Is there a director working today who has been able to consistently match the crescendo of the last minutes of a Christopher Nolan film? Since Memento (2000) – barring Insomnia (2002), the only remake Nolan has made – the final stretch of most Nolan films could bring corpses to life.

In fact, I think one of the most crucial tricks behind his popularity, his ‘prestige’ if you may, might be his ability to finish strong. His weakest film, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), after plodding along for 164 minutes, ends with a spectacular five-minute montage tying all the loose ends of the Batman trilogy. The montage is so good, it almost made me forget what a clunky film I’d seen.

In The Odyssey, Nolan delivers his usual rousing climax, but the knockout punch comes a few scenes before. Odysseus (Matt Damon) is talking to his wife, Penelope (Anna Hathaway), for the first time in 20 years. After spurts of flashbacks about the Trojan war peppered through the 173-minute film, this is the first time Odysseus looks back on his storied invasion in the most clear-eyed manner.

He describes his ploy of hiding men inside a wooden horse, disguised as a peace-offering to the city of Troy, as a version of the ‘original sin’. Unable to breach the walls of Troy for ten years, the king of Ithaca came up with a way to deceive the Trojan army – “violating all that is sacred between human beings, defiled the house of the Gods”.

It’s a gloriously written scene, deftly performed by Damon and Hathaway (on either side of a wall through it). Nolan characterises the mythic Trojan horse as a metaphor for how distrust entered civilisation. It becomes one of the film’s core themes, and Odysseus’s monologue becomes the ‘nutgraf’ for this 2026 adaptation.

Adapted from Emily Wilson’s 2017 English translation of........

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