Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has exploded onto X, hailed as a mythological epic on par with Oppenheimer. Shot entirely on IMAX with Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland leading a star-studded cast, the film blends mythology, family drama, romance and action. Early reactions call it a grand, immersive masterpiece and a once-in-a-lifetime big-screen experience.
Some films arrive quietly, but not those done by Christopher Nolan. The Odyssey opened in theatres today, and within hours of the review embargo lifting earlier this month, Twitter had already made up its mind: this is another one for the shelf next to Oppenheimer and it is even set to do magic at the box office. It is worth pausing on just how much weight this film is carrying. The Odyssey is Nolan's thirteenth feature and his first since Oppenheimer swept the Oscars in 2023, winning seven awards on a relatively modest budget of about a hundred million dollars. This time, Nolan has gone bigger, shooting the entire film on IMAX cameras and casting Matt Damon as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, fighting his way home after the fall of Troy. Anne Hathaway plays his wife Penelope, Tom Holland their son Telemachus, and the supporting cast reads like a studio's wildest wishlist, with Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, and Lupita Nyong'o, all in the mix. Advance tickets for its 70mm IMAX screenings reportedly sold out within minutes, nearly a year before the film even opened. Here is the Odyssey review on Twitter (X) and the verdict is, universally, of "outstanding" with some labelling it a 4 star experience.
Film journalist Aavishkar set the tone early, awarding the film four stars and writing that "Christopher Nolan does it again. Delivers a grand, immersive and emotionally satisfying big-screen experience." It was a sentiment echoed by hundreds of similar posts framing the film as Nolan's latest, and perhaps grandest, triumph.
Not every early viewer was swept off their feet in the first act. Reviewer Venky Reviews called the film "Technically Brilliant, A True Cinematic Experience!" while noting that the opening half hour takes its time to settle before Odysseus's journey truly gathers pace. From there, Venky pointed to horror-tinged sequences and a genuinely gripping final stretch, framing the slow start less as a flaw than a deliberate choice, atmosphere first, spectacle second.
Himesh Mankad went further, describing the film as an "absolute cinematic masterpiece" that folds mythology, romance, family drama and action into a single sweeping experience. He singled out the performances of Matt Damon, Holland, Hathaway and Pattinson, and credited Nolan with holding the audience's attention from the opening frame through to the last.
The five-star reactions kept coming. Trade analyst Ramesh Bala called it an "OUTSTANDING cinematic experience," citing its blend of action, drama, suspense and scale.
Alex Walason went a step further still, framing the film as nothing less than "the culmination of a career," and adding that the performances throughout felt close to flawless.
Jonathan Sim, meanwhile, urged people to skip the smaller screens altogether and find the biggest one they could, calling the film "a once-in-a-lifetime experience" and ranking it among Nolan's finest work to date.
For anyone unfamiliar with the source material, Homer's Odyssey has survived roughly three thousand years as one of literature's great homecoming stories: a king, a decade-long war behind him, fighting monsters, gods and his own pride on the long road back to his wife and son. It is not, on paper, obvious blockbuster material. Yet if this first wave of reactions holds, Nolan appears to have found a way to make an ancient story feel enormous again on the big screen.
Early box office projections have the film opening somewhere between eighty and a hundred million dollars domestically, though those numbers may well shift now that word of mouth has caught up with expectation. Either way, between the scale of the production, the size of its cast and the sheer volume of praise flooding X this week, The Odyssey already looks set to be one of the defining cinematic events of 2026.