my 4.5/5 STAR ODYSSEY review

I’m not a film reviewer I’m a filmmaker. So when I talk about a film, I’m looking at it from the perspective of someone who’s paying attention to the craft, the construction, and the filmmaking choices behind it.

I watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX, and as a filmmaker, I was blown away. The practical filmmaking is masterful. You can feel the craftsmanship in every frame: massive built sets, large-scale miniatures, and the use of forced perspective to create scale without leaning on CGI. It’s the kind of work that reminds you how much can be done in-camera when the ambition is there. It doesn’t just look big it feels real.

John Leguizamo, as Eumaeus, brings warmth and loyalty to the screen, and Matt Damon is phenomenal as Odysseus. He carries the film with a grounded intensity that really works. The Troy sequence is a standout I could genuinely watch a three-hour epic just set there. It’s visually stunning and probably the film at its most immersive.

Ludwig Göransson’s score is still great, but compared to something like Oppenheimer, I was expecting more standout moments. There are scenes where it really elevates what you’re watching, but overall, it didn’t leave me with a theme that stuck.

And that’s kind of how I feel about the film as a whole. There’s nothing wrong with it structurally it’s well made, everything fits, everything works. I just didn’t feel it as much as I wanted to. I didn’t fully connect with the characters, especially in some of the Tom Holland sections. Maybe that works for others, but for me, it just didn’t land emotionally.

Ultimately, I think that’s why the film worked for me on a technical level but not quite on an emotional one. I admired so much of what Nolan was doing, and I could see the craft in every choice, but I never quite got fully swept up in the story itself.

But if you’re going to see The Odyssey, you have to see it in 70mm IMAX. There is something genuinely special about it. I know people joke about “the way Nolan intended,” but I get it now. It opened my eyes to what cinema can actually look and feel like. Even if the story didn’t fully hit for me, the experience itself is unforgettable.