The Odyssey

Odysseus: 

“What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if...one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn't possibly be there anymore. 

[…]

To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home.

[…]

We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.

[…] 

The breaking of Zeus's law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn't bear to see the ruins of what he'd done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.” 

A film by CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

• First narrative feature film to be shot 100% on IMAX film cameras (that hold only 3 minutes of filming per reel)
• Original film negative (over 610 km of film) was hand-spliced together
• Filmed on location in Greece, Italy, Morocco, Iceland, Scotland and the USA.
• Production took place on the open ocean on a full-size Viking longship reconstruction, modified to resemble an ancient Greek vessel. (Actors actually learned to row and sail it)

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Ezra Klein, "Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse" in The New York Times (August 2, 2026): 

"The ideas and morals upon which the best of our culture was built have been disrupted and desecrated. The question now is whether that disruption can be met with creativity and renewal. This is the central question of Nolan’s “Odyssey.” This “Odyssey” ostensibly hinges on Zeus’ law: […] It demands hospitality toward the guest or the stranger, recognizing that anyone could be a god in disguise. […] Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. 

[...]

the political movement that rose promising to make Western civilization great again betrayed its inheritance. The world now looks at America and sees us as the barbarians: the country obliterating the global order, the country that takes what it wants and demands tribute from those who cannot resist. And what the political opposition has to do now is recognize what Nolan recognized: That it is an affirmation of our civilizational values to say that cruelty is a weakness. That only compassion and reciprocity build a durable and decent society. That order is necessary but order without ethics and restraint is perversion or authoritarianism. That there is both beauty and wisdom in the injunction to avoid inflicting on others what we would not see turned against us and in remembering that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, too.

[…] 

Regeneration is hard. It requires seeing old values in new ways. It requires recognizing that a moral inheritance that has collapsed into cliché holds power in an age when it has been debased and forgotten. But it can be done. It needs to be done."