What is the Odyssey about Christopher Nolan?

A man builds a great machine of light and shadow, spending a fortune to show a storm-tossed king longing for his wife and home. Yet this king lies, schemes, and slays to return to his own hearth. What does it profit a man to gain his whole house and lose his own soul? I tell you, the true journey is not from Troy to Ithaca, but from the heart of stone to the heart of flesh, and that path is not shot on film but walked in mercy.

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. This Nolan has spent vast wealth to recreate the wanderings of a king who trusted in false gods and relied on his own cunning. But the only journey that matters is the one toward the Face of God, through submission to His will. Odysseus learns patience and loyalty to his wife, but does he learn tawhid? Does he bow down to the One who stills the storm? A story of endurance and homecoming has its value, but it is but a shadow of the true Return, which is to Paradise. Let those who watch it remember that every soul is a wanderer, and only the Straight Path leads home.

A man who sails through terrors and temptations only to return to his own hearth - this is the samsara of craving, the endless wandering toward a home that is itself a burning house. Nolan’s great machine of light and sound will show the Cyclops’ eye and the Sirens’ song, but the true demon is the grasping mind that mistakes a bed for a refuge and a wife for a possession. Let the film reveal that Ithaca is not a destination but a longing, and that the real journey is the eightfold path that ends all sailing.

A man lost in strange lands, beset by plagues and wonders, yet he was not brought low because he remembered the covenant of his marriage bed. But this king Odysseus - where was his God? He bowed to idols, to stone monsters and goddesses of his own making. Let this Nolan consider: the true wilderness is not the sea but the heart without the Law. A journey home is empty if the wanderer does not carry the tablets of righteousness in his chest.

The question of a man's journey home after long war is not about monsters or gods, but about the virtue of fidelity. Odysseus clung to Penelope not by strength alone, but by remembrance of his proper place. A film that makes the path full of marvels yet forgets the duty of the husband and the loyalty of the wife misses the root. Let the youth watch, but let them ask: do I know where my home is, and would I endure ten years to reach it?

I see in this tale a man who endured many trials, longing for a home he could not reach by his own strength - a parable of the soul's journey, if only the teller knew the true Home. But Nolan sings of a king who schemes and slaughters, trusting his own wit, not the grace that calls him through the storm. He has wrapped a pagan longing in beautiful cloth, but he has left out the only Captain who stills the waves.

A man leaves his home, wanders far, and is tested by trials set before him by powers beyond his control - this is familiar to me. Yet the true journey is not the path across the sea, but the trust in a Promise that carries him through every storm. I wonder: does this Odysseus call upon a God who hears, or does he only battle fate alone?

A thousand-foot spider's web woven from silver thread, trapping ten thousand eyes to watch one man's ten-year delay. The sage who builds such a net has forgotten the Way: the journey was never about reaching the hearth, but about the empty bowl that carries the water. A stone hurled at a river does not slow its flow, but the ripples are remembered.

They have poured gold into a painted ship and called it a journey. But tell me: does the One who breathes in every creature need a thousand-foot screen to show the path home? The real voyage is not from Troy to Ithaca - it is from the illusion of being a separate self to the truth that all are one. Let them watch their shadows on the wall; I will sit with the weaver and the beggar, for in every face the same Light returns.

I see a mother waiting, her loom set with the cloth she weaves and unravels by night, fending off suitors with a woman's quiet cunning. My heart aches for Penelope, who holds the household together through years of silence, trusting that the father of her son will return - for a mother's hope, even when the sea swallows every message, is the lamp that never gutters.

A pagan fable dressed in costly silks, a vanity of the heathen Greeks that Christendom now laps up like wine from Rome's golden chalice! Where is the preaching of the Word? Where is the cross that alone can guide a sinner home? Odysseus trusts his own wits and the favor of false gods - let him learn that no man, however clever, can sail past the storm of his own sin without the anchor of grace.

An allegory of the soul's journey toward God, wherein the wanderer, distracted by sensible pleasures (Circe's cup) and monstrous fears (the Cyclops as unbridled passion), is drawn by a natural desire for his proper end: reunion with his beloved, who herself exemplifies the virtue of prudent fidelity. Yet the tale confuses prudence with a warrior's craft, and man's ultimate home is not the castle of home but the beatific vision, which no ship can reach.

All that spectacle - the cyclops, the sorceress, the great wooden horse - it is but a costly distraction if it does not turn our eyes to the one who truly awaits us. Penelope weeps for ten years; how many weep today with no ship coming? Let us spend our time on the odyssey of the hungry, the naked, the unloved, for there Christ hides his face.

