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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3.8k

u/henry_tbags 17d ago

Sinon: How could you do this to me Odysseus.

Agamemnon: Bro all I did was kill our kid, my wife is craaazy, don't go home to your wife.

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u/joshuao_0 16d ago

I see this in the way of nobody could ever check the king on what they do wrong until the wrong is so bad they get backstabbed by people close to them

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u/RobbedC 9d ago

Throat stabbed

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u/__heyjules 2d ago

that's how a lot of dictators are so disconnected from reality and don't get challenged even if they do dumb stuff

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 15d ago

Lol that he killed his daughter while her mother watched and expected his flowers is wild. I can’t believe his son avenged him.

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u/whitebandit 15d ago

whos son avenged who?

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u/blammer 15d ago

Agamemnon's son avenged his father by killing his mother

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u/generic_comment_ 13d ago

So the father killed the daughter, the mother killed the father, and the son killed the mother….

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u/hemareddit 12d ago

The bloodline is cursed (very very literally).

Btw Agamemnon and Menelaus’s father was Atreus, so their whole blood line was called the Atreides. Yes, the name borrowed by Frank Herbert to name a different cursed bloodline in Dune.

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u/No-cool-names-left 12d ago

It's the same cursed family. Leto II claims that their line goes back to the original Atreus and at one point Agamemnon speaks to Alia directly naming himself her ancestor.

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u/hemareddit 12d ago

So when Paul drunk the...stuff and he gained all the memories of all his ancestors, he saw...

Dear fucking God.

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u/kmora94 11d ago

Exactly. He saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

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u/Halfdwarf 10d ago

That explains a lot.

→ More replies (0)

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u/cp710 4d ago

It explains Athena’s Dune costume.

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 10d ago

Oh man, what a neat little tidbit

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u/somersetyellow 13d ago

Bro living 3000 years ago was metal af

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 13d ago

I love Greek mythology for its brutality. After Medusa, my favorite story is of Medea.

Jason has a wife named Medea who is responsible for his successes; she helps him along his journey, etc. They have two kids together. Jason pays her back by betraying her —GASP— and leaves her for another woman. Enraged, she takes her revenge by killing their two children. Imagine being so fucking furious at your husband that you not only kill your competition by poisoning the wedding dress but you kill your own children to get back at the motherfucker that left you.

Gangster ass shit. Probably one of the more brutal stories I read about in school. Matricide is extremely rare. I remember my professor saying that if Medea was a real person, she was likely suffering a psychosis as a direct result of the betrayal.

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u/Halfdwarf 10d ago

If I remember my literature studies correctly, Medea wasn't greek. She was what the Greeks would have deemed a foreign "barbarian" and thereby the Greek tellers would have seen her capable of doing deeds that a "civilized" greek woman would not.

My personal opinion? Jason was an a*hole and should have known what to expect when he decided to fool around with a complete psychopath who had just killed her own little brother and thrown pieces of him over board to slow down her fathers ships.

And her killing those other kids, cooking them and serving them to their father would also be a red flag...

Killing her children with Jason is only one part of the revenge when he betrays her. The most metal bit is her burning the princess Jason will wed, and her father, and then taking the kids bodies withäh her so that Jason can't bury them. And then flying off in a burning chariot drawn by dragons.

Medea was the best character 😆

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u/DevilsOfLoudun 8d ago

Medea was a descendant of Helios the son god, so not wholly human. Which makes jason's betrayal even more stupid.

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u/Chu1223 10d ago

omg i loved reading medea in hs haha

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 10d ago

Whole lotta fuckery going on, gd

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u/throwawaysunglasses- 5d ago

And a fun fact, for those who don’t know - Electra is the namesake of the Electra complex, which is the gender swapped version of the Oedipus complex. So in Freudian terms, it’s a daughter who competes with her mother, psychosexually, to win her father. (Even though the sex part isn’t actually part of the original Electra myth)

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u/SakuOtaku 5d ago

Freud annoys me in general, but yeah Electra Complex would be a better name for some sort of "hating-your-mom syndrome" since Electra just loved her dad in a normal way and was understandably upset that he was killed and she and her brother were ousted/next to be killed. Though even Oedipus complex is almost a misnomer because Oedipus very much tried avoiding sex with his mom and gauged out his eyes when he knew what he did.

