Nolan's 'The Odyssey' Is First Film Shot Entirely in IMAX
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- Christopher Nolan directed 'The Odyssey,' the first feature film shot entirely in IMAX, earning the NYT Critic's Pick at 2 hours 52 minutes with an R rating.
- The film adapts Homer's 12,109-line epic poem with Matt Damon as Odysseus, Zendaya as Athena, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus.
- Nolan's version tracks Odysseus as a lost amnesiac who vanished two decades after the Trojan War, expanding the magical wanderings while repeatedly circling back to the family he left behind.
- The adaptation reads as both a throwback with 'Old Hollywood allure' and a contemporary piece that adjudicates the costs of war, asking 'who benefits, and who suffers?'
- The cunning, complicated Odysseus of the source poem has been 'sweetened and made more psychologically legible for contemporary sensibilities,' played by an actor the review calls an 'appealing' everyman.
Why it matters: Nolan has built his career on closing the divide between art film and blockbuster, and 'The Odyssey' distills that signature — kinetic thrills, formal playfulness, and big thematic stakes — into a $300M-scale swing at foundational Western literature. The film's first-ever all-IMAX approach sets a technical benchmark for prestige spectacle, while its interrogation of war's human cost gives the adaptation urgent contemporary weight beyond spectacle.