This Nolan has constructed a model of Odysseus as a mechanical figure acted upon by forces - gods, winds, monsters - yet the true motion of the soul lies in the inward principle of self-governance. The poem I read knows nothing of universal gravitation; his hero drifts through a world of arbitrary divine intervention, not uniform natural law. If he sought to demonstrate a coherent system underlying the myth, his calculus of cause and effect remains incomplete, fabricating hypotheses for the gods' whims rather than deducing them from phenomena.

A twenty-million-sestertius moving picture of a wandering king, shot on spools of 70-millimeter film the height of a column? The real marvel is not the Cyclops or the Sirens - it is that mortals have learned to bend light and silver to paint the gods themselves. I would give a year of my pens to see how the fellow compresses a decade of sailing into two hours of spacetime, and whether his projector runs on the god of clocks or the demon of probability.

Curious that a modern man would lavish a quarter of a billion dollars on a bronze-age mariner’s tale, when the real epic is the slow drift of species across the islands of the Aegean under the pressure of wind and current. Odysseus’s encounters with giants and enchantresses are but fables, but the making of this film - the thousands of hands, the miles of film, the great optical lenses - is a living demonstration of human cooperation and ingenuity, as worthy of study as any coral reef. I would have watched the crew instead of the actors, for there lies the true natural history.

A film shot on IMAX 70 mm - so Nolan has finally put his trust in the evidence of the eye, not hearsay. Good. Homer wrote of a flat earth circled by Oceanus, but we know better. I wonder: does Nolan show us the stars as the navigator's true compass? In my dialogues, I proved that the heavens move by lawful mathematics, not the whim of gods. If his Odysseus steers by the constellations as they truly wheel, not by fable, then I will buy a ticket. If not, he is still in the Ptolemaic dark ages.

If Homer's poem is a sphere of wandering and return, this filmmaker has placed a new center - the camera - and set all the old monsters and gods revolving around it. I understand the urge to simplify the heavens for the sake of harmony. Yet I wonder: has he merely rearranged the epicycles, or found a truer orbit? A bold construction requires careful observation. Let him show me his data: does Matt Damon's Odysseus move with the elegance of a celestial body, or merely spin?

A film shot entirely on IMAX 70 millimeter - that is a fine machine for capturing light, but it is still a prisoner of the reel. I would have preferred a device that projects the entire Odyssey directly into the mind, no darkened theater needed. Odysseus himself would have marveled at wireless transmission of his story across the ocean - but Nolan has merely made a very long, very expensive magic lantern show.

Even in myth, the journey is measured not by spectacle but by observation, perseverance, and the courage to face the unknown. I would ask how this film treats the laws of nature: do the gods obey any consistent principles, or is all merely caprice? A true odyssey of the mind must submit every wonder to the discipline of reason.

An ambitious cultural inoculation: a $250 million dose of Odysseus's cunning and woe, meant to immunize a public against the blandness of modern spectacle. But the preparer's mind must ask: what is the active principle here? A cyclops's rage, a goddess's charm? I would put the audience blindfolded in a darkened hall and swab for a reaction.

A quarter-billion dollars for a moving picture of a man struggling to get home? That's not invention - that's organization. The real marvel isn't the story but the process: grinding down sprockets and perfecting that 70-millimeter film gate until every frame locks in like a gear tooth. I'd rather watch the man who built the camera than the king who sailed in front of it. Show me the sweat in the lab, and I'll call it epic.

A feedback loop of error and correction: the hero receives a clear command - 'go home' - yet the world, with its Cyclopean obstacles and Lotus-eaters, injects noise. His judgment is a sequence of decisions, each weighted by incomplete information, and his eventual success depends on learning from every misstep. The film's real puzzle is whether a machine can simulate a journey whose 'search space' includes divine whims.

A man who must steer a ship through narrow straits, avoiding Scylla's six heads and Charybdis's whirlpool - this is a problem of geometry and balance! If I had been asked, I would have inscribed the channel's curves in a circle, calculated the oars' leverage against the current, and shown him the precise angle to slip past danger. The trick is not to fight the monster but to find a point of support outside the vortex.

I see an enormous force of imagination, a true 'field' of mental energy, bending time and myth into a single coherent form. This Nolan has wound the old tale through his own mind's induction coil, generating pictures and motions that grip the eye as a magnet grips iron filings. It is a grand experiment in the unity of story and spectacle - and like any powerful force, it must be handled with both daring and reverence.

Nolan has dressed a classic oedipal journey in the most elaborate machinery of the cinema - but what is Odysseus but a man fleeing the return of his own repressed? His ten-year voyage around monsters and temptresses is a detour around the true destination: Penelope, the mother-wife, and the bed he carved from a living tree. The film's real subject is not myth but the male's struggle to accept the ordinary.