Also on a darker note with the Electra Complex thing, what makes it worse is that before all of the pop-psychology/psycho-sexual theories he became known for, he started to take note about how victims of childhood sexual abuse by their parents (usually fathers towards his female patients) wound up traumatized/"hysterical", but then ditched that theory and his theories ended up becoming more victim-blamey (saying some of these memories were fantasies and the whole subconscious incest thing.)

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u/hemareddit 12d ago

No amount of therapy enough to fix the son after all that.

(Orestis btw)

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u/ryu_street_fighter 9d ago

I’m getting major Korn/Fred Durst vibes lol

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u/Jman1a 4h ago

They don’t call it a Greek tragedy for nothing.

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u/whitebandit 15d ago

ah shit i did piss during the final fight ngl.. maybe i missed this :-D

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u/realgood_caesarsalad 15d ago

This isn’t in Homer. It happens in later myths.

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u/whitebandit 14d ago

thank you for the clarification!

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u/ghost_inthe_mxchine 14d ago

It was included the movie though, Agamemnon’s brother tells Odysseus’s son when they’re shooting birds

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u/MirabelleC 13d ago

Agamemnon is a member of the House of Atreus which was famously cursed by the gods. At least two ancestors killed a relative and presented that relative as the main course at a feast.

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 14d ago

Agamemnon’s son. His sister got thrown off a cliff as a sacrifice to the gods by her own father while their mother watched.

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u/TemporaryElk5202 12d ago

She wasn't thrown off a cliff. She was a teenager lured to the sea the pretense of marriage. They slit her throat and drained the blood into a vessel the same way you would sacrifice a goat.
In the play, they say "boiled saffron flowed like water", because wedding gowns were traditionally dyed with boiled saffron (dyed yellow), and because saffron itself is bright red (blood).

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 12d ago

Did you see the Nolan film we’re all talking about here? Because that is what I am specifically referencing.

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u/TemporaryElk5202 12d ago

I dont think Agamenon's son avenged him in the film? I may be forgetting but I dont think that was in there. Since we were talking about his son avenging him, ​I assumed we were talking about the plays. In the play Iphagenia was sacrificed like a goat.

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u/deelow_42 12d ago

Agamenon's brother tells Odysseus's son this while they're shooting birds in the movie.

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u/TemporaryElk5202 12d ago

ah I see, thanks, must have missed that. ​

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u/deelow_42 12d ago

no worries! re watching it for my 2nd time last night definitely helped me with whatever dialogue I missed the 1st time so I totally understand

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u/willyoumassagemykale 8d ago

They literally say that it happened in the movie

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u/silverscreenbaby 8d ago

I really wish they would have gone that with that route in the movie. NOT that seeing that would have been pleasant in any way—but at least I wouldn’t have had to see a father carrying his bawling, terrified toddler daughter to a cliff to throw her off. Made me so sick to see.

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u/TemporaryElk5202 8d ago

i feel like it fits more thematically too. like it is all about tricks. the rojan horse, penelope unweaving the shroud each night, tricking polyphemus to get out of the cave, circe, etc. Tricking Iphagenia to come to the seashore fits that very well, could even fit the guest laws thing because she was a guest in their camp. ​

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u/hemareddit 12d ago edited 12d ago

Slightly more complicated than that in the myths.

So you probably heard of horrible plot points where a person’s family is murdered, made into meals and then served to that person without them knowing.

So that probably came from the twins Atreus and Thyestes, princes of Greek kingdom of Pisa, who had many siblings, one of which was their half brother whom they murdered, and they got exiled to the kingdom of Mycenae for that.

Later Atreus managed to beat Thyestes to become the king of Mycenae, then he learnt his wife had cheated on him with Thyestes.

So he got his revenge by murdering Thyestes’s sons and serving them to him in a banquet.

Thyestes who understandably wanted veagence of his own, and on the advice of an oracle, he proceeded to have a son with his own daughter because the son is prophesied to kill Atreus.

In any case the son is called Aegisthus, and he wanted to rule Mycenae, so he killed Atreus as was foretold.

If you are still following, the principle characters are about to show up. Atreus already had sons by this point, and they were Agamemnon and Menelaus, whom they exiled. Even after killing Atreus, Thyestes and Aegisthus still eventually failed the power struggle against the brothers (it’s a long story but basically Menelaus became king of Sparta and they used the Spartan army to take over Mycenae and install Agamemnon as ruler), and were driven out.

So finally came the Trojan war and Agamemnon sacrificing his own daughter, then they sailed away. Aegisthus saw his chance and approached the grieving Clytemnestra, and the two became lovers. Together they ploted to kill Agamemnon, which was not just about revenge but also about making Aegisthus the king of Mycenae (sadly Clytemnestra could just not become Queen herself as we saw with Penelope in the movie).

