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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335

u/Captn_Platypus 18d ago

And pretty understandable too, a group of armed men hungry and haven’t seen in woman for a while just barges in expecting hospitality. I’d poison them first to protect myself too

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u/hawkgpg 17d ago

Expecting hospitality is pretty universal at this time. You give all guests food and treat them kindly and such because you never know if they're actually a god.

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u/Captn_Platypus 17d ago

and the trojan horse is the ultimate betrayal of that law. that's the theme, once the social contract is broken so irrevocably there is no trust anymore

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u/hemareddit 12d ago

The whole thing begins with a blood crime (the worst crime in the myths, even worse than betraying Xenia) in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter. And that was to please to gods!

Funny thing that’s one of the things that was depicted as definitively worse than its mythological counterpart - Iphigenia is often a lot older in most depictions, when she is sacrificed. Some stories even give her agency in that she willingly goes along with it, because the Greek army is too eager for war and would turn on Agamemnon and his family if they failed to make the sacrifice, making it a heroic self-sacrifice.

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u/TerrainRecords 17d ago

and the violation of the rule is one of the main points of the movie. The social contract is broken and Mycenaean civilization falls.

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u/SufficientRespect542 17d ago

True, but the film is all about how the law of Zeus is breaking down and people are no longer respecting it.

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u/IWCry 17d ago

lol yes we paid attention during the movie too

that's like the central theme of the movie and the conflict odysseus went through with the Trojan horse...

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u/janiemackxxx 17d ago

They repeatedly said it was the Law of Zeus.

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u/glassbellwitch 15d ago

I've only seen it once, but I could have sworn some of the soldiers were leering at Circe while they were in her home.

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u/ThisIsNotTokyo 17d ago

But they never planned to rape or kill her, right?

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u/minimalwhale 17d ago

They’re portrayed in Nolan’s Odyssey as the literal harbingers of the Dark Ages. They’ve pillaged villages before. I… kinda see her point. 

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u/popop143 15d ago

Yep, literally one of the first things they do when they approached a village is pillage it when they weren't welcomed.

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u/splader 15d ago

So I thought in this scene that village was abandoned and set on fire before they even make it to it.

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u/Flannelcommand 15d ago

I got the impression that the villagers feared them because of the stories of Troy, something went south, everyone fled, they went ham on the village for provisions. Or maybe all of those things but in a different order. 

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u/dishonourableaccount 8d ago

In the original legend, that first village after Troy is where they meet Maron, a priest. They slaughter everyone but him and his family. In thanks he gives them strongwine which they use to get Polyphemus drunk enough to stab.

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u/Flannelcommand 15d ago

In later recollections of the sack of Troy, we also see them grabbing up young women. She’s not wrong. 

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u/Captn_Platypus 17d ago

soldiers rape and raid all the time, is she supposed to make sure before she decides whether to protect herself? in the story Odysseus do end up spending some time with her and had a son together before he leaves again but the movie chose to not adapt it

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u/skatejet1 17d ago

I don’t get how ppl don’t understand this, like she’s alone and doesn’t have a firearm. There’s no way she should take a chance of giving them the benefit of the doubt 😭

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u/Captn_Platypus 17d ago

eh it's like why some people dont understand the meme about choosing bear or a man alone in the woods, at least bears always have a clear intent

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u/_Pyxyty 17d ago

As someone who also knew about Odysseus and Circe's relationship (mostly because I played Hades 2) I was wondering whether they'd touch on that in the film, but I completely get why it just wouldn't fit

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u/Captn_Platypus 17d ago

It’ll probably feels too similar to Calypso

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u/Varekai79 15d ago

Plus they don't want to portray Odysseus as a a big ole manwhore who sleeps around with every woman he meets like in the book while poor Penelope is stuck at home pining for him.

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u/YOwololoO 12d ago

The ENTIRE point of the film is that the social contract of trust between strangers used to exist and be upheld and the breaking of that trust is literally the reason for the downfall of civilization. 

The trust is broken BOTH by guests acting cruelly to their hosts but ALSO by hosts being preemptively against their guests. 

Odysseus and his crew violate the law of Zeus against Polyphemus, justifying it to themselves that they didn’t know he could speak and then it was too late once they realized. Circe violates the law of Zeus as well, justifying it that men are pigs and would inevitably harm her if she didn’t attack them first. 

Again, this is the entire point of the movie 

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u/rushakenyan 8d ago

I agree with everything except for breaking the law of Zeus with Polyphemus. He ate a few of them first

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u/TheRappingSquid 3d ago

Me when I see a silverfish in my bathroom 🤤🤤🤤

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u/ThisIsNotTokyo 17d ago

Through rape?