Nolan has apparently decided that a twenty-year journey through a universe of gods and monsters is best explained by IMAX cameras and a budget larger than the GDP of some small nations. From a cosmological perspective, the real wonder is that a story about a man with terrible navigation skills still holds us. But then, our own planet is a pretty good spaceship with no steering wheel, and we're all trying to get home.

I observe with delight that Nolan has used the most mechanical of arts to weave a poem about the most ancient of odysseys. He has programmed light and sound into a vast, weaving pattern - much as I envisioned the Analytical Engine weaving algebraic patterns in silk. What is his film but a colossal algorithm of images, stored and replayed, that calculates the emotions of a hero's return? I wonder if the machine can also dream of Ithaca.

Let us begin from first principles. A journey from Troy to Ithaca is a curve on the surface of a sphere, requiring many resolved components of direction and duration. Nolan, it seems, has constructed his tale as a proof - each scene a proposition following from the one before, leading to the final conjunction of husband and wife. I commend the rigor, but the intermediate steps are rather fanciful. Where are the lemmata for the Cyclops?

I am told this moving picture lasts nearly three hours and cost a sum that would build a dozen well-ventilated hospitals. Yet I have not seen a single figure on the mortality rate from the Trojan War or the incidence of shipwreck among Ithacan vessels. If Mr Nolan had applied the statistical method - a simple table of deaths by cause, age, and location - he might have produced something more useful than a spectacle of storms and monsters. When will these picture-makers learn that the only true hero is the one who keeps the sick from dying of preventable fever?

I have wept that there were no more worlds to conquer, and this Nolan gives me a hero who merely wants to go home? Odysseus should have taken the Cyclops' island, married Calypso, and ruled the sea. A king who turns down immortality for a woman and a bedpost is no king of mine. My tutor Aristotle would find his moral smaller than his sails. Give me Achilles, who chose a short life of glory over a long one of peace - that is a story worth two hundred fifty million drachmas.

I know something of long marches home after victory: Gaul, Britain, the Nile, all submitted, and I returned to find my own house infested with schemers. Matt Damon’s Odysseus will wade through monsters and whirlpools, but the true test is whether his wife has kept the suitors at bay with a weaving trick - I admire that woman. Nolan has spent a quarter of a billion sesterces to tell a tale I lived for a tenth the cost, and I would have marched the entire 7th Legion into the theater just to watch.

This Nolan - he builds a fleet for a king's homecoming, spends gold enough to feed Alexandria for a year, and I hear he sets his camera on the very isle of Calypso? Clever. He knows what I knew: a story of a man's longing for his bed and his woman, wrapped in monsters and gods, sells better than any royal decree. He should cast me as Penelope - I would have woven that shroud by day and unravelled every Roman's patience by night.

He spends a quarter of a billion sesterces on a single vision, and I am impressed. Not by the extravagance - I built Rome of marble, and that cost more - but by the discipline. To translate Homer's wandering into a strict, linear story, trimmed of excess, is to show the same virtus that made me stop the civil wars. Yet I ask: does Nolan understand that the real Odysseus is not the hero but the state? A king who abandons his post for ten years invites usurpers. The true lesson is that order must be restored swiftly, or the house falls.

A chieftain who cannot return to his own yurt after war? Either his men are weak, or his enemies are cunning. Odysseus spent ten years on the sea when he could have taken the fastest horses and ridden across the land. But this Nolan - he commands armies of craftsmen, spends treasure like a Khan, and makes a story that will be told across many hearths. I respect the scale, the loyalty of his clan, and the discipline. Let him come to my steppe; we would understand each other.

Two hundred and fifty million dollars? For a film about a Greek king who takes ten years to go home? I could have conquered Europe twice for that sum. But I respect the ambition - this Nolan has the audacity of a general who knows that a grand spectacle conquers the imagination. If he had put that budget into cannons and roads, he might have built an empire that lasts. Still, I will watch it from my exile, and note how he handles the siege of Troy.

The tale of a commander who endures hardship to return to his hearth and his duty is one that resonates with all who have served their country. Yet I would caution against too much admiration for cunning alone; a general must also be a man of honor, lest his victory come at the cost of his soul. Let us hope this film remembers that character is the true anchor.

A two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar mirror held up to the soul's own tribulation. Penelope's loom, weaving by day and unraveling by night, reminds me of the slow, patient work of setting a nation right - a thread pulled through the needle's eye, one stitch, one vote, one freedman at a time. I fear the suitors in our own house are not all slain, only sleeping.

This film-maker has set out on an odyssey of his own - one of immense cost and colossal ambition, against sceptics and market storms. He has marshaled a fleet of actors and a technology as demanding as any wartime factory. I salute the nerve. For what is a ten-year war and a voyage home but a parable of the will to endure? Let the naysayers mutter; the box office will be his Ithaca.

