Adapting literary works as seminal as Homer’s “Odyssey” can never be easy. Written sometime in the 8th century BCE, this epic Ancient Greek poem explores themes of generosity and kindness, karma, mind over matter, and a victorious warrior’s return to their homeland being their sweetest reward, which have been studied by historians and academics and inspired artists for millennia since. It’s no surprise then that if you think about Christopher Nolan’s filmography, you’d realize he’s been making “The Odyssey” over and over in multiple forms.

Films like “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), “Inception” (2010), “Interstellar” (2014), and “Dunkirk” (2017) immediately come to mind, most of them sharing the broad-strokes logline of morally complicated men of action persevering through a treacherous journey to get back home to see their family again. Keeping this in context, his decision to make a direct adaptation feels like a natural endpoint to this creatively exploratory chapter.

Except, just like those movies—which were more inspiration than adaptation—the Oscar-winning director of “Oppenheimer” (2023) seems less interested in an obsessively faithful adaptation of Homer’s text than he is in understanding and interrogating it within the bounds of gender hierarchies, suffocating norms both societal and religious, and the irreversible transformation of a victor whose spoils of war lie just beside the heap of corpses whose blood is on his hands.

An earnest attempt to do so would require Nolan to deconstruct the book’s Hero on a human level. Using the understated performance of Matt Damon (”Air,” 2023), we see the titular odyssey originally conceived by Homer, now retold through the eyes of a man haunted by visions of the goddess Athena—his burning conscience and his guide home. For his part, the “Bourne” star shifts effortlessly between cutthroat practicality and existential disillusionment, giving his performance an edge of vulnerability we rarely find in the regal theatrics of similar period epics.

One of Odysseus’ biggest motivators to return to his homeland is the chance to see the family he left twenty years ago to go to war. Anne Hathaway (”The Devil Wears Prada,” 2026) plays his wife Penelope, a woman who continues to hold out hope that he is alive all these years later. She is phenomenal, and lends a dignified air to her role without missing a beat on the nuanced nature of her character: a woman of apparent privilege frustrated by the gendered hierarchy of power.

Penelope’s only objective at the moment is to protect her son Telemachus (Tom Holland; “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” 2026) while simultaneously keeping at bay a crowd of power-hungry suitors vying for her hand in marriage. She’s not entirely successful; Antinous—played with devilish glee by Robert Pattinson—makes every attempt to encroach upon her boundaries and pressure her one way or another. The “Die My Love” (2025) actor plays him so well you’re bound to want to cross the screen and do him as much harm as possible.

He also works perfectly as a foil for Holland’s idealistic young adult, stuck between a rock and a hard place and forced to stay within the walls of his palace to avoid assassination. The latter gives his career best, his range on full display. It’s an absolute treat to watch his body language transform over the course of the film from meek and irritable to a fearless man with a plan in complete control.

Boasting a dazzling array of performances from its all-star cast of supporting characters, and armed with top-tier film craft—including, but not limited to, Ludwig Göransson’s dark, structurally volatile, and unsettling soundtrack, the delicious visual handiwork of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, and film editor Jennifer Lame balancing the non-linear narrative with pacing that never lets go for a single second of its 3-hour runtime—the latest big-screen retelling of ”The Odyssey” is among Christopher Nolan’s finest films, marrying the big-screen blockbuster with burning questions about the human condition.

Using the accessibility of larger-than-life spectacle, the movie throws us into a sea of rhetorical questions: is the price of blood a price you’re willing to pay to burn down an entire city? Is the eventual burden of your conscience haunting you for the rest of your life worth it? Will you, after all these years, find yourself worthy of the love and mutual respect you seek from your family with the blood of the innocent on your hands?

None of these questions have any easy answers, especially in our current timeline, fraught with a war that now feels doomed to last forever.

Whether or not “The Odyssey” succeeds as an adaptation will depend totally on whether you’re a classicist or an academician devoted to the works of Homer, or among those who find themselves open to the very idea of an adaptation being a possible reinterpretation. As it stands, however, Nolan’s latest is an excellent film about passion, perfidy, punishment, and penance, distilling the Greek poet’s expansively woven narration through the eyes of its increasingly disillusioned protagonist. Highly recommended.