Homer wrote The Odyssey somewhere around 2,800 years ago. Christopher Nolan just handed it a 70mm IMAX camera and a quarter-billion dollars, and — reader, the man stuck the landing. Or, appropriately, the homecoming.
Let's start with the numbers, because they're a little ridiculous. The Odyssey is sitting at roughly 96% on Rotten Tomatoes across 400-plus critics — the highest-rated film of Christopher Nolan's entire career. Higher than Inception. Higher than Interstellar. Higher than the one that gave us Heath Ledger's Joker. And the audience somehow went even harder, breaking Nolan's all-time viewer record at about 97% with a 4.80-out-of-5 average — finally dethroning the long-standing three-way tie between Memento, Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight.
It also opened to $263 million worldwide on a reported $250 million budget — a record debut for Nolan. Turns out a 3,000-year-old story about a guy who just wants to get home still absolutely slaps.
The cast is stacked to the rafters: Matt Damon as the war-weary, sea-cursed Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope holding down Ithaca, Tom Holland as their son Telemachus, and Robert Pattinson as the smarmiest suitor in the Aegean. It's R-rated, practical-effects, built-for-the-biggest-screen-you-can-find filmmaking — exactly the swing-for-the-fences spectacle we're always begging Hollywood to make more of.
Is it a note-perfect classics seminar? No — Nolan took his liberties, and the internet has Opinions about a few of them. But that's what happens when a myth is this alive: everyone's got a stake in it. We're just thrilled that a filmmaker with this much clout used all of it to drag Homer back into the multiplex and remind a new generation why this story has outlasted, well, everything — including three millennia and the collapse of several empires.
Gear up for the voyage
Naturally, you're going to want to wear it. We combed the shelves for the perfect Odyssey shirt and hit one tiny snag: the ancient Greeks are criminally underrepresented in the officially-licensed-tee industrial complex. So we did the next best thing.
Browse the whole lineup over in Movie T-Shirts — sword-and-sandal epics, sci-fi, horror, comedy; if it played on the big screen, we've probably got the shirt.
Then go see The Odyssey on the biggest screen you can find. Odysseus took ten years to get home — the least you can do is drive to the IMAX.