'The Odyssey' First Reactions Are In. Critics Are Calling It a Masterpiece.

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Jul 13

Written By Jonathan P. Moustakas

Early reactions describe Christopher Nolan's adaptation as flawless, breathtaking, and a genuine first in technical filmmaking — with the loudest praise landing on a supporting turn nobody saw coming.

There's a specific kind of reaction a film earns when it clears expectations by a wide enough margin that critics stop talking about the movie in front of them and start reaching for a director's entire body of work. That's the territory The Odyssey has landed in. Following its London premiere and the first round of press screenings, early reactions to Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic have been close to unanimous in their awe — "staggering achievement," "monumental filmmaking," "crowning achievement," "masterpiece," the vocabulary of people who've just watched something they suspect they'll be talking about for years.

That's a rare register to hit for a filmmaker who already has Oppenheimer, Interstellar, and The Dark Knight on his shelf. The consensus forming out of these first screenings frames The Odyssey as a masterful follow-up to Oppenheimer and Nolan operating at the absolute peak of his craft — not necessarily his best film, a claim that will take the full critical body to litigate, but unmistakably his most ambitious, and possibly his most complete. Universal, notably, structured the rollout to lead with working journalists and premiere attendees rather than pure word-of-mouth influencers, which lends the early rapture a little more institutional weight than the usual opening-night gush.

What comes next is the real test — whether that first wave of enthusiasm hardens into an official score that ranks among Nolan's best-reviewed work, or whether some of it cools as the wider critical body weighs in. There's already one notable holdout, and the market that's built up around the film is pricing in exactly that gap between rapture and verdict. But first, what's actually driving the acclaim.

A technical first, 25 years in the making

Some of the scale here is quantifiable rather than just descriptive. The Odyssey is the first narrative feature ever shot entirely on IMAX cameras, a commitment no studio has made for a full production before, reportedly on a $250 million budget and filmed across Greece, Italy, Morocco, Iceland, and Scotland over 91 days. Critics screening it in IMAX have called the format a perfect match for the film's immensity, with one describing the experience as jaw-dropping and several insisting it's the only way to see it.

Nolan also built something genuinely new into his own playbook: a fully fleshed-out horror sequence, something he's never attempted in 25 years of directing beyond small doses in Batman Begins and Oppenheimer. The Hollywood Reporter's Aaron Couch flagged it as a Nolan first outright. Given that Odysseus's journey home is a decade-long gauntlet of monsters, sirens, and divine cruelty, that swerve reads less like an experiment than like Nolan finally letting the darker instincts of the source material off the leash — and the early word is that the supernatural material is where the film is most surprising.

Damon anchors it. Morton walks away with it.

The performances are where the reactions get specific, and more interesting. Matt Damon's Odysseus is being called a career-best, powerhouse turn — the kind of role that follows an actor into awards season, with Oscar pundit Anne Thompson already floating him as a potential first-time winner and the film as an early Best Picture front-runner. Robert Pattinson's Antinous, the sniveling suitor angling to seize Ithaca, drew some of the most delighted reactions of the night, with several critics calling him the outright scene-stealer.

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But the name that recurs most across the entire rollout isn't Damon's, or Hathaway's, or Pattinson's. It's Samantha Morton. Her Circe appears in essentially one scene, and that single sequence has generated some of the most pointed praise of the whole cycle — Time Out called her "extraordinary," The Independent's chief film critic said she "damn near steals the show" with the few minutes she has, and more than one reaction has compared her work to Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight: a small, indelible performance that threatens to define the film it appears in. That's a staggering thing to say about a supporting role inside a three-hour ensemble epic stacked with this many recognizable names, and it's the single most consistent thread in the early reaction.

The one dissent worth noting

None of this settles anything definitively, and it's worth being precise about what these reactions are: short-form impressions posted before the full embargo lifts and before Rotten Tomatoes has an actual Tomatometer to display. The near-unanimity has one visible crack so far — IndieWire's David Ehrlich, the lone established critic in the first wave, landed mixed, calling the film a bit too clunky to rank among top-tier Nolan while still praising its final act. One dissent among a flood of raves isn't a trend, but it's a reminder that the loudest early voices are self-selecting, and the bigger, less forgiving batch of reviews arrives next week.

That gap between overwhelming first-wave enthusiasm and an unsettled final number is exactly what the prediction markets are built to price. On Kalshi, the forecast for where The Odyssey lands on Rotten Tomatoes is sitting high — the market clearly expects a strong, well-reviewed film — but the odds thin out considerably at the very top of the scale, where the difference between "excellent" and "career-best Nolan" actually gets decided. In other words, the market believes the raves without quite treating a historic score as a foregone conclusion. With the wide critical wave still to come and the film not in theaters until July 17, that's the honest position: this looks like a triumph, and the only thing left to settle is how big a one.

View the market below for live odds on where The Odyssey lands on Rotten Tomatoes.

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