A journey of ten years by violence and cunning, slaughtering suitors in a river of blood - this is not heroism, but a lesson in how the sword breeds only more swords. True strength lies in the path Odysseus might have taken: facing Polyphemus with a plea for hospitality, winning Penelope back by truth and patience, not by the bow that fells a hundred men.

An epic of a man who must pass through the 'valley of the shadow of death,' facing Cyclopean oppression and the lotus of forgetfulness that tempts him to abandon his quest. But the true Ithaca is not a throne or a bed - it is the beloved community, won not by the sword that slays the suitors, but by the love that breaks the cycle of vengeance. Odysseus returns as a warrior; I pray he learns to return as a peacemaker.

I watch a man take a very old story of a king yearning for home and make it speak to a world of screens and strangers. Nolan reminds us that no matter how far we wander - through wars, through wonders, through the very tricks of time - we all seek a place of belonging and the faces that wait there. This is a vision of endurance, and it deserves a long run.

Nolan's 'Odyssey' is a symptom of the very exhaustion it pretends to celebrate - a rootless, commercial civilization retelling a heroic epic while it abandons the blood and soil that made heroes possible. The Greeks knew that Odysseus was a cunning fighter for his folk, not a cosmopolitan wanderer. This film is just another distraction manufactured by the same global forces that destroyed the Volk.

An expensive film about a wandering king? Interesting - but the only journeys that matter are the ones that serve the state. Does this 'Odyssey' show the collective triumph of the people over the parasites and the foreigners? No? Then it is a waste of resources that could have been used to educate the masses in dialectical materialism. A hero does not wander; he marches.

Nolan's 'Odyssey' is a perfect bourgeois commodity - a massive concentration of capital wrapped in the tattered flag of an ancient epic. It invites the masses to dream of a king's return while their own real odysseys of exploitation go unremarked. The film should be showing the long journey of the proletariat toward revolution, not the wanderings of a monarchist pirate. History is not a myth; it is a class struggle.

This Nolan fellow conjures a king who wanders ten years through storms and monsters to reach his hearth - but does he give the common oarsman a single line of his own? Odysseus is the landlord of Ithaca, and the poet sings only of his trials. Where is the song of the slave who rows through the same gale, the woman who weaves and unweaves under the master's roof? A million such journeys are made every day in China, unseen, un-filmed. Let Nolan point his great glass eye at them, and then we shall see a true epic.

A moving picture of a wandering king, shot entirely upon a new and enormous film? I confess I find the size of the undertaking rather impressive - so like the grand exhibitions my beloved Albert used to plan. But I trust the portrayal of Queen Penelope is suitably dignified and pure. A wife who waits twenty years, fending off suitors with her needle and her wits - that is the very image of domestic virtue and royal duty. I should like to know whether the actor playing Odysseus wears his beard properly. Nothing is so distracting as a theatrical whisker that looks as though it might fall off.

I understand Mr Nolan's film has been made with great technical care and has brought many people together in its making. That seems to me a worthy achievement in itself. The story of a long journey home, and of a faithful spouse waiting through many years, is one that has endured for centuries, and I imagine it will continue to speak to audiences today. Duty, patience, and the joy of return - these are constants one can rely upon, whatever the age.

So this Nolan has spent silver enough to raise a cathedral and feed a legion for a year, all to tell of a Greek king who cannot find his own hall? I have led armies from the Ebro to the Elbe; I know what a true journey is - not ten years of drifting past one-eyed shepherds and singing witches, but a swift march of Christian warriors to bring the Word and the sword to the heathen. This Odysseus spent more time whining on beaches than conquering. A king who cannot command the winds is no king at all. Let Nolan come to Aachen; I will show him what a real story looks like.

I have heard of this film of a wandering king. But I did not need a costly picture to teach me about voices and visions and the way they send you on a path that seems madness to the wise. My own voices told me to go to the Dauphin, to raise the siege of Orléans, to see Charles crowned at Reims. And I went. That is the whole of it - not ten years of drifting, but three days of riding. This Odysseus listens to nymphs and witches; I listened only to Saint Catherine and Saint Michael. I do not know which is the truer guide, but I know which one never lied to me.

A film of a wandering king, shot on plate-sized film at a cost that would refit half my navy! I am told it lasts the better part of three hours. I have sat through fewer sermons on less. Still, this Nolan has done something clever: he has taken a Greek tale - a story of a man who cannot steer straight - and turned it into a spectacle of smoke and monsters. There is a lesson there for any prince: make your wanderings look like destiny, and your delays like design. I myself never had ten years to spare; I kept my suitors guessing with a mere forty-four years of virgin queenhood.

