The Odyssey
Directed by Christopher Nolan · Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway
Epic Adventure · 2026-07-17
“The most technically staggering film of the year, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm for the forty one screens on Earth that can actually show it, and the critics gave it a 95 while the audience score on Metacritic sits at 5.1.”
You shot the entire film on IMAX 70mm cameras, the first feature ever to do it, across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, Malta and Western Sahara, in ninety one days, and wrapped nine days early. The result is genuinely magnificent to look at. Empire's John Nugent said the scale and scope is frankly jaw-detaching, Peter Bradshaw called it a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair, and Robbie Collin called it the best of the year so far. Two hundred and sixty four million dollars worldwide on a two hundred and fifty million dollar budget, and a record domestic opening for Matt Damon. Nobody is arguing you cannot build a spectacle.
The argument is about whether anything is happening inside it. Variety got closest: consistently involving and frequently dazzling, and yet never exactly moving, so that you almost do not notice your heart is not quite in it. David Rooney at the Hollywood Reporter praised the blindingly charismatic ensemble and Damon going to dark places seldom explored, then called the film uneven and no match for the sure-footedness of Oppenheimer, and said flatly that Tom Holland is wrong for the role. He is. Telemachus needs to feel like a boy carrying a legend he cannot lift, and Holland plays him like a very capable young man on a work placement.
Then there is the gap nobody at Universal wants to discuss. The critics are at 95 percent across three hundred and eighty four reviews, Metacritic is at 89, CinemaScore says A. And the Metacritic user score is 5.1 across sixteen hundred ratings, split almost exactly in half between positive and negative. That is not review bombing, that is a genuine divide, and the likeliest explanation is that you made a film that rewards being watched correctly and then made it nearly impossible to watch correctly. Which brings us to the projectors.
- 01
The first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, and the images justify the obsession: Hoyte van Hoytema delivers what Bradshaw called gasp-inducing, Imax-sized landscapes of loneliness.
- 02
Matt Damon gives the performance of his late career, and Rooney specifically credits him with going to dark places the actor has seldom if ever explored.
- 03
Ludwig Goransson's score does an enormous amount of the emotional lifting that the screenplay leaves on the floor.
- 04
The quiet passages are the real achievement. Empire noted that what is most striking about the film is its quieter moments, which is not what anyone expected from a Nolan epic.
- 01
Emotional distance. The film is admired far more often than it is felt, and multiple critics landed independently on the same complaint about a missing pulse.
- 02
Tom Holland is miscast as Telemachus and the parallel journey structure keeps cutting away from Odysseus to a story with less gravity.
- 03
At a hundred and seventy three minutes the balance between the two strands is clumsy, and the film keeps resetting its own momentum.
- 04
AwardsWatch argued that stepping away from the mythological approach is a massive letdown for anyone who came for the source text, and the monsters largely become weather.
Anyone who will drive four hours to a 70mm IMAX screen and considers that part of the film rather than an inconvenience, and anyone who wants to watch the most ambitious piece of large-format filmmaking ever attempted.
Anyone who needs to care about the people on screen rather than admire them, and anyone whose nearest cinema will be showing this as a digital scale-down where roughly half the point evaporates.
The entire campaign was built on a format almost nobody can access. Forty one screens worldwide can project IMAX 70mm: twenty five in the United States, nine in Canada, three in the United Kingdom, and exactly one each in Australia, Belgium, France and Czechia. You told the planet that the only correct way to see your film is a presentation available to a rounding error of the planet, then released it everywhere else anyway and let those audiences conclude they had seen it. The secrecy campaign worked beautifully, the format flex worked on the twenty five thousand people who could take you up on it, and the 5.1 user score is what everyone else thought of the version they were actually sold.
Your website, CV, or whatever you made. I'll roast that too.
A full teardown from €2,99. No mercy.