Nolan's “The Odyssey” finally washed ashore, and what Brookings, South Dakota should know about it

By now, most people in Brookings have heard something about “The Odyssey” even if they haven't tracked every beat of its rollout. It's the kind of movie that shows up in conversation at the coffee shop before it shows up on a marquee: the Nolan name alone does that. Here in late autumn, with the evenings getting shorter and a lot of us looking for a reason to sit in a dark room for a couple hours, a big-swing epic like this one lands at exactly the right moment. It's the sort of picture that belongs to the season when you want something that fills the whole screen and asks for your full attention.

The real story here isn't Troy or Ithaca, it's the gamble. Christopher Nolan has spent two decades building a brand around original, brain-knotting concepts, from “Memento” to “Inception” to “Oppenheimer.” Taking on Homer is a different kind of risk. The “Odyssey” is one of the most adapted stories in human history, which means Nolan isn't competing with other blockbusters so much as he's competing with three thousand years of retellings, school reading lists, and everyone's half-remembered idea of the Cyclops. Add to that an ensemble cast stacked deep enough to anchor three separate movies, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, and you've got a production that was always going to be judged as much on ambition as on execution. That's the actual drama worth paying attention to: whether a filmmaker famous for precision engineering could handle something this old, this mythic, and this baggy by nature.

For anyone who hasn't cracked open the source material since high school English, the setup is simple enough. Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca played by Damon, is trying to get home after the Trojan War. That journey turns into years of detours, monsters, gods interfering where they shouldn't, and a wife, Penelope (Hathaway), waiting with a lot more patience than most of us would manage. Nolan isn't reinventing the plot. He's betting that scale, texture, and craft can make a story everybody already knows feel newly urgent.

Based on it does, apparently. Rotten Tomatoes has the film sitting at 94% with an average score of 8.7 out of 10, which is about as strong as consensus gets for something this big and this expensive. Metacritic lands a touch lower at 89, still comfortably in “near-universal acclaim” territory, just with slightly less unanimous enthusiasm than the Tomatometer suggests. That's not really a split worth agonizing over. When your low number is an 89, you're not watching critics argue, you're watching them compete to find new adjectives.

My own take lines up with that reception, and I'll say it plainly: this is Nolan operating near the top of his game, and it's worth your time. The scope is the first thing that hits you, this doesn't feel like a story shrunk down to fit a soundstage, it feels like Nolan actually went and found the ocean, the caves, the scale that Homer was describing. Damon carries the physical and emotional weight of a man who has been away far too long without ever tipping into self-pity, and the supporting cast, especially Hathaway and Nyong'o, get real moments instead of just decoration around a big budget. Where it stumbles slightly is pacing in the middle stretch, where the episodic nature of the source material shows through and a couple of the mythic set pieces feel like they're there because the checklist demanded them rather than because the story needed them there. But those are minor drags on a film that otherwise earns its length and its reputation.

If you want to catch something like this on the big screen the way it's meant to be seen, Brookings Cinema 8 is the local home for that kind of experience, the sort of widescreen, sound-rattling event picture that genuinely benefits from a real theater rather than a laptop. Whether “The Odyssey” happens to be on their schedule when you read this is worth checking directly, but it's exactly the type of film this town's screen exists for.

Facts verified as of October 1, 2026.