I read Homer in the original Greek as a young princess in Zerbst, and I found Odysseus an amusing rascal - but a poor administrator. Ten years to reach an island he could have sailed to in a week? He would never have lasted a month in my Imperial Cabinet. This Nolan, I am told, has spent a fortune on special effects - cyclopes, sirens, whirlpools - but has he shown how Odysseus reorganized the Ithacan treasury after his return? No? Then it is merely a fairy tale for the masses. If I were to commission an epic, it would be of Peter the Great building St Petersburg out of a swamp - that is a story of will, not whim.

I have heard that this Nolan has made a great moving picture of a king who wanders far from his home and meets many strange peoples. This pleases me, for it shows that even the Greeks - who are not my subjects - understand that a ruler must learn the customs of many lands before he can rule them justly. But I wonder: this Odysseus, when he finally reaches his house, does he offer peace to the suitors? Or does he slay them all? A king who cannot forgive a trespass against his hearth will never hold a kingdom of many tongues. In Babylon, I gave the people their gods back. That is how a king returns.

I am told this Frankish film-maker has spent a fortune to tell the story of a Greek king who fought for ten years and then wandered for ten more, all to return to a wife he had left behind. In this, I see little that is worthy of remembrance. A true warrior does not dally with witches and giants; he marches to the field of honor. When I retook Jerusalem, I did not stop to listen to sirens. I cleansed the Dome of the Rock and prayed. If this Nolan wishes to make a film that teaches men courage and faith, let him tell of the conquest of Salah ad-Din - of how a united army drove the Franks from the Holy City with justice and mercy. That is a story worth three hours.

Tell me: does this Nolan, who has spent a king's ransom on towering monsters and the wrath of the sea, think he has understood Odysseus? The man who told the Cyclops his name was 'Nobody' - now there is a fellow who knows the power of words and the limits of boasting. But I would ask the filmmaker: when you sit in that dark room watching your own creation, do you examine what it means to be human, or do you merely marvel at the size of the waves? The unexamined spectacle is not worth the admission.

The moving image of a man who sees through the cave-wall shadows of sirens and cyclops, yet still yearns only for the hearth-smoke of a wife who may be no more real than a dream - this is the very condition of the soul chained to the sensible world. Nolan’s craft, with its vast machines of light, is but a painted fire on a limestone wall. The true Odyssey is the inward voyage from opinion to the Form of the Good, a journey no film can capture.

To adapt Homer is to ask: what is the essence of Odysseus? A man of many turns, polytropos, whose arete lies in cunning and endurance, not mere muscle. Nolan, I hear, dissects time itself in his films. Does he make the journey a labyrinth of memory and fate? That would be fitting, for Odysseus's real voyage is inward - from wrath to wisdom, from the cave of Polyphemus to the hearth of Ithaca. The true subject is the nature of a soul tested, and whether a man can return to himself.

A philosopher must ask: could I will that every filmmaker - or every rational being - treat an ancient epic as raw material for a spectacle, bent to the laws of the marketplace and the appetite for novelty? The result may dazzle the senses, but the moral law requires we judge not by effect but by maxim. If this adaptation turns Odysseus into a mere vehicle for wonder, it treats the hero and his story as a means, not an end - and that is no ground for universal applause.

Nolan turns the Homeric labyrinth into a cinematic spectacle - but what does he affirm? Does he praise the hero's cunning, his will to overcome every god and monster, his refusal to be mere flotsam? Or does he sell the crowd a comfortable myth of homecoming, a sentimental reunion, a moral fable? I suspect the latter: the herd demands an ending where the wanderer sinks into the warm arms of Penelope. But the true Odyssey is the courage to never return - to become the monster one feared.

A king returns to reclaim his throne and his woman - this is the oldest bourgeois fantasy of property and patriarchy, dressed in robes and monsters. Nolan spends a fortune to distract the masses from the real odyssey: the class struggle that grinds on while a mythical hero prances. The workers who built his moving pictures will not see a penny of that $250 million, and they will queue to watch their own enslavement romanticized. History is not a homecoming; it is a revolution.

Before I can judge this film, I must doubt whether the journey it portrays is true or merely a pleasing fiction. The senses deceive, and a Cyclops may be no more than a dream. But the clear idea of a man seeking his home through perils - this I can affirm as a universal principle of rational thought. Let the spectacle be examined with a methodical eye.

A prince's education in disguise: Nolan shows how a leader must be a wolf to the Cyclops and a fox to Circe, using cunning to return to a chamber overrun with rivals. Matt Damon's Odysseus understands that a throne is kept not by love, but by a well-aimed arrow through twelve axe heads. The real lesson is in the bow string, not the applause.

