Moreno Valley: The Odyssey (2026)

Christopher Nolan has spent two decades making movies about men who cannot get home, whether the obstacle is a dream within a dream or a black hole's gravity well. It was only a matter of time before he turned to the original text on the subject. His new adaptation of Homer's epic, starring Matt Damon as the wandering king of Ithaca, is his biggest swing yet, and mostly it connects.

The premise needs no introduction to anyone who suffered through a high school English unit: Odysseus, hero of the Trojan War, spends ten years trying to sail home to his wife Penelope, played here by Anne Hathaway, while monsters, gods, and his own pride keep getting in the way. Nolan and Thomas have assembled a cast deep enough to stock three ordinary films, with Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron filling out roles that range from mortal to divine. That's a lot of marquee names for one story, and the film's chief accomplishment is that it never feels like stunt casting. Each performer gets a scene built around what they do best rather than a cameo built around who they are.

What distinguishes this Odyssey from the dozen sword-and-sandal epics that clutter streaming libraries is Nolan's insistence on treating myth as physical event rather than special-effects spectacle. He shoots in large format, as always, and the choice pays off in the film's quieter stretches as much as its set pieces: a storm at sea has weight and texture instead of just noise, and the film's handling of Odysseus's more famous encounters favors practical scale over digital sprawl. Anyone who found Nolan's recent work chilly and overengineered will find some of that same reserve here, but it suits material that is, after all, about endurance rather than triumph.

Damon carries the film's emotional spine with a performance that trades charisma for exhaustion, playing Odysseus less as a swashbuckler than as a man whose cleverness has curdled into something closer to compulsion. Hathaway, working with comparatively little screen time, makes Penelope's patience feel like its own form of heroism rather than a waiting-room virtue, which is more than most adaptations bother to attempt. The film's structure, true to Nolan's habits, does not proceed in a straight line, and the fractured chronology occasionally asks the audience to do more piecing-together than the emotional payoff justifies. There are stretches in the middle third where the film's ambition to honor the whole poem, rather than just its highlight reel, slows the momentum considerably.

None of that will surprise anyone who has followed Nolan's career, and this won't be the film that converts a skeptic. But as an adaptation of one of the oldest stories in Western literature, it treats its source with more intelligence and less irony than the genre usually allows. It's a demanding two and a half hours rather than a comfortable one, and it rewards viewers willing to meet it on those terms.

For readers in the Brookings area weighing whether to make time for a new theatrical epic this summer, this is a case where the big-format experience genuinely matters; the sound design and scale are built for a large screen, and something will be lost waiting for a home release. Homer fans and Nolan skeptics alike will find more to argue about than expected, which is its own kind of compliment.