🏺 The Odyssey Review: What Critics Are Actually Saying

Ninety-five percent of critics liked it. Ninety-seven percent of the people who bought tickets loved it, which is the highest the Popcornmeter has ever recorded for a Christopher Nolan release, past The Dark Knight, past Memento, past every caped or time-looped thing he's made. Four-word verdict: the myth survived contact.

The numbers, before the quotes

Here's what's on the record before a single critic gets a word in.

A three-hour Greek epic with a horror sequence and a dual role for Lupita Nyong'o cracking 95% critical approval is the kind of thing that shouldn't happen on paper. Ambitious swings usually split a room. This one didn't split anything. It's the rare case where the audience number isn't a correction of the critics — it's an echo of them, just louder.

Worth being honest about how these numbers move. Some outlets logged the Tomatometer as high as 98% in the first wave of reviews, before the count climbed past three hundred and settled closer to 95%. That's not a correction so much as the normal math of a bigger sample. Add two hundred more reviews to any number this high and it drifts down a point or two just from volume, the same way a hot streak regresses once the sample gets big enough to include an off night. Nothing here reads like buyer's remorse. It reads like a number stabilizing.

Is this actually Nolan's best-reviewed film, or an early-week mirage?

Real, and holding at a level no Nolan film has touched even after the sample size tripled. Rotten Tomatoes' own editorial desk filed it under "another Christopher Nolan masterpiece," which is not a headline that outlet hands out to be polite. Robbie Collin at The Telegraph didn't hedge either.

"Nolan and his collaborators have constructed a strange, fearsome and trailblazing machine of a movie — by some distance, the best of the year so far." — Robbie Collin, The Telegraph

Compare that against Nolan's actual box office track record and the pattern gets stranger. Oppenheimer sits at 93% critics. Dunkirk and Insomnia hover in the low 90s. Tenet and The Prestige don't get near this territory at all. A three-thousand-year-old poem out-reviewed the atomic bomb. I did not have that sentence on my bingo card for 2026.

What's actually landing — beyond "it looks expensive"

Every big-budget mythology swing gets called a spectacle. Fewer get called specific. This one's earning the specific version of the praise.

"This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair... full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums." — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"The scale and scope here is, frankly, jaw-detaching. Samantha Morton's Circe provides the closest Nolan has come to full-on horror, an astonishing sequence full of shocking fury and sadness." — John Nugent, Empire

Nolan reaching for horror is the detail that keeps surfacing, and it's the least predictable part of this whole rollout. He's built a career on the clean, controlled machinery of heists and time loops. Circe's sequence, by Nugent's account, is not controlled. It's the first time in his filmography he's let a scene go feral on purpose, and critics keep singling it out like they can't quite believe he let himself do it.

"A must-watch cinematic experience... that frequently brings a sense of horror and existential angst to the story — and even a bit of humor too!" — Scott Collura, IGN

That's the tonal range this film is getting credit for: horror sitting next to jokes sitting next to a ten-year homecoming, and reviewers aren't describing that as whiplash. They're describing it as the whole point.

Where the ensemble actually holds together — and where it doesn't

Here's the friction, because a page with zero friction on it isn't a review roundup, it's a press release. David Rooney at The Hollywood Reporter gave the film real praise and one specific complaint in the same piece, which is the most useful kind of review to quote.

"While The Odyssey is uneven, and no match for the sure-footedness and intellectual complexity of Oppenheimer, it's elevated by the blindingly charismatic ensemble." — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Then Rooney turned the knife on one specific piece of casting.

"Holland... is wrong for the role... comes across as, well, Peter Parker in a tunic, sapping the gravitas from Telemachus' path to maturity." — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Nobody else in this roundup raises Holland as a problem. Bradshaw doesn't. Nugent doesn't. IGN doesn't. That's one critic's specific dissent sitting inside a wall of specific praise, and I'd rather hand you the one real crack in the consensus than pretend this thing landed as unanimous as the Tomatometer headline makes it look. A 95% score is still 5% of several hundred people who watched the same movie and didn't buy it, and Rooney's the clearest of that minority report.

It's also worth noting Rooney's dissent is narrow, not total. He's not arguing the film fails. He's arguing one piece of casting undercuts a scene that needed to land, which is a very different complaint than the wholesale "why does this exist" pile-on Moana caught a few weeks earlier on this same tracker. A single-actor critique inside an otherwise glowing 800-word review is what an honest consensus looks like. Total agreement across 374 outlets would be the number I'd distrust.

Do Damon and Hathaway carry the marriage plot, or does the ensemble drown them out?

This is where the reviews converge hardest. Odysseus and Penelope are a twenty-year long-distance marriage conducted entirely through absence, and that's a much harder note to hit than a battle scene. The consensus, stitched together across Rooney's "charismatic ensemble" praise and the wider critical language around it, is that Damon plays the toll of the war on a man rather than the swagger of a hero, and Hathaway plays the waiting as its own kind of siege. Adam Nayman at The Ringer framed the larger project this way.

"It gives us one of the greatest stories ever told reimagined as a cautionary tale." — Adam Nayman, The Ringer

A cautionary tale, not a triumph lap. That reframing is the throughline across almost every quote in this piece — the horror in Circe's scene, the "uneven but elevated" verdict from Rooney, Bradshaw's "seriousness" alongside the "flair." Nobody's selling this as a clean, feel-good homecoming. They're selling it as a myth that hurts on the way back, which happens to be exactly what Homer wrote and what most adaptations sand down to make it more marketable.

Is the 97% audience score inflated by opening-weekend goodwill?

Some. It's early, the sample's opening-week ticket buyers rather than a full theatrical run's worth of word of mouth, and 5,000-plus verified ratings is a real floor but not the final one. That said, this isn't a nostalgia crowd rating a remake against a fond childhood memory — the exact dynamic I flagged when Moana's audience score ran 56 points ahead of its critics. Here the audience and the critics are reading the same film the same way, which is the far rarer split to log on this beat. When the paying crowd and the reviewing class land within two points of each other on a three-hour Greek epic with a horror set piece, that's not goodwill. That's agreement.

What this does to the mythology-epic genre

Hollywood has tried this exact bet before and mostly lost it — Troy, the Percy Jackson films, both Clash of the Titans swings, a decade of algorithm-bait sword-and-sandal projects that treated Greek myth as a theme park with a marketing budget attached. Nolan treated it as source material worth being afraid of, and the reviews are rewarding exactly that choice. A director spends two decades building a reputation on controlled, cerebral machinery, then hands the audience a horror sequence inside a three-thousand-year-old poem and gets his highest audience score ever for the trouble. The lesson every studio greenlighting the next myth adaptation should take from this: the epics that work aren't the ones that flatten the myth into a superhero skeleton. They're the ones that leave the myth's teeth in.

Methodology

Critic and audience scores reflect Rotten Tomatoes' published Tomatometer and Popcornmeter as of this writing, cross-referenced against Forbes' and SlashFilm's reporting on the record-setting audience number, which noted the Tomatometer climbing as review volume grew after release. Quotes are drawn directly from The Hollywood Reporter (David Rooney), The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw), Empire (John Nugent), The Telegraph (Robbie Collin), IGN (Scott Collura), and The Ringer (Adam Nayman). Comparison figures for The Dark Knight, Memento, and Oppenheimer were pulled from their own current Rotten Tomatoes pages. We have not screened The Odyssey ourselves — every opinion here belongs to the critic it's attributed to, not to us.