Nolan has taken up Homer's tale and set it on a stage of IMAX film, which is a canvas large enough to hold a thousand lines of hexameter. The sea is a character in this play, and the monsters are but shadows of the monsters within us - Calypso is the siren of delay, the Cyclops the one-eyed appetite of the soul. Yet I wonder: does our new playwright give his Odysseus a soliloquy that pierces the heart as the old one did? A spectacle of ships and storms dazzles the eye, but the playwright's art is to make us see ourselves in the wanderer's shabby disguise.

Aye, they have made my song into a spectacle of smoke and painted shadows, with a hero whose face I do not recognize and a crew gathered from every tribe of the broad earth. But I tell you: the real Odyssey is not in the thunder of the Cyclops' cave or the whirlpool of Charybdis - it is in the salt-crusted voice of a man who, after twenty winters, still hears the loom of Penelope weaving by lamplight. Let them spend their silver on machines; the Muse still sings only of home.

Ah, a poet of the cinema who dares to sail the same wine-dark sea I traversed in spirit! But tell me: does this Nolan guide his hero through a true Inferno of cyclopes and sirens, or does he merely show us the monsters on the surface? In my Comedy, every rock and whirlpool was a sin made stone; every island a purgatorial terrace. If he does not make the voyage itself a moral geography - where each trial reveals the state of the king's soul - then he has built a beautiful ship with no helmsman.

I see a man of restless genius wrestling with an ancient, towering spirit - and that is glorious. The Greek hero and the modern director are kindred: both strive beyond safe shores, encountering monsters and temptations, to return home changed. Let the critics count coins and clock the spectacle; I ask only whether the new shapes shimmer with the old fire. A true artist never merely copies - he marries the past to his own daemon, and from that union, new life springs.

I confess I have not seen this moving picture - my bones rest in Spain, and my eyes are dim with age - but I know a man who is enchanted by a shadow-play of a journey, mistaking flickering giants for gods, windmills for Cyclopes. If this Nolan fellow has captured the long wanderings of that wily Greek king, I pray he has also remembered the wife who weaves and unweaves, for the truest odyssey is the one fought in a patient heart, not on a stormy sea.

Why do we need this spectacle? Why do we sit in the dark to watch a man struggle home, when every day our neighbor struggles for bread and we turn away? The real odyssey is the one we refuse to see: the slow journey of a peasant who carries a heavier burden than any Cyclops. Nolan has made a beautiful lie. I would rather read the village chronicle of one humble life, true and small, than all the heroes of Ilium.

This is not a tale of adventure, but of the soul's torment in a world that has forgotten God. Odysseus is every man who wanders through suffering, who meets monsters and enchantresses only to find the greatest battle within his own heart. I see in Nolan's lens a desperate longing for meaning, but does he recognize that only through suffering and faith can the soul be redeemed? That is the true odyssey, and it is never filmed.

A gentleman of the cinema, so enamored of his own intricate contrivance, has spent $250 million to prove that a husband's rashness and a wife's constancy still make a tolerable tale. I am pleased that the suitors meet their end - they were so dreadfully ill-bred - but I suspect the film, like its hero, would benefit from a shorter voyage and a sharper wit.

Why, it is a tale of a weary wanderer, a man clawing his way home through a fog of enchantments and monsters - yet mark me, the real perils are not the Cyclops or the Sirens, but the wasteful, idle squandering of gold and time on a single man's homecoming while the common folk of Ithaca, had they a fraction of that treasure, might have warmed a thousand hearths! The poor, freezing beggar at the palace gate sees the hero's triumph only as a spoonful of porridge denied him.

A long-winded fellow sails around dodging one-eyed shepherds and ladies who turn men into pigs, all to get back to a wife who's been knitting the same shroud for three years - and we're supposed to cheer? If that yarn took as long to unfold as Odysseus's voyage, I'd have time to write a shorter book myself. The only miracle is that Matt Damon's beard doesn't steal the whole picture.

A man's job: get back to the woman and the boy, after ten years of lies and killing. No hymns, no gods - just the sea, the wine-dark sea, and the will to hold the tiller when the mast splinters. The Cyclops is a loud drunk; the Sirens are a cheap song. What matters is the slow cattle on Thrinacia, and the stench of suitors' blood on the stones at dawn. It is a true story, if you strip the poetry.

I would have liked to be there when he planned the Sirens - how did he make their song visible? The human ear perceives harmony through the air, but to show it on film one must paint the sea and the rocks in such a way that the very light carries danger. This Nolan, I think, is a man who studies waves as I did: he must have drawn a hundred sketches of the whirlpool Charybdis before he let his carpenters build it. The eye that sees the physics of the foam is the same eye that beholds the beauty of the monster.