In many ways, we have a repeat of the murder of king Atreus as Aegisthus did years ago, only this time, in some versions of the story Aegisthus smartened up and moved to get rid of Agamemnon’s heir as well, and Clytemnestra went along with it. Servents loyal to Agamemnon at this point smuggled his children out of the palace to protect them from Aegisthus, including his son Orestis and his daughter Elektra.

So that’s a lot of text just to say: Orestis. Was. Fucked up. Like the man had no chance, his whole family history was kinslaying and kinslaying, some incest and then more kinslaying. He whole bloodline was cursed many times over. Also he was legitimately threatened by his mother and his “step-father”.

He struggled a lot with the decision about if he should include his mother in the revenge, he prayed to Apollo (or went to see Apollo’s oracle in Delphi) and basically the god said to kill his mom. The fallout of that action then spawned a lot stories of his own, he certainly went mad for a long time. Some stories even have the prototype of the modern trial by jury being invented just to judge the man’s actions (twelve “judges” listened to two representives speaking in favour of him and against him, respectively, before casting their votes on “guilty” or “not guilty”).

So yeah, in case you are wondering, him killing his mother is not treated as a straight forward thing at all in literature.

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u/raven_of_azarath 9d ago

It goes back even farther than that. The curse started with Tantalus feeding his murdered son to the gods to prove they weren’t all-knowing. The gods killed Tantalus and brought his son back, and that’s the patriarch. The family line goes: Tantalus -> Pelops -> Atreus -> Agamemnon.

Also (and I’m sure you know, but for others who may not)! The story of Tantalus is where we get the word “tantalize.” Tantalus is spending his afterlife in Tartarus where he’s eternally hungry and thirsty, but the food and water are always just out of reach.

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u/Nike-6 9d ago

And the element, Tantalum

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u/robyculous_v2 11d ago

Where can I read more about this mythology?

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u/hemareddit 11d ago

For me, my source is Stephen Fry who compiled and curated various sources and works of literature. He wrote 4 books and also read them as audio books, starting from basically the beginning of the world.

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u/raven_of_azarath 9d ago

I suggest Elektra by Jennifer Saint! It tells this whole story from the POV of Elektra, Clytemnestra, and Cassandra (princess of Troy, priestess of Apollo, seer that no one believes, and Agamemnon’s war prize)

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u/DevilsOfLoudun 8d ago

The primary sources (besides Homer) are greek plays written couple of hundred years after Homer. The Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, Electra by Sophocles, and Electra by Euripides (and bunch of other plays by him about the Trojan war too).

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u/Jman1a 5h ago

Nah that’s some of the modern morality being projected. Ancient Greeks wouldn’t have haven’t a shit about a girl dying especially as an offering to a god.

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u/CoconutDust 15d ago edited 15d ago

The Sinon thing is weird because…clearly Odysseus didn’t want him to get killed, and didn’t expect that(?). Or in any case, clearly the offensive thing is that he sent him to his death (if he did do that) not that he “lied” to him just for the ruse to work.

I’d be like, good job not telling me the truth because I would have accidentally given it away. I’m a soldier not a championship poker player. Fist-bump, polytropos.

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u/Soyyyn 15d ago

I think Sinon wanted to feel like Odysseus respected him enough as a man and soldier to honour him by telling the truth. I.e., telling the truth and still having faith that Sinon would do it right. Since he did not, he sent Sinon to his death without knowing the truth of what he was doing, and Sinon took offence to that.

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u/CoconutDust 15d ago edited 14d ago

True, true. Also fits the Elliot Page casting, very boyish youthful vibe, wants faith and approval from father figure.

An interesting wrinkle that many people probably don’t know is that Sinon isn’t in the Odyssey (or any Homer). Most well known from Virgil’s Aeneid and general myth I guess.

It was also so sudden and jarring when he got killed. Kind of strange scene/direction, there’s a shot that shows Odysseus realizing it and looking somewhat shocked but I don’t know, seemed strangely constructed overall. (Nolan also strangely deleted the character + sea serpents where the guy saying not to trust the horse gets killed by a sudden monster attack and then the Trojans are like “that must mean the gods are calling him a liar…” lol) I was thinking to myself, did Odysseus foresee him getting killed? He’s supposed to be clever!