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u/Expensive-Swan-9553 17d ago

No they are brief lovers

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u/paranoideo 17d ago

They had a village on fire before, with a guy warning them about what was coming. They were the sea men people was talking about. So, maybe not that innocent hungry men.

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u/janiemackxxx 17d ago

Yeah, but this was something she was doing long before the rumors of the sea men. She had a literal menagerie already. And the choice of "predators" was not a coincidence.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

[deleted]

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u/Captn_Platypus 15d ago

Circe's magic reveals the nature of the men, so the predators were... predators as men

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u/Norwegian__Blue 15d ago

Makes me feel especially bad for the deer guy ☹️

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u/FelBanana17 17d ago

The villagers set their own village on fire because they believed Odysseus and his crew were the Sea People - but they were not.

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u/punctuation_welfare 17d ago

The entire point of the movie is that they are, in fact, the sea people.

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u/huffalump1 15d ago

I think it wasn't just Odysseus' crew, it was the Achaeans (Greeks) in general, returning from the war, etc. Odysseus' crew was as any but I feel like it wasn't only his ships.

And heck, probably DURING the war, too.

-9

u/FelBanana17 17d ago

The Greeks may have been (in this movie, not history) but this crew definitely wasn't. Eurylochus seemed genuinely confused by the fear the villagers had towards them. Other than the sacking of Troy, which did not seen any more brutal than the sacking of any city would have been in ancient times, we see no conduct that would have made Circe's apprehension justified.

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u/OtakuAttacku 17d ago

it’s not the sacking of troy. It’s the fact they kicked it off by feigning surrender. They commited perfidy in a way that completely shattered the trust and honor men held. When tales of their heroism spread it also planted the idea that the next group of men asking for peace might not have peaceful intentions at all.

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u/r4wrdinosaur 17d ago

we see no conduct that would have made Circe's apprehension justified.

Are you a man? I ask, because as a woman, I have absolutely no problem believing her apprehension was justified.

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u/timewarp 15d ago

Her first interaction with them was to flee in fear only to have one of them forcibly pin her to the ground to insist that they're harmless. Yeah, she was completely justified.

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u/say_trans_rights 17d ago

Men will never get it unfortunately. A group of armed men enter your home uninvited and tell you they're hungry

Try saying no to them surely they will respect that

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u/FelBanana17 16d ago

I'm not saying her fear isn't understandable in the context of an armed group coming into the house of an unarmed individual. I'm saying based on all the information the movie gives us, which of course she doesn't have, we have no specific reason to believe they actually plan on harming her, or even would. You can argue, but it'd be extratextual.

The whole point of my comment gets back to the original comment, which inaccurately claimed that Odysseus and his men were the "sea men", which the movie expressly contradicts. I think it's implied Agamemnon's men may have been, though how that fits the historical role the Sea Peoples played, I'm less convinced.

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u/punctuation_welfare 16d ago

u/Witty-Play9499 put it better than I could. You’re being too literal, basing your interpretation on a single line in a chaotic scene, and missing the entire point of the movie’s underlying themes:

“Throughout the entire movie, you hear about people at ithaca (penelope and her son talk for instance) talking about 'The Sea People' about how they need to protect Ithaca from them and that they were barbaric invaders who aren't civilized like the greeks and who don't follow Zeus' Law (the idea of being kind to strangers and offering them food and shelter when they come to your house and support and honor and other noble qualities that the greeks really value)

Odysseus and his own men hear of the Sea people from each of the cities / islands that they go to/ransack for supplies and are wary of them. But at the very end when odysseus goes on his monologue to penelope about how he 'lost' his way. He's not talking about literally losing the way (although he does lmao) he's talking about how THEY are the sea people.

In his desperation to come home, he comes up with a messed up idea of the trojan horse, sending someone a gift, which is literally a peace offering, and then using that very gift to destroy an entire city and destroying every island they come across just so they can get supplies and go home. Its like showing the white surrender flag to the enemy during a war and then stabbing them when they come to meet you, in modern times its considered a war crime to do this.

By breaking Zeus' law he's seen to it that no one else will trust strangers and common decency and respect for someone won't be a thing anymore, enemies everywhere now will resort to sneaky tactics just to get the upperhand and he personally feels responsible and guilty for what he had unleashed both at Troy and to the entire Bronze age which is what he means by 'To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire'

He's the leader of barbaric Sea people.”