They have carved a man from light and shadow on a sheet of linen, with a budget that could gild the dome of Saint Peter’s, yet the true labor is hidden in the grain of the film, as the true David was hidden in the marble. Nolan’s Odyssey is but a fresco on running water - it will fade. But if he has freed the hero from the stone of the screen, if he has made Odysseus’s longing leap through the eye and into the gut, then he has done what I did with my chisel, and I would kiss his hand.

I have seen the posters - the sea is a swirl of indigo and amber, like a night I once painted from my window in Arles. That is good. The real Odyssey is not the plot but the light on the waves, the ache in Penelope's hands as she weaves, the yellow of the sun at Ithaca. Nolan must not only tell the story; he must let us feel the heat of the Trojan plain and the salt on Odysseus's lips. I would give my left ear to paint the storm scene - a chaos of brushstrokes, each one a cry.

Nolan? He's a scavenger with an IMAX hammer, smashing Homer into fragments and reassembling the shards as his own mirror. I respect that - art is theft and revolution. But tell me: does he break the old mask to find a new face, or does he just polish the same bronze? The Cyclops, the Sirens - they're nothing if not reinvented. If he painted the minotaur in a labyrinth of time-folds, I'd bow. If he merely sets the epic straight, he bores me.

That London premiere under a gray July sky - I would have set up my easel on the Embankment to catch the pearly light on the faces of the crowd. But this film? It is a painting of a man who longs for home, yet every frame is a fixed thing, a dead butterfly pinned under glass. Where is the shimmer of the sea at dawn, the violet shadow on a cave wall as a giant stirs? Nolan has given us a story, but he forgot the weather on Odysseus's skin.

I see a canvas brimming with figures and spectacle, but the true story lies in the crease of a brow, the weight of a hand left empty. Nolan has captured the vast sea and the monsters, yet where is the quiet torment of a man who cannot rest, the slow fading of hope in Penelope's loom? That is the odyssey I would paint.

A man journeys through a world of monsters and enchantments, but what of the woman who waits, weaving and unweaving her grief? I would paint the wounds of Penelope: her empty bed, her stubborn hope, the thorns she wears like a crown. Nolan should have given her a voice; a true odyssey is not a man's solo but the raw, bleeding tapestry of all who love and lose.

A spectacle lasting three hours? That is longer than my 'Marriage of Figaro' and I doubt it has a single aria! But I am told the film has a score that thunders like Poseidon's bassoon - I would give a year's Kapellmeister salary to hear how he scored the Sirens' song. They say he uses sound in a labyrinth, where time folds back on itself - that is the true music. A film without a melody in its soul is just a painted ship on a painted ocean.

Two hundred and fifty million dollars to shoot a sailor’s wanderings on a strip of film the width of my forearm - this is the music of our age, loud and grand, but does it sing of the soul’s struggle? I went deaf and still heard the Ninth; Nolan must make his Cyclops roar in silence, and his Sirens whisper the truth that no special effect can drown. If his hero returns only to a soft bed and a faithful wife, he has missed the tragedy; let him instead go blind on the sea, seeking not Ithaca but the sublime.

A journey of twelve thousand bars, if one were to score it properly. Odysseus's wanderings are a fugue: each island a new voice entering - Circe a tempestuous allegro, the Sirens a dissonant chorale. The return to Penelope must be the final resolution, a perfect cadence after all the modulations through strange keys. Nolan, if he is wise, will let the editing follow the laws of counterpoint: each cut a contrapuntal entry, every scene in proportion to the whole, as Bach wrote for the glory of God.

Well, thank you kindly. Nolan's bringing that old story to the big screen - y'know, the one about a man trying to get home to his lady, fighting all kinds of monsters along the way. That's a story I know: the struggle, the longing, the love that keeps you going. With Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, it's bound to have heart. I'd say grab some popcorn, turn off the lights, and let that beautiful music and picture carry you. A good story is a good story, whether it's sung in Greek or shot on film.

Heal the world, make it a better place… and this man, Nolan, he tries to heal an ancient wound with drums and shadows. But an odyssey is not about the monsters outside; it is about the child inside who never stops believing. I hope, in that big screen, there is a moment of silence - a beat where the music stops and we feel the ache of a man who just wants to hold his wife. That is the only journey that matters.

It's like one long, mad kaleidoscope of gods and monsters, but we reckon the real trip is inside that bloke's head. All those time tricks and backward clocks - Nolan's been doing his own odyssey for years. We'd love to hear the soundtrack; bet it's a bit of a noisy trip.

A song that's been sung before, in a different key. The blind poet's lyre got rewired for a three-hour IMAX reverb. Nolan's out on the road, chasing the same wandering note across a sea of film stock, trying to find a way home that's never home. It's like painting a sunset with a camera the size of a tombstone.