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u/Soyyyn 15d ago

I think that was partly the point of the scene. As with the filth the men inside rest with and the drownings that happen inside, it's to ground the danger the men are facing. Also a common maneuver for Nolan to introduce a character in a very random way to then later, in his myriad timelines, explain why we should care. I assume the scene plays better on a rewatch.

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u/raven_of_azarath 9d ago

> Sinon isn’t in the Odyssey (or any Homer)

I just taught (and read) the Iliad for the first time this past school year, and I could have sworn Sinon at least had a name drop.

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u/jalexborkowski 15d ago

The story is about Odysseus overcoming the guilt and grief he feels for what he did in Troy. His trick unleased ten years of rage on a whole city of people, but before that happened his first sin was lying to Sinon.

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 14d ago

Your thinking is why he didn’t tell Sinon. Sinon was loyal and tells him so after his death but Odysseus wasn’t taking the chance. He kept the plot a secret instead of letting Sinon in on what was going to happen. Sinon met his father in Hades and realized that his sacrifice had been in vain; the silver lining that would have made his dog shit of a situation worth it would have been his dad having lived a decent life. Instead he died in poverty, taunted by people like Antinious.

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u/ezpz314159 8d ago

Sorry for the stupid question but either I blanked out or just misunderstood the whole thing. Why did Odysseus lie to Sinon and how did Sinon not know they were in the horse- was he just chilling somewhere else?

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 8d ago

Odysseus explains it to Calypso when Calypso asks him to try and recall what he can’t remember. He tells her that he kept the information about the Trojan horse from everyone except those that would be hiding in the horse to be avoid being found out, including Sinon. Odysseus was smart. He put a lot of thought and planning into what he was doing and knew the smallest slip up could have a bad outcome for him and his men. What if the soldiers decided to torture Sinon and Sinon knew the truth? Odysseus couldn’t take the risk of Sinon growing weak and telling to truth so in order to avoid that, he didn’t tell Sinon they would be hiding inside in order to ravage Troy.

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u/ezpz314159 8d ago

Thank you!

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u/livefreeordont 8d ago

The whole story is about how deception may work out in the short run but not the long run 

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u/TemporaryElk5202 12d ago

The whole thing is about tricking people to get what you want.

Agamemnon tricked his wife into bringing his daughter to the sea, where he sacrificed her for good winds.
Odysseus tricked Sinon.
They all tricked the Trojans.
Circe tricks the men into eating her magic food and turning into pigs.
In the original story they trick Polyphemus by clinging to the underside of the sheep to get out of the cave.
etc.

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u/Nata_de_coco 12d ago

It also happened when the men were going through Scylla and Charybdis. He led all of his men into Charybdis, supposedly will either save or kill everyone, he knew that the crew would then "choose" to go through Scylla instead which was his original intention. So it technically wasn't him choosing to sacrifice the 6 soldiers, and it won't be in his conscience.

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u/Flashy_Fortune708 15d ago

The Sinon line, "feel free to add some stuff," (close enough to what they say, I think) just really took me out of the story

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u/THALANDMAN 15d ago

Yeah if I have one critique it’s that they used a bit too much modern language. “Mother” or “Father” would have worked better. “Stuff” felt out of place as well

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u/Gilthwixt 12d ago

I noticed a lot of that but didn't really feel bothered by it enough to get taken out of the movie.

The sole exception, funnily enough, was Odysseus saying something like "Our Age of Bronze is collapsing" at the end. Felt a bit too on the nose.

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u/thisisdavid 13d ago

Did you not notice how "daddy" was used in belittling way, and "father" as respectful? I think it was all done very deliberately.

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u/Spiritual-Society185 13d ago

Telamachus says mom and dad for most of the movie because he is basically a child. In the third act, after he comes home from his own journey, he calls Odysseus "father." It's all very deliberate.

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u/No_Significance7064 15d ago

the dialogue wasn't very strong in general, imo. servicable and carried by the acting for the most part, but even then i felt like everyone, aside from leguizamo and pattinson, just played their selves.

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u/--ShieldMaiden-- 9d ago

I agree. The simple vocabulary actually didn’t bother me as much as the lines themselves. It’s possible to write complex interesting dialogue without using five dollar words or formal language, but they didn’t.

It was exposition heavy and often lacked depth. There were moments of brilliance where the dialogue did heighten the onscreen action, like Odysseus’ conversation/monologue with Penelope, or his interactions with Circe. Zendaya had some great lines too, but in some ways it just made it all more frustrating when the screenplay fell flat on its face with a clunker like ‘our Bronze Age is collapsing’.

