Nolan's “The Odyssey” Finally Lands, and Brookings Cinema 8 Has It on the Big Screen This Weekend

If you have spent the last two summers half-following the trade rumors about Christopher Nolan's next big swing, you already know this weekend matters. “The Odyssey” opens locally at Brookings Cinema 8, and for a town where a trip to a proper multi-screen theater already counts as an event, this is the kind of release worth building a Saturday around. It is playing now, the seats have room to stretch out in, and if you happen to go on a Tuesday you can catch it for five bucks. That combination alone makes this an easy one to recommend checking out in person rather than waiting for it to show up on a streaming service eight months from now.

The bigger story here, though, is how long this project sat in the realm of rumor before becoming real. Nolan has spent two decades being the guy studios hand a blank check to for original, mind-bending concepts: dream heists, time inversion, World War II evacuation shot like a thriller. Adapting Homer is a different kind of gamble. The “Odyssey” has been public domain material forever, which means there was nothing stopping any studio from making this movie at any point, and yet nobody with Nolan's resources had really tried to do it as a full-scale epic. That gap is the interesting part. It suggests Nolan wanted to prove something about scale and craft using material everyone already half-knows, rather than leaning on a twist nobody saw coming. Producing it with his wife Emma Thomas, as he has for most of his career, also signals this was built with the same tight creative control as “Oppenheimer” or “Interstellar,” not a studio-driven tentpole assembled by committee.

The premise sticks close to the source. Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, is trying to get home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, after years fighting in the Trojan War. The journey back is where all the trouble lives: strange islands, stranger beings, and enough delay and temptation to fill a decade. Nolan has assembled a genuinely stacked ensemble around Damon and Hathaway, including Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron, which suggests a lot of these mythic encounters get real weight and screen time rather than cameo treatment. That is about as much as is worth saying on plot. Anyone who read the poem in high school knows the broad shape of where this goes, and the fun is in how Nolan actually stages it.

On that front, the numbers back up what the trailers have been promising. Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at 94%, with an average score of 8.7 out of 10, and Metacritic has it at 89. That is about as close to consensus as a major studio epic gets these days, and unlike some Nolan releases in the past, there is no real split here between the popular score and the more measured critical one. Both point in the same direction: this is a movie that is landing with almost everybody who has weighed in on it.

Having sat with it, I think the acclaim is earned. This is Nolan working at the scale he clearly loves, big practical sets, real locations standing in for the wine dark sea, and a script that trusts the audience to sit with long stretches of tension rather than cutting away every ninety seconds. Damon carries the film's emotional center with more restraint than I expected, and Hathaway's Penelope gets more to do than most adaptations bother giving her. It runs long, and there is a stretch in the middle where the episodic structure of the source material makes the pacing sag a little. But the highs, particularly a couple of sequences involving the mythical creatures that I won't spoil here, are genuinely some of the best pure filmmaking Nolan has put on screen. It is not a flawless movie. It is a great one.

If you are debating whether this is worth a trip into town, the answer is yes. Go on a Tuesday if you want the deal, but go.

Facts verified as of August 23, 2026.