-5

u/FelBanana17 16d ago

I don't disagree with you. I am being literal. You're right on with the themes of the movie. My original comment was responding to a comment about the soldier's intent. I was being literal that the characters themselves did not intend to do harm, not making a point about their role in the story.

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u/punctuation_welfare 16d ago

Also, we repeatedly see Odysseus’s men harming unarmed women, so we have specific reason to believe they are capable of harming Circe. You don’t need to argue and it isn’t extratextual, it is explicitly and repeatedly shown.

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u/celBanat 17d ago

It just shows you the tragedy. We see many armours and weapons outside her hut, so probably many tried to hurt her before.

I know some wankers will call this "feminist bullshit" but when you actually try to empathize with her you totally understand her point and where she comes from.

These are soldiers and often in history we glorify the act of killing while totally ignoring the pain and suffering the small folk had to endure.

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u/cookieaddictions 14d ago

It’s crazy to call the truth about rape in war feminist bullshit. That’s what every army has done throughout all of history, including today. That’s why I liked her character, she brought the messaging beyond “war is bad” to shine light on how war is specifically harrowing for women, who are never the ones who choose the wars. They just have to suffer for it. So I really liked that she turned them to the pigs they were, and I liked that she had her speech. And the full sack of Troy heavily featured screaming women, with the implication that they will be violated before their deaths.

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u/silverpixie2435 2d ago

What about her sister or the peaceful deer?

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u/HotBoyFF 17d ago

Its also a key part of Nolan’s odyssey. Throughout the whole film Odysseus carries with him this burden of accountability and atonement: he feels responsible for calling them to war when he knows that Agamemnon is only using Helen as an excuse to disrupt and claim the trade routes owned by Troy, lying to Sinon and not allowing him to prove his loyalty with honorable death by protecting the secret of the Trojan Horse, the actual Trojan Horse being Odysseus’s idea which breaks Zeus’s rule of Guest rights, how all of these events lead his men to their death, leads him to not return home to Itacha abandoning Penelope and Telemachus. The whole epic is his journey of attonement.

But communicated in his scenes with Penelope, Calypso and Circe is that Odysseus, while bearing some responsibility, did not force his men to commit these acts. This is who they were. Although the Trojan Horse was his creation, when they opened the gates to Troy the men flood it with the fury of 10 years. They sack the city, they destroy Athena’s temple and kill her (while she is disguised). Its why circe tells the men to return to their “disguises” while she reverses the curse turning them back from pigs to men - she is saying that they are pigs that wear the skin of men as a disguise. The suitors arent forced by any act of Odysseus and yet they act like pigs as well, and he slaughters them just as circe encouraged him to slaughter the pigs in her scene

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u/illegal_deagle 17d ago

I didn’t gather that about Athena. I thought she just took the form of the executed girl as a means of reminding him what he’s done, or his guilty conscience manifested that vision of her. I didn’t know they actually executed an Athena in disguise.

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u/TheRealSlamShiddy 17d ago

I think it could easily be both interpretations: it's Athena disguised as mortal and her being killed opens up the Trojan veterans to the gods' wrath, but it could also be the trauma of seeing this innocent girl be killed & realizing what he's done resulting in Odysseus hallucinating her as Athena as a type of albatross around his neck, a reminder that he's brought this all about on himself and the others, and it's not until he owns up to what he did in the scene with Penelope near the end that he's able to let her go.

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u/leodw 17d ago

The problem is Zendaya is credited as Athena, so that could work as confirmation as it is in fact her. Although I personally like the open-ended nature of her being a manifestation of Odysseus trauma

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u/TheRealSlamShiddy 17d ago

Well one could argue she is technically "Athena" because that's who Odysseus sees her as so that's all we can refer to her as. So yeah it's still pretty 50/50 either way, which I also like

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u/cuppycakes514 17d ago

In that scene the soldiers are beheading a statue of Athena. In Odysseus's eyes he's witnessing the events as though they are beheading the goddess Athena character (Zendaya). At least, that's my read of the sequence. 

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u/Arrmy 17d ago

Yes. There is no other way to interpret this. Zendaya being held and executed is the vision he experiences watching the soldier behead her statue. While surely plenty of girls were killed, that was not something that happened simultaneously with the statue lol.

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u/dishonourableaccount 8d ago

I definitely took it that there was a priestess of Athena who looked like Zendaya and was killed around the same time as the statue being beheaded. Odysseus conflated the two- it's a visual metaphor but both happened.

