Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey came out of Monday with a wave of early praise, and the first reactions point to a film that is already being treated like an event before it opens on July 17. The chatter is not just about scale. It is about whether Nolan has made something that can live up to the expectation surrounding it.
That matters now because the film has been carrying serious box office talk for months, with initial projections putting its domestic debut between $80M and $100M. Early reaction cycles can harden that kind of momentum or weaken it, and this one has mostly strengthened the case that audiences are about to get a major release rather than a routine summer title.
Joshua Rothkopf of the Los Angeles Times called the film “staggering. Earthy, ghostly, weighty, touched by humor and grandeur alike. It’s pure cinema,” and added that it felt like “a return home to the robustly entertaining action movies that cinema was invented to tell.” Phil de Semlyen, a Time Out film critic, was nearly as emphatic, writing, “Believe the hype(rbole): The Odyssey is that film,” and calling it “dense but accessible.” Peter Bradshaw of described it as “a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion and a loss of innocence.”
The awards talk arrived just as quickly. Anne Thompson of Indiewire said Matt Damon could win Best Actor and called the film “The BP to beat,” a signal that the early consensus is not only about craft but about the kind of prestige run that can follow a strong summer opening. Those reactions fit a larger pattern around Nolan, whose films are now expected to arrive as both spectacle and awards conversation.
Still, the praise was not uniform in tone. David Erlich, Indiewire’s chief film critic, called the film “less despairing” than Oppenheimer, but said it was “too clunky to be S-tier Nolan, but the last act rewards the journey.” That split matters because it suggests the movie may be winning on finish and feeling while losing some points for shape and flow, which is often the difference between broad admiration and full-blooded evangelism.
The one clear conclusion from Monday’s reactions is that The Odyssey is opening with enough heat to validate the advance hype and enough scale to make $80M-$100M look plausible if the broader audience responds the way early critics did. Whether that converts into a real opening-night rush will be decided on July 17, but the first verdict is already in: Nolan has a film people feel compelled to argue about before they have even bought a ticket.
