Christopher Nolan has made a three-hour film about a haunted genius who builds one (1) device, immediately regrets it, and then spends the rest of the runtime being punished by the universe for his own cleverness. No, not that one.
We’re talking about The Odyssey (2026), Nolan’s IMAX-shot, Homer-adapting, Matt Damon-starring epic — which, according to nearly everyone who has actually watched it, is less “loose thematic cousin” and more “direct blood relative” of his 2023 Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer. Two men, two catastrophic inventions, one director apparently working through something.
Let’s get into it.
The Setup: A Bomb, a Horse, and a Guy Who Can’t Stop Thinking About What He Built
Oppenheimer was about a physicist who splits the atom, wins the war, and then spends decades quietly disintegrating under the weight of what he unleashed. The Odyssey (2026) swaps the Manhattan Project for the Trojan Horse and the desert of Los Alamos for the wine-dark sea, but the emotional architecture is suspiciously identical.
As critic Kristy Puchko put it in her review, Nolan’s take on The Odyssey has “far more in common with his Best Picture-winning Oppenheimer than you’d think,” noting that Odysseus’s guilt over breaking “Zeus’s Law” with his wooden gift-that-keeps-on-taking mirrors Oppenheimer’s guilt over Trinity almost beat for beat.
This isn’t fan-fiction pattern-matching, either — Nolan basically confirmed it himself. In an interview about The Odyssey (2026), ScreenRant’s Liam Crowley directly asked Nolan whether working on Oppenheimer and reading American Prometheus bled into his read of Odysseus, pointing out the overlap between Odysseus’s remorse over the fall of Troy and the Trinity Test.
Nolan didn’t exactly deny it. When your director is out here comparing a bronze-age war criminal to the father of the atomic bomb, you know the “parallels” section of this article was always going to write itself.
Exhibit A: The “Great Man” Who Is Actually Just a Guy Having a Very Bad Time
Both films center on what critics keep calling the Nolan “great man” archetype — except the twist, every time, is that the great man is miserable. Deep Focus Review’s write-up of The Odyssey (2026) points out that Odysseus is “troubled by his deception and the breaking of Zeus’ Law” in a way that reads as a direct extension of Cillian Murphy’s tortured Oppenheimer.
Meanwhile, The Pop Culture Studio’s review explicitly flags that “other commentators have noted the thematic overlap between The Odyssey and Oppenheimer’s respective ‘great man’ protagonists,” zeroing in on hubris as the shared fatal flaw — both men convinced, against all available evidence, that they’re smarter than the forces they’re messing with. Reader, they were not.
Yahoo’s review goes further, essentially declaring The Odyssey (2026) a spiritual sequel outright, noting that Nolan’s film continues his “psychological examination of men reflecting on their roles in destructive moments that changed the world” — which is a very polite way of saying Nolan has found his one guy: brilliant, self-destructive, bad at going home for dinner.
Exhibit B: The Weapon of Mass Regret
Here’s the bit that even the memes haven’t caught up to yet: multiple critics are drawing a literal line from the Trojan Horse to the atomic bomb, treating both as origin stories for humanity behaving badly to itself.
Yahoo’s review argues that the Trojan Horse sequence functions as “ground zero for creating an unfair, cruel world,” the same way Trinity was ground zero for the nuclear age. And in a separate piece rounding up early reactions to The Odyssey (2026), ScreenRant summarized reviewer Laura Sirikul’s read that “like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Odysseus is tormented by his weapon of destruction — the Trojan Horse,” resulting in deaths that haunt him for the entire back half of the film.
Somewhere, a screenwriting professor is drawing a Venn diagram with “hubris,” “clever device,” and “spends the rest of the movie sad about it” in the overlapping middle, and both films are sitting right there in it.
Exhibit C: Nolan Doing the Time-Jump Thing Again
Structurally, The Odyssey (2026) apparently refuses to just… tell the story in order, because that would be too easy and also not Nolan’s brand. JoBlo’s review calls it “Nolan’s most experimental film since Memento,” describing a non-linear style that’s “slightly more extreme” than what he pulled off in Oppenheimer, cutting between Odysseus’s twenty-years-gone present and the Trojan War past.
Deep Focus Review agrees, noting that Nolan and longtime editor Jennifer Lame used a “similar technique” on Oppenheimer to arrange scenes in an almost impressionistic, time-hopping order during the first half hour alone.
If you left Oppenheimer mildly disoriented about which decade you were in, congratulations, The Odyssey (2026) has technically prepared a prequel course for you, this time with a cyclops and gods and monsters and suitors trying to usurp the protagonist’s wife.
Exhibit D: The Recurring Ghosts (and the Recurring Wives)
NPR’s review takes a slightly cheekier angle on the pattern, pointing out that Nolan treats the sack of Troy “as an epochal tragedy, comparable to the dawn of atomic warfare in Oppenheimer,” before noting — not unkindly — that both “admirers and detractors” of Nolan have clocked his long-running fixation on dead or absent wives driving his heroes’ inner torment.
Whether it’s Oppenheimer’s fractured marriage or Odysseus spending two decades away from Penelope, Nolan keeps writing men who wreck the world and then discover, too late, that home was the whole point. It’s less a coincidence and more a director returning to the scene of the crime.
Exhibit E: It Was Written Solo, Just Like Oppenheimer
Even the credits are telling on Nolan. Rotten Tomatoes’ own critics’ consensus write-up for The Odyssey (2026) notes it’s “telling” that the screenplay was written solo, the same way Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer were, rather than co-written with his brother Jonathan (who handled Memento, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar).
Translation: when Nolan wants to write a guilt-soaked epic about a man haunted by his own genius, he apparently prefers to suffer through it alone. Very on brand.
So… Is It Actually Good, Or Just Oppenheimer-With-A-Cyclops?
Both, according to most people who’ve seen it. The Odyssey (2026) is currently sitting at a very Nolan-shaped 96–98% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics tossing around words like “masterpiece” the way Odysseus tosses around bad decisions.
The Hollywood Reporter, however, is the designated party-pooper of the bunch, calling it “uneven, and no match for the sure-footedness and intellectual complexity of Oppenheimer,” which is critic-speak for “great, but your last movie was still better, sorry.” Yardbarker’s review agrees the writing is the softer link compared to the filmmaking, flagging “a few too many jokes that don’t quite land in the third act.”
CBC’s review, meanwhile, basically speaks for the whole audience when it admits that understanding a Nolan film in one viewing “is its own Herculean task,” which — considering the film is literally about Hercules’s fellow Greek legend — feels like a compliment Nolan absolutely engineered on purpose.
The Final Verdict
Strip away the togas, triremes, and one enormous puppet cyclops, and The Odyssey (2026) is doing the exact same emotional math as Oppenheimer: brilliant man, one irreversible decision, decades of consequences, zero peace of mind, and a director who clearly finds “guy who broke the world and now has to live with it” the most endlessly rewatchable premise in cinema.
Nolan didn’t just adapt Homer — he found the one 2,800-year-old story that already had an Oppenheimer-shaped hole in it, and thankfully, his very own version of colonel Leslie Groves happened to be free.
If The Odyssey (2026) proves anything, it’s that Christopher Nolan has officially entered his “haunted genius cinematic universe” era.
Buckle up, because if the pattern holds, his next film is probably going to be about Prometheus himself — and honestly, at this point, we’d all just assume that’s a stealth threequel.
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Sources: ScreenRant, Looper, Rotten Tomatoes, The Pop Culture Studio, NPR, Deep Focus Review, IndieWire, Yardbarker, JoBlo, Yahoo Entertainment, The Hollywood Reporter, CBC News