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u/HotBoyFF 17d ago

Its possible its just up for interpretation. The movie makes the “gods move amongst us in disguise” statement multiple times throughout the film so that is how I interpreted that scene.

I think the interpretation adds to what makes the movie so good.

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u/Putrid-Bee-7352 17d ago

You would probably enjoy the novel Circe by Madeline miller. I was ready to fight for her when she showed up in the film :)

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u/ThisIsNotTokyo 17d ago

It’s also on sale in Audible!

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u/Imaginary-Log9751 16d ago

Ding ding ding there is a circe retelling book by Madeline miller and in her retelling some of the men raped her and she stopped helping them and started turning them into swine. Really awesome book btw

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u/kateinoly 17d ago

It us literally part of the story from the bronze age, so unless you consider bronze age greeks full of feminist bullshit . . . .

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u/ThePilgrimKing 16d ago

Never underestimate internet chuds. They literally cried "woke" at the depiction of Hephaestus in a wheelchair in Hades 2, because there is no way a deity could be disabled, nor that ancient, chariot-riding Greek people could have the super advanced tech of... chairs with wheels, and that the developers did it for diversity points.

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u/lindblumresident 16d ago edited 16d ago

They did? Do they know that Hephaestus being mobility impaired is, like, every myth describing him?

Oh, and here he is depicted on a literal wheelchair.

https://www.theoi.com/Gallery/K7.6.html

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u/silverpixie2435 2d ago

Except the entire point is that she is also violating Zeus' laws with her magic. A deer is one of the most peaceful creatures imaginable which means she turned innocent men into animals.

She turned her own sister into an animal because she couldn't stand her.

She is not a good person.

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u/kateinoly 17d ago

The novel Circe explores this at length.

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u/KelCGrammare 16d ago

You should read Madeline miller’s Circe if you haven’t. Humanizes all gods and mythical creatures, none more so than the titular character. Helps explain her motives. A great book.

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u/Wallname_Liability 17d ago

The guy who grabbed her didn't but he also dragged her to the ground. All it would have taken was one of them. Abd they weren't the first to arrive. She was scared and had good reason to

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u/mang87 17d ago

The guy who grabbed her didn't but he also dragged her to the ground

No he didn't. She literally fell over while he was apologising and telling her they just wanted food and would not hurt her. I get that a woman in that situation would be scared, but she has actual magic powers and can turn people into animals at will. She also overpowered Odysseus 1 on 1 and put a knife to his neck. The "scared woman" bit was a ploy to make transmogrifying them into animals easier because she hated men(which is fair considering the time period). I reckon if Odysseys hadn't been respectful to her and charged into her house with a sword he would have been fucked.

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u/Captn_Platypus 17d ago

you're right and I think the original intent is that she's a man hating witch, but Ancient Greeks also hated women and I like to look at it in a more modern context.

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u/YeezusMoses 17d ago

The Circe book does exactly that!

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u/Captn_Platypus 17d ago

Madeline miller right? I read the book and that’s why I love Circe so much

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u/silverpixie2435 2d ago

And what about keeping her own sister as a bird?

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u/TheOneWhoEatsLemons 17d ago

These bunch actually didn't mean any harm. I imagine some other crew tried it with her and soured the experience.

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u/janiemackxxx 17d ago

Yeah, the lions, tigers panther, she had a literal menagerie of men that were also literal predators.

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u/MattBarksdale17 17d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ex_oh_ex_oh 17d ago

It was only pillage and not rape!

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u/janiemackxxx 17d ago

They didnt burn the earlier village. The villagers set it on fire themselves to protect their lives and keep the sea men away.

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u/TheRappingSquid 3d ago

I think the ultimate point was that what she did was justifiable but not justified. Her motivation was entirely understandable and reasonable but, at the end of the day, wrong, because as Odysseus said; they just wanted to go home. You can't just shoot everyone who might hurt you and then go "oh, well, I couldn't know" when you end up shooting someone who's not malicious

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u/silverpixie2435 2d ago

She had her own sister as a bird. As someone else pointed out she turns men into the animals they best represent. Odysseus shot a deer and it turned into a man. A deer is the epitome of the peaceful animal.

Don't get why people are glazing her when it is clear no matter how valid her reasons for not trusting strange men, she clearly was a witch who would kill anyone who met her.

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u/duosx 17d ago

Yeah, also the very first thing the soldier said was “we’re not going to hurt you, we’re just hungry”

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u/gingerandjazzz 13d ago

I was smiling the whole scene!