Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is, by almost every technical measure, a staggering achievement. Shot entirely on IMAX film across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, and Scotland, it is the kind of film that justifies the phrase “you have to see it on the big screen.” Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography renders the wine-dark sea as something genuinely oceanic and threatening; Ludwig Göransson’s score never lets the mythic scale curdle into camp; and Matt Damon, playing against his usual easy charisma, gives Odysseus a haunted, unglamorous physicality that several critics have singled out as career-best work. The set pieces — the Cyclops’s cave, the whirlpool of Charybdis, the underworld — are staged with the tactile, practical-effects confidence Nolan has built his career on. As pure spectacle, it earns comparisons to Gladiator and Ben-Hur. And yet the film has a structural flaw at its core, and it can be attributed to the translation Nolan chose.

Nolan has been open, if a little defensive, about the fact that his screenplay leans on Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation rather than the more traditional, martial-glory register of Robert Fagles. Where Fagles’ Odysseus is introduced through the language of cunning and conquest, Wilson’s opens with a single, deflating word: complicated. The fingerprints of that choice are all over the film — Nolan’s Odysseus is written as an everyman whose trauma, not his brilliance and hubris, are his defining traits, and whose mistakes cost lives directly and repeatedly. This is not, on its own, a betrayal of Homer. The Odyssey has always been a poem about a hero whose intelligence and vanity are two edges of the same blade. The problem is what Nolan’s script does with that insight once it has it.

Nowhere it is more stark than in the Cyclop scene. The Polyphemus episode is the hinge on which the entire poem turns. Odysseus blinds the Cyclop, escapes clean under the sheep, and then — for no tactical reason at all — shouts his real name back across the water so that his enemy, and the gods, will know exactly whose triumph this was. That single act of vanity is what summons Poseidon’s wrath and manufactures the ten years of suffering that follow. It is the moral engine of the entire journey: victory curdled into catastrophe by pride.

Nolan’s film keeps a version of the reckless-pride beat in a subdued manner— Odysseus fires an arrow back into the cave after the escape out of a deluded, antagonistic sense of honour, costing him men. But the actual name-reveal, the boast that gives the myth its causal logic, is either cut or thrown away so quickly it barely registers. That is not a minor trim. Removing or burying the boast severs the line between Odysseus’s character flaw and his punishment. The audience is left with a hero who is reckless in the moment but never shown choosing his own doom for the sake of glory. The hubris is never clearly presented as a personality trait and it is absent as a mechanism. Homer’s tightest piece of narrative causality becomes, in Nolan’s hands, just another dangerous decision in a string of dangerous decisions.

Similarly, the Lotus-Eaters shift tells the same story from the other direction. In the poem, the lotus is a temptation Odysseus’s men fall into and he actively resists, because his pull toward home outweighs the offer of oblivion. In Nolan’s version, it’s Calypso who gets him hooked on the lotus flower, inducing an amnesia that keeps him from Penelope. Forgetting is no longer a trap to be willed away by a man defined by his longing for Ithaca; it’s something inflicted on a man who, by the film’s late scenes, seems almost relieved to have an excuse not to remember Troy. When Odysseus finally speaks to Penelope in disguise near the end, he speaks less like the proud architect of the Trojan Horse reckoning with what his cleverness cost him, and more like a soldier processing something closer to PTSD.

This is where lies the film’s real flaw, and it is not simply that Nolan chose trauma over hubris — plenty of adaptations have made that trade and found something coherent in it. It’s that The Odyssey tries to have both without ever deciding which one is actually driving the story. The Cyclops sequence wants you to believe Odysseus is undone by pride. The homecoming wants you to believe he is undone by grief. Homer’s version works because those are the same event, refracted through one character’s fatal need to be recognized. Nolan’s version struggles with the pride as texture and the trauma as theme, and never lets one cause the other. This Odysseus behaves so differently from decision to decision that he starts to feel like a different character entirely from scene to scene, rather than a deepened version of a single, consistent man.

That incoherence is the cost of borrowing Wilson’s psychological candour without borrowing her rigor. Wilson’s translation doesn’t abandon Odysseus’s hubris — it just refuses to romanticize it, tracing with total clarity how his vanity produces his suffering. Nolan takes the demystification and drops the causality, which is the one thing that made the demystification mean anything.

The thematic confusion is the film’s real wound, but it isn’t alone. A handful of smaller choices needle at the edges of immersion throughout. Most noticeably, the ensemble is stacked with British actors — Tom Holland’s Telemachus chief among them — delivering flat, unmistakably American line readings that sit oddly against the Mediterranean setting and the poem’s ancient register; a line as plain as “my dad is coming home” lands strangely when the accent doing the saying belongs nowhere near Ithaca. It’s a defensible stylistic swing — flattening the cast’s voices to strip away “prestige” affect — but in practice it more often reads as a mismatch than a deliberate choice, pulling attention toward the actors rather than the roles. Elsewhere, several of the mythic set pieces are shot so darkly that the geography of the action becomes hard to parse — the Cyclops’s cave in particular is murky enough that the mechanics of the escape are more inferred than seen. None of these are fatal on their own, but they compound the larger problem: a film so busy reworking what Odysseus means that it sometimes loses track of simply, clearly telling us what is happening to him.

Overall, the Odyssey is a film of genuine, sometimes breathtaking craft, anchored by a performance from Damon that understands a wearier, more culpable Odysseus better than the screenplay around him does. But a story about a man destroyed by his own pride only works if the film is willing to let him actually be destroyed by it — to show the boast, to let it cost him everything, and to make him own that in the end. Nolan gives us the wreckage of that man without ever quite showing us the choice that wrecked him. The result is spectacular to look but a bit strangely hollow to sit with.