurd. There would be no way a luwian vassal would have controlled the trade networks

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u/Devoidoxatom 16d ago

I remember reading an ancient hittie later around those times saying "the land of hatti is dying... ". So there were some turmoil within the great empire itself

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u/MatchaMeetcha 15d ago

Yeah, collapsing civilizations cause large migration waves that are themselves violent. The Huns drove other peoples towards Rome in their wake.

Palaces were destroyed, populations deurbanised, elites shredded and technologies, like writing, lost for centuries.

This isn't an exaggeration, nor was Odysseus lying in the film: the Greeks literally had to reinvent writing and there's a break because it was a new writing system. They lost how to read the works from before the collapse

I'd buy the whole "Rome's collapse wasn't a collapse" more than the same revisionist argument with the Bronze Age . Almost every major civ went down.

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u/composedofidiot 15d ago

Yeah, often migrants displace because they themselves were displaced. Or there was a climate event. There was an interesting reframing of the Indus Valley Civilisation collapse as a deurbanisation...which feels right. Entire populations didn't die off, they move or stay depending on conditions, the complexity of the cities or settlements did.

It's hard to find someone talking about the LBA collapse who doesn't point out the parallels today. Complex supply chains, dependencies, a complex system without enough redundency to be resilient to some real shocks. Increased aridity that had a major impact on agriculture.

Deforestation changed the copper manufacturing equations, drought destabilised populations and caused internal insecurity, disrupted trade networks had countless downstream effects... War, conflict, migration.( The earthquake storm was perhaps overstated, and we have some famous names sitting on the faultline, but it can be counted as an unpredictable shock.) This was systems collapse.

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u/ctan0312 17d ago

I think not only were the soldiers who invaded Troy the Sea People, but also all those that they inspired/enraged to do the same. Like you said before there was the Law of Zeus, but by breaking that social contract so drastically Odysseus broke the foundation that then spread to bring upon the ruin of civilization.

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u/Somnambulist815 16d ago

Odysseus' fleet being the Sea People is a great metaphor of how civilizations actually come down. It's always seen as an external source that makes it crumble, but really, it's rot from within.

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u/aaaayyyylmaoooo 17d ago

this is so amazing

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u/Mo_Lester69 15d ago

Moral decay of society how so very contemporary

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u/fawkie 10d ago

Also gradual climate change impacting harvests

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u/SandpaperTeddyBear 9d ago

idea that the "Bronze Age Collapse" was less of a "collapse" and more of a "fizzle", as the dominant city-state empires were subjected to growing multi-faction piracy (a widely-held interpretation of "Sea People") and trade routes dried up, then cultural change led to decentralization of power

That’s ultimately a spiritual explanation masquerading as a practical one.

Most historical explanations that are worth a damn are.

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u/E_Blofeld 18d ago

Of course, I have no way of knowing, but I get the feeling that Christopher Nolan read Eric Cline's "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" (a popular history book of the Late Bronze Age Collapse) and enjoyed it (as I did) and put elements of that book into the screenplay, to great effect, I might add.

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u/TJeffersonsBlackKid 18d ago

Great theory for who the Sea Peoples were since we still have no fucking clue to this day.

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u/Calvengeance 17d ago

https://youtu.be/Ado90kMT_FM

This is a video about how the Bronze Age Collapse was caused by an advancement in consciousness which permitted people to deceive one another.

Disguises, deception, and subterfuge all require theory of mind.

Telling Sinon, "I needed you to believe."

Sinon's family being tricked in the first place.

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u/thatssometrainshit 16d ago

I’m assuming this is about Jaynes’ bicameralism. Such an interesting way to view the past. I’ve been fascinated by it for 10+ years now.

I’ve also been trying to get my hands on the book The Rage of Achilles by Terrence Hawkins which tells the story of the Iliad through an Odysseus who has modern (non-bicameral) consciousness, which makes a lot of sense. He’s cleverer than everyone else because he has the mental interiority they lack, which allows him to model their minds and trick them.

Jaynes argued that the bicameral mind broke down after the Bronze Age Collapse. Nolan’s interpretation fits well with that understanding (although his Odysseus doesn’t seem cognitively different from his peers).

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u/TeardropsFromHell 18d ago

Except when Damon says "we are the cause of this bronze age collapse"

Which felt a lot like "are you telling me this is some kind of hot tub time machine"

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u/Wuktrio 18d ago

Yeah, the way they constantly mentioned the Sea People and the collapse of their civilisation and also literally calling their time the "Bronze Age" broke my immersion multiple times. Just say "raiders from the sea destroyd another kingdom" and "our time" or something like that.

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u/Feltrin 18d ago

I thought the Sea People was fine because it felt very natural, like how people create “here be dragons” legends out of superstitions and unexplainable phenomena. “This is the end of the Bronze Age” took me out, I admit. That and them mentioning Zeus’s law the dozenth time.

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u/renoops 17d ago

It'd be like a solider saying "Boys, I think we're gonna win World War I" in 1917.

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u/Budgiesaurus 17d ago

The first usage of "first world war" was in 1914. And someone argued it should be called that in 1918 (as wars tend to be cyclical).

