The Odyssey (2026) Review

I approached The Odyssey without any previous experience of its source material. I had never read Homer’s poem, nor did I possess more than a vague awareness of the story’s place in literature and mythology.

I can’t evaluate the film as a faithful adaptation, identify any alteration made to the original, or discuss how effectively it translates particular passages from the text. My response is simply that of an average moviegoer encountering this story for the first time.

That lack of familiarity ultimately worked in the film’s favour. I did not know exactly where the journey was heading, or what trials awaited Odysseus. The story therefore unfolded not as the visual recreation of something I already knew, but as a genuine voyage into the unknown.

The scale of the production is undoubtedly one of the first things that captures the audience’s attention. The world feels vast, dangerous and frequently overwhelming. Each new obstacle for Odyssey and his crew is not merely another episode in an adventure; it becomes part of the emotional burden he carries.

The desire to return home provides the film with its emotional foundation. This gave the film a surprisingly intimate core. Despite the scale of the world and the extraordinary nature of the events, its emotional motivation remains simple.

My main criticism concerns the pacing. At certain points, the film moves slightly too quickly. Some events and emotional developments arrive in rapid succession, and a few scenes could have benefited from more time to breathe.

Because the journey contains so many significant encounters, the film occasionally seems eager to move towards the next major event before the emotional impact of the previous one has fully settled.

I can’t complain too much because the runtime for this movie is very close to 3 hours. The pace also creates momentum and communicates the relentless nature of the journey. Odysseus himself is rarely given an opportunity to rest or process what has happened, so the audience’s feeling of being hurried from one trial to another may partly reflect his own experience.

I can’t say whether people familiar with the source will respond to the adaptation in the same way. It may create expectations that I did not have, and viewers who know the poem may focus on omissions, reinterpretations or changes that were invisible to me. My experience was freer from those comparisons.

One of the more controversial choices in the film is its use of distinctly modern English. The characters do not speak in the elevated, ceremonious language that audiences have been trained to associate with historical epics.

Instead, they use ordinary expressions, contemporary vocabulary and recognisably modern patterns of speech. I can understand why some viewers found this distracting. Certain words clearly belong to a world very different from that of ancient Greece, and hearing them within such a monumental mythological setting can initially create a sense of historical dissonance.

However, this never became a serious problem for me. In fact, I gradually came to see the modern language as one of the reasons the adaptation communicated the story so effectively.

The characters in Homer’s world would not have spoken English of any kind, whether modern, Shakespearean or conventionally “epic.” An archaic form of English might have sounded more dignified to a contemporary audience, but it would not necessarily have been more historically authentic.

Its dialogue allows the characters’ fears, rivalries, affections and frustrations to be understood without the language becoming an additional barrier between the audience and the story.

For me, the purpose of an adaptation is not to reproduce every surface feature of its source mechanically. It is to discover how the essential experience of that source can be conveyed through another medium and to another audience. Literature and cinema communicate differently.

There is, after all, more than one kind of fidelity. An adaptation may be faithful to wording, chronology and detail, or it may be faithful to emotional impact, thematic purpose and the experience it creates in its audience.

From my perspective, The Odyssey succeeds most strongly in the latter sense. Its language may not always sound ancient, but the conflicts it expresses feel immediate and human.