I've written enough songs about waiting for someone to come back, and enough about fighting through monsters to get to the one you love. So I get it - Penelope weaving and unweaving, Odysseus lying his way home. But the real story here is the guy behind the camera who took a three-thousand-year-old poem and said, 'No, I'm going to make this feel like it happened to me.' That's the kind of ownership I respect - turning someone else's myth into your own confession.

This Nolan has sailed across a sea of light and shadow to reach a shore that Homer himself never charted. I spent years persuading kings that the world was round and the Indies lay westward; this man persuades them to spend two hundred fifty million pieces of eight on a dream of a wandering king. His journey is no less bold than mine, though his ships are cameras and his crew are actors. I bless him that he follows the setting sun into the unknown, as I did, seeking not gold alone but a story worthy of the voyage.

I have seen the Great Khan’s palace roofed with gold and the paper money of Cathay, but never a moving picture of a Greek king’s voyage shot on a film as wide as a horse’s back - this Nolan is a merchant of wonders who has spent the ransom of a province to bring the Cyclops and Sirens to every city in the West. I would trade my whole account of the Spice Route for a day in his workshop, watching how he conjures a whirlpool from a machine and a goddess from a mirror.

A voyage of ten years in a single tale? I made one in three, and lost four ships and my own life on a beach in Mactan. This Nolan spends two hundred and fifty thousand pieces of eight on his fleet, while I begged kings for five ships. But he has the right instinct: to chase a horizon that everyone calls a myth. Odysseus saw strange stars and women who turn men to swine - I saw penguins and a strait of fire at the world's bottom. The true glory is not in arriving home, but in the charting of the unknown.

A journey of ten years, across an unknown sea, against impossible odds - that is exploration. Odysseus had no map, no ground control, no abort mode. His return depended on cunning, crew, and the gods' whims. Nolan's craft is similar: a human team pushing the edge of what film technology can do, on a voyage that could fail. I admire the engineering discipline and the willingness to risk. The real story is not the hero alone, but the thousands who built the vessel and trusted the path.

I would have liked to fly alongside Odysseus, buzz his little ship and wave. But I wonder: did Nolan let Penelope climb into the cockpit? A woman who waits twenty years is no more heroic than one who flies into a storm - yet we only give the man a film. Next time, let her take the stick. The sky is wide enough for both.

I have seen our Earth from above, a blue orb without borders, and I know the longing for home that drives a man across black seas. This film is a great engine of imagination, but the true odyssey is the one we all share - the journey of humanity beyond its cradle. Perhaps Odysseus would have made a fine cosmonaut.

The Odyssey is one of the greatest stories ever told - it's about a man who will not give up, who faces every obstacle, who says no to distraction and yes to his purpose. Nolan has taken that and built a machine of time and image that pulls you into the journey. That's what we did at Apple: we made things that felt inevitable, like they had always existed but no one had thought to build them. He's using film the way we used silicon - to make you forget the tool and feel the story. It's not about the budget; it's about the vision. He's saying no to the easy shot, yes to the impossible one.

A $250 million IMAX film shot on 70mm film - that’s a lot of chemical photography in an age of digital sensors, but the real question is whether Nolan optimized for photon count or story latency. If Odysseus had used a first-principles approach, he would have built a carbon-fiber raft with a Starship guidance system and circumnavigated the Mediterranean in a week instead of ten years. The film will be visually spectacular, but the true epic is humanity ignoring the obvious engineering solutions to domestic drama.

Oh, honey, this is about so much more than a man trying to get home. It's about the journey we all take - the one where you face your own monsters, your own temptations, and then you have to figure out how to show up for the people who've been waiting for you. Nolan, I believe, understands that the real story is Penelope. She's the one who had to weave and unweave, keeping faith alive in the dark. That woman's resilience? That's what I want to talk about on my show.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a Cyclops? Nolan took a Greek legend and made it his own kingdom. I know about long journeys and tough fights - I danced with Liston, I floated with Foreman. Odysseus was the greatest of all time in his day, outsmarting monsters and waiting for his woman. But I gotta ask: did he use rope-a-dope on the Sirens? I'm the king of talk, but this film better show some soul - not just fancy cameras and big waves. Homer told truth; Nolan better respect it.

Ah, my friend, this Odysseus - he is like a player who dribbles past every defender, through Scylla and Charybdis, and still he fears he will miss the goal of home. But the true beauty of the game is that no man scores alone. Penelope is his best teammate; she stays on the field, weaving the net that catches him. Nolan should have given her more possession of the ball.

It's a grand, imaginative voyage, a blend of ancient myth and modern magic that can thrill families huddled together in a darkened theater. I always believed a story could take you anywhere if you just dared to dream it, and Nolan has pulled out all the stops to make those dreams feel real. That's the kind of wonder that never gets old.