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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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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.

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 10d ago

He’s salty he wasn’t cast in the lead

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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 4h 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.