The Odyssey is packing Portuguese cinemas — and nobody agrees on Nolan's epic yet
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened in Portugal with sold-out IMAX screenings and critics split between masterpiece and letdown.
The Odyssey finally landed in Portuguese cinemas on Thursday and did what only a Christopher Nolan film can do in the middle of July: fill theatres, sell out IMAX screenings booked months in advance, and get everyone arguing — not about whether it’s good, but about exactly how good (or not) it is.
The Oppenheimer director took Homer’s poem and turned it into a three-hour epic with Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope and a cast list that reads like an Oscars seating chart: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron. Shot in IMAX with the new camera the company developed for Nolan, it’s the kind of film that demands the biggest screen within fifty kilometres.
What are critics saying about The Odyssey?
They’re split — and that’s half the fun. Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars in the Guardian, reading it as a film about the trauma of soldiers coming home from war. In the US, some are already calling it the Best Picture frontrunner, with Damon’s performance described as the best of his career. But others walked out talking about a letdown, about a Nolan too enamoured with his own scale. Somewhere between “film of the year” and his “biggest misfire”, the only consensus is that nobody left indifferent.
The controversy is older than the release: months of social-media rows over the historical accuracy of the casting and of Nolan’s reconstructed ancient Greece — noise that had already dragged the film into the AI-generated content debate long before opening night. Screening details and formats are on Universal’s official site.
Whether it earns its three hours is your call. Just decide quickly — centre seats at the IMAX are already collector’s items.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: PhilipRomano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
