Iconic poster image and shot from the trailer for the Nolan film (fair use)

(3) CHRISTOPHER NOLAN –

THE ODYSSEY (2026)

“In a time of apparent magic”

Well, you must have seen this coming. Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation of the Odyssey is inescapable for inclusion in a top ten compiled in the same year as its release – even more so as Nolan himself observed, the Odyssey “had not been adapted into a large-scale production from a major Hollywood studio” and was hence “an odd gap in movie history”.

Also, I liked it.

It is by no means perfect and necessarily has omissions or changes to adapt the original epic into a single film – but by Athena, it lodged itself deep in my psyche and resonated with me afterwards. Not as deep or resonant as the original epic or my childhood version of it in top spot, but perhaps on a par with Tennyson’s poem – which Nolan’s film echoes in its ending.

Part of that resonance is because Nolan’s film is a distinctly contemporary or modern adaptation of the epic.

The “apparent magic” of the film’s intertitle is poised ambiguously between the psychological and the supernatural – floating as memories through a lotus haze and haunted by the ghosts of war.

Beyond that, there’s the reframing of the poem and the character of Odysseus “into a meditation on the moral consequences of war…using it to reframe the Trojan Horse and Odysseus’ journey as explorations of post-traumatic stress disorder, war guilt, moral injury and the breakdown of trust in civic norms”, albeit it got a little heavy-handed with its message of the Odyssey as part of the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Sea Peoples.