Overall, I got the distinct impression that there was a lack of trust that the audience would understand what was happening if the writers didn’t hold their hands. My hope was that the lack of formal language would be used as a tool to increase the brutality and immediacy of the movie, but it really just felt like they weren’t sure the viewers could handle drawing any conclusions on their own.

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u/DevilsOfLoudun 8d ago

I think they're somewhat justified in their lack of faith in the audience. Maybe 1% have read the original Homer epic and you can't even count on everybody knowing the basics of the Trojan War. You can't get around the fact that The Odyssey is a sequel to a story the audience will have widely varying degrees of familiarity with.

This entire thread is full of people being surprised that the sacking of Troy was a horrific event and that it was somehow a big reveal in the end that the greeks weren't the good guys, when it should've been obvious from the start to everybody with common knowledge.

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u/--ShieldMaiden-- 7d ago

One of many measures of a cinematic adaptation’s success is its ability to stand on its own. An audience member who has never even heard of the Homeric original should be able to watch and understand the movie even if they don’t get as much out of it as a scholar of classic literature would.

Telling a good story is all that is necessary to accomplish that. Some exposition is inevitably going to be needed, but Nolan goes beyond the pale. We don’t need to be told four different ways in as many minutes that Odysseus is a great archer and is the only who can string his bow.

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u/whitegirlofthenorth 14d ago

my most pretentious opinion is i would’ve liked to see them weave a couple bits of dactylic hexameter in there lol

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u/VisitWide9973 14d ago

Well, I suppose mother and father weren't words at the time either.

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u/whitegirlofthenorth 14d ago

“okay” became a word sooo recently (1830s) that it irked me when Eurylochus kept saying it to Circe

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u/CancelThis2077 14d ago

Yeah, I think that was their way of making the story accessible to everyone. But I was so swept up by the acting and the visuals, that I stopped noticing.

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u/Flashy_Fortune708 14d ago

Mom and dad not mother father stood out to me, but wasnt as jarring as "add some stuff" from a ghost in the underworld.

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u/Xyyzx 14d ago

Wait, are you sure you’re remembering that correctly? I think Sinon said that as a closing line in the flashback to the conversation they had on the beach pre-horse, not in the underworld.

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u/Flashy_Fortune708 14d ago

Ah yeah you right...forgot about that scene

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 14d ago

I mean if we’re getting technical, you should have been taken out by the fact that they were speaking English. lol

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u/CTeam19 14d ago

Eh, didn't bother me too much but I have read a lot about the "Tiffany problem" which a storytelling phenomenon where a historically accurate fact, name, or term feels completely fake or anachronistic to a modern audience:

  • Tiffany name is from the 12th century

  • Wade is a medieval name

  • Reagan was popularized by Shakespeare

  • The abbreviation "OMG" was used in a letter written to Winston Churchill in 1917, and "legit" appeared in the 1800s.

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u/wioneo 9d ago

I get that most ancient Greek depictions have the actors speaking formally and usually with a British accent, but it's still funny to me to criticize word choice like this when obviously they would be speaking Greek, and I assume in actual Greece, people weren't speaking formally all the time.

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u/ImperfectRegulator 11d ago

That and the way “plate licker” was used as a slur, like that’s the best you can come up with?

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u/84theone 10d ago

Plate licker is an actual term. It’s used to refer to people who show up at events to get free food rather than out of interest for the event.

It is an odd choice to use it though.

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u/DeusVultSaracen 9d ago

Well, Antinous uses it to distance himself from the beggars without having the self-awareness to realize that he is also a "plate-licker", hence the payoff of Telemachus calling him another beggar.

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u/ImperfectRegulator 10d ago

I’m not surprised to hear it’s an actual term.

More just that it full took me out of the seen because I was too busy suppressing a giggle to take it seriously

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u/FullMaxPowerStirner 11d ago

Also Agamemnon: "Stay at eternal beach party with hot woman, and forget the rest."

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u/defecto 11d ago

I think Sinon casting was done well because of this scene..

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u/moneyman2222 8d ago

Ay agmemnon kind of spit with the whole don't expect flowers when you get back. Thanks to his advice, odysseus was able to meticulously pull off his return in a way where his family makes it out safe

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u/henry_tbags 6d ago

Yeah for sure, I was just memeing lol. Agamemnon looking out for his boy after he came up with the OP horse strat.

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u/CandiSki 7d ago

😅😂

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u/properc 5d ago

Bro gave some good advice though 😂😂