Long before there were DD-214s, quiet returns after long deployment, and reintegration briefs, a combat vet was trying to get home, failing repeatedly, and fighting monsters, ghosts, and his own worst instincts along the way.
We usually just call it The Odyssey.
Now Christopher Nolan is turning Homer’s Bronze Age war story into his next massive IMAX epic. After Oppenheimer and a bucket of Oscars, Nolan has wrapped production on The Odyssey, with Matt Damon playing Odysseus, the Greek commander trying to make it back to his wife and son after the Trojan War. The film, due out in July 2026, was shot entirely on IMAX film and required more than two million feet of footage over a 91-day shoot, much of it on open water.
“I’ve been out on [the sea] for the last four months,” Nolan told Empire. “We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’s ship out there on the real waves, in the real places… We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.”
That phrase — an “unmapped, uncharted world” — is a big part of why this story still hits for troops and vets. Strip away the gods and monsters, and The Odyssey is the original homecoming narrative: a warrior trying to navigate a changed world, a changed self, and a homefront that hasn’t stood still while he was gone.
The Odyssey: A Bronze Age Deployment & Homecoming Story
In Homer’s poem, Odysseus is no wide-eyed recruit. He’s a seasoned commander and the king of Ithaca, fresh from a long, brutal war at Troy. Instead of sailing home in a neat timeline, he gets stuck in a kind of ancient “forever deployment” — a 10-year odyssey of wrecked ships, bad calls, hostile shores, and supernatural threats.
Along the way, he:
- Loses shipmates, one disaster at a time.
- Makes mistakes that cost other people their lives.
- Spends years effectively stranded, wondering if he’ll ever see home again.
- Has to fight for his place when he finally walks back through the door.
Modern readers have seen a lot of things in that journey: survivor’s guilt, moral injury, the struggle to switch off “combat brain” and become a husband and father again. Homer obviously didn’t have those terms, but the emotional territory is familiar to anyone who’s tried to go from deployment tempo back to school pickup and grocery runs.
Meanwhile, on the home front, his wife Penelope and son Telemachus are living out their own part of the story: holding the house together, fighting off people who assume Odysseus is dead, and deciding how long you keep waiting for someone who might not be coming back.
If you’ve ever had to balance a uniform, a marriage, and a family calendar against deployments and TDYs, the dynamics aren’t hard to recognize.
Nolan Keeps Coming Back to War and Its Fallout
If you’re a Nolan fan, his choice of subject isn’t random. His last two big films were both about war and its consequences:
- Dunkirk turned the evacuation of British troops into a time-bending survival story.
- Oppenheimer followed the man behind the atomic bomb as he tried (and failed) to control what he’d helped create.
In talking about The Odyssey, Nolan has said Emma Thomas, his producer (and wife), called the poem “foundational” — a story that “contains all stories.” He’s described looking for “gaps in cinematic culture” and realizing that the mythological epics he grew up with, like Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion adventures, hadn’t been given the kind of “weight and credibility” a modern A-budget IMAX production could bring.
In other words, he’s not just trying to make another swords-and-sandals movie. He wants to treat this ancient war narrative with the same seriousness he brought to nuclear weapons and World War II.
For troops and vets, that’s intriguing. Nolan isn’t adapting a superhero comic this time; he’s adapting the closest thing Western literature has to a long-form story about post-war limbo.
“Real Waves, Real Places” and the Feeling of an Uncharted AO
Nolan could have shot most of The Odyssey in tanks and on soundstages. Instead, he spent months at sea, putting Damon and the rest of the cast on “real waves” in “real places” to feel how big and unpredictable the ocean actually is. He’s called the shoot “pretty primal,” and several outlets have noted that a significant chunk of the movie’s 2-million-foot film haul came from those ocean days.
Anyone who’s done serious time underway, or deployed in terrain that didn’t care about your plans, knows that feeling: the world pushing back at you. The weather doesn’t match the forecast. A mission brief that evaporates the second you hit the ground. A route that looks clean on the map and turns into something else entirely once you’re there.
Nolan has said that “embracing the physicality of the real world” changes how you tell the story, because you’re “confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.” That’s as true for a film crew on the open ocean as it is for a platoon dealing with bad roads, worse comms, and a timeline that just blew up.
If he’s successful, that physical realism won’t just be eye candy; it’ll be part of how the movie communicates what it meant for ancient sailors to push into places that, for them, really were unmapped and uncharted.
How Troops and Vets Might See Themselves in Odysseus
We won’t know exactly how Nolan handles the character until the movie drops, but the basic contours of Odysseus’s arc are already baked in by 3,000 years of storytelling.
A few pressure points that may land hard for modern viewers in uniform:
- The long tail of war. The Trojan War is “over” when The Odyssey starts, but its consequences keep hitting Odysseus for a decade. For a lot of post-9/11 vets, the idea that the deployment is done but the story isn’t will feel familiar.
- Leadership and fallout. Odysseus is smart, cunning, and brave—but he’s also prideful, and sometimes that pride gets his people killed. Anyone who’s worn stripes or bars knows what it’s like to carry the weight of decisions that went sideways.
- A home that didn’t freeze in time. When Odysseus finally gets back to Ithaca, he doesn’t walk into a preserved museum of “how things were.” His son grew up. His wife built a life of waiting and resistance. Other people moved in on his territory. That dissonance between the memory of home and reality is something a lot of military families quietly navigate.
- Trying to be more than the warrior version of yourself. In the poem, Odysseus has to do more than fight; he has to listen, disguise himself, accept help, and figure out who he is when he’s not just the guy with the spear. That question—Who am I if I’m not in the fight?—is one that echoes in a lot of transition stories.
Nolan isn’t making a documentary about post-deployment life, obviously. But he is attaching IMAX cameras and a $250 million budget to what is, at its core, a story about a warrior trying to come home in one piece.
What to Watch For When It Hits Theaters
By the time The Odyssey reaches theaters in July 2026, the hype machine will be in full burn. Matt Damon is already calling it “the best experience” of his career. Tickets for some IMAX 70mm showings went on sale a year early and started selling out within hours.
When you finally sit down to watch it—whether that’s in a giant-format theater or on a laptop later—there are a few questions worth carrying in with you as someone who’s served, or loved someone who has:
- Does this version of Odysseus feel like a real commander, with real flaws and responsibilities, or just a mythological action figure?
- Does the film take seriously the cost to the people waiting on the other end of the war—Penelope, Telemachus, the community of Ithaca?
- Does it show any space for growth, or is Odysseus simply trying to re-create his war persona back home?
Nolan has said he chose this project because he saw a gap in how myth has been treated on screen and wanted to give it real “weight and credibility.” For troops and vets, that’s an invitation: to see one of humanity’s oldest war stories not as something distant and abstract, but as part of a long continuum of people trying to survive the journey out and the journey back.
However you end up feeling about the movie itself, the underlying story still belongs to everyone who’s ever tried to get home from a fight.