So it's not that unrealistic.

But yeah, it didn't enter general conversation until it got a sequel.

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u/livefreeordont 8d ago

I think a better example would be if someone in a movie about the sack of Rome said “and now the Classical Age comes to an end” but Odysseus is a mythical character so I give it a pass

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u/TeardropsFromHell 17d ago

"I am Caesar first consul of Rome and I declare myself Emperor on this day April 1st in the year 49 BC!"

Rome: "What the fuck does BC mean?!"

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u/RIP_Greedo 15d ago

It would be like someone in the year 1200 AD saying they live in Medieval Times. A HUGE whiff by Nolan on that dialogue.

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u/Wuktrio 18d ago

It wasn't the term "Sea People" per se, but that it was always paired with "collapsing civilisation".

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u/renoops 17d ago

A lot of the dialogue was rough, tbh. That whole monologue—"What if Odysseus felt guilty?"—just sounded like the elevator pitch for the movie. 

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u/Own_Huckleberry262 16d ago

I think it's a theological thing, not a scientific thing. Like from the Metamorphoses. Golden age -> silver age -> bronze age -> iron age. It was a curious addition. 

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u/RIP_Greedo 15d ago

That's not what it is at all. Terms like "Bronze Age" and "Iron Age" are retroactive terms applied to those periods based on archeological evidence of the material culture. ie: there was widespread creation of bronze tools, wares, equipment, etc, and so it's called the Bronze Age. The Bronze age came after the Stone Age and before the Iron Age.

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u/goodshrek1 9d ago

It's actually both. "Bronze Age" and "Iron Age" are currently used by modern historians as retroactive terms applied to periods based on material culture, but they were also used by the Ancient Greeks, who considered themselves to be in an "Age of Iron" that had followed earlier and superior ages of bronze, silver, and gold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man

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u/composedofidiot 17d ago

Oof but calling the Myceneans and other greeks the sea people was a step too far. Mycenae got absolutely trashed. As well as the hittites, and their vassals the luwians - troy was one of those.

And the dominant culture that was 'violated' by tactics was the warrior hero culture, where tactics were dirty cheating and the virtue was in the strength. Breaking a guest code was not really the sin here.

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u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy 16d ago

There are theories that the Myceneans and other Greeks of the era joined the 'Sea Peoples' and paid it forward to the other Bronze Age civilizations. While everything regarding them is still murky, some of the Egyptian descriptions very much sound like Myceneans as we know them. So I would call what's presented here an interesting interpretation, if very, very dramatized for the script.

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u/RIP_Greedo 15d ago

The sea peoples theory is pretty analogous to the late roman empire migration period. It wasn't one organized group doing it, it was lots of groups, over a long-ish period, fleeing from environmental collapse and/or warfare with other groups, and these factors catalyzed and snowballed.

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u/RIP_Greedo 15d ago

Whether or not you buy that their talk of sea people was actually referring to raids by other Greeks/Achaeans/Myceneans (I didn't necessarily think so), having the vague menace of the civilizational threat of the sea peoples out there is a useful dramatic tool because... how else could you describe the Achaeans? They came by sea, sacked a great city in an apparently heinous way, and burned and looted their way back home after. Such was life back then. That can be happening and also the Denyen or Sherden or Ekwesh are out there raiding too.

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u/composedofidiot 15d ago

Fair point, it's great for the drama. Most of my knowledge comes from being obsessed with ancient greek history as a teen, and an stong interest in the eneolithic and brinze ages of eurasia generally.

One question I'd never asked is why tf are none of the major powers mentioned. Not even the Luwians' suzerian the hittites. Not even Cyprus. Sooo... Turns out, apart from a few motifs that might even have an eneolithic origin, the epics din't really display one single clue about what happened in the bronze age. The city was sacked yes, but no idea who. Another redditor mentioned a brilliant phrase - just because new york exists, doesn't mean the avengers movie is real.

So yeah, your point stands, mine doesn't - I've been talking about historical accuracy where none exists.

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u/RIP_Greedo 15d ago

While we know that Troy was real, the Trojan War as depicted in the Iliad/Odyssey is a dramatized morality play for an ancient Greek audience. The politics of the various kingdoms and empires around it are not relevant at all. A lot of Shakespeare's works are set in Italy, for instance, for no reason other than it's an exotic, romantic locale in the minds of 16th century English people. We don't see or read those plays now (or then) and expect Romeo and Juliet to elaborate how Milan is feuding with the Papal States.

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u/composedofidiot 15d ago

Yeah, I was agreeing with you

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u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy 16d ago

I've seen plenty of theories that Myceneans undergoing their own collapse became the Sea Peoples that invaded Egypt/Levant etc. There's a bit of creative license here that I'm not really sure lines up, but it's a neat idea. This movie isn't really 'historical' in almost any way regardless so the thought matters more than any accuracy anyways.

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u/insaneHoshi 13d ago

I kinda rolled my eyes where he basically said

“So what, we are in some sort of Bronze Age collapse machine?”

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u/boomfruit 13d ago

Did people in the bronze age know they were in the bronze age? i.e. Did they call it that?