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With The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan spent a reported $250 million and every available inch of IMAX 70mm film to drag Homer into the multiplex. But, before a single frame rolled, Nolan did the thing every serious director does with a star-studded cast and a story burdened by big expectations: he handed out homework. Three films, specifically, that he wanted stars like Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Zendaya to sit with before they picked up a spear.
The Odyssey is dense with the influence of other films, and Nolan has been unusually open about where some of it comes from. Those three assigned titles are the ones he’s shared on record. Look closely, and you can find plenty more: David Lean‘s boundless deserts, the sword-and-sandal epics that made a Greek myth bankable again, one of the director’s own recent blockbusters, even a monster movie still warm from a Netflix-backed Oscar run. The list of must-watch movies below traces all of it, starting with the three films Nolan named himself.
‘Andrei Rublev’ (1966)
Andrei Tarkovsky‘s three-hour-plus film, Andrei Rublev, follows a medieval icon painter drifting through a Russia that’s coming apart at the seams. It takes two decades, famine, and a brutal Tatar raid to set the stakes for Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn) to lose faith in his art and stop painting. But then, he watches a young man strain to cast an enormous church bell and finds his reason to begin again. It’s all shot in long, patient takes that hold on mud and faces, and Nolan screened it for his cast because of that texture.
With The Odyssey, Nolan wanted an ancient world with weight to it, where the light and the faces belong to the era and not to a green screen. Odysseus (Damon), like Rublev, is a man ground down by cruelty and by the sheer length of his own road, and the film needs you to believe he has lived through every brutal year of it.
‘Ran’ (1985)
With Ran, Akira Kurosawa took King Lear to feudal Japan and set it on fire. An aging warlord hands his kingdom to his sons and then watches his family and his country tear each other apart, in some of the largest and most punishing battle scenes ever filmed. The armies march in blocks of pure color, and the wind moves through everything, bending grass and banners and smoke. Nolan zeroed in on exactly that, praising the movie’s use of “landscape” and the “banners flapping in the wind.”
It’s a natural fit. Nolan builds his films out of real places at real scale, and The Odyssey is about a hero at the mercy of forces far larger than himself. Kurosawa supplies the template for how to translate that on-screen.
‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ (1988)
Martin Scorsese‘s sweaty, doubt-ridden, once-scandalous take on Jesus (a raw Willem Dafoe) tells a familiar myth from the inside out, as the story of a man arguing with his own destiny. It was protested and picketed on release. It’s also one of the boldest things Scorsese ever made. Nolan called it “a fresh and accessible window into history” and admitted the technical work Scorsese was doing struck him as “quite inspiring.”
The connection isn’t hard to trace. Odysseus is a hero who lies, cheats, and stalls his way home, and Scorsese’s blueprint for a flawed legend given a human pulse is key to making The Odyssey‘s sheer density palatable.
‘Interstellar’ (2014)
Sometimes the biggest influence on a Nolan movie is another Nolan movie. Interstellar sends a father into space to save the human race and loses him in time, so that every hour out there costs him years with the children he left on Earth. The whole movie yearns for a homecoming that always feels heartbreakingly out of reach.
Swap the wormhole for the wine-dark sea, and you’re most of the way to The Odyssey. Both follow a man desperate to get back, and both let time do the cruelest work, piling up while he is powerless to stop it. Odysseus loses ten years to the gods; Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) loses decades in the span of an afternoon. Nolan has clearly been mapping this particular journey for a while.
‘Gladiator’ (2000)
“Are you not entertained?” turned out to be a rhetorical question with a very obvious answer in this Ridley Scott banger. The director dragged the sword-and-sandal epic out of the grave and stood it back on its feet with Russell Crowe playing a betrayed Roman general fighting through the blood and sand of the arena toward home… and revenge. The film became a sensation, winning Best Picture and reminding Hollywood that the ancient world could still fill a theater.
Every toga-draped blockbuster since has walked through the door Gladiator opened. Without its success, no studio would hand Nolan a quarter of a billion dollars to put a Greek myth on IMAX screens 26 years later.
‘Troy’ (2004)
This is the most obvious comparison on the list, and the one Nolan may be subtly answering. Wolfgang Petersen took The Iliad, cast Brad Pitt as an oiled, sulking Achilles, and swung for grand, star-driven spectacle. Because of that, Troy landed somewhere between genuinely stirring and faintly ridiculous.
The Odyssey picks up the very next chapter of the same story, which makes the contrast feel almost pointed. Where Troy went for beefcakes and battlefields, Nolan seems to be after the interior wear of the myth, the psychology of a man who can’t stop scheming even when scheming is what keeps him from his wife and son. It is the same source material approached from the opposite direction.
‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962)
If Nolan has a sacred text, this is it. Lean drops Peter O’Toole‘s unreadable T. E. Lawrence into a vast desert and shoots it on 70mm, until the sheer size of the landscape presses down on you in your seat. Nolan has cited it for years as the film that shaped the way he thinks about scale. In fact, the whole IMAX 70mm bet of The Odyssey comes straight from Lawrence of Arabia: set a single small figure against an overwhelming world and let the size of the image do the work.
Even the heroes at the center of these two films feel connected. Both men are magnetic and evasive, half-turned into legend but never fully known by the people who follow them. You don’t really need a reason to watch this, one of the greatest films ever made, but Nolan just gave you one anyway.
‘Spartacus’ (1960)
Stanley Kubrick’s Roman masterpiece gave us Kirk Douglas as a slave leading a doomed revolt, and the famous moment when a captured army rises one man at a time to claim his name. Spartacus is a huge, crowd-filling spectacle with a real brain behind it. It’s not the Kubrick entry most associate with Nolan’s work, but it’s the one that connects best here.
The balance between cerebral and crowd-pleasing is what The Odyssey is after. Spartacus carries weighty ideas without ever shrinking from the size of its audience, which is the same line Nolan walks, in every film really, but especially here.
‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
George Miller made two hours of near-wordless road chase with real vehicles hurled across real desert and virtually nothing faked that could instead be built and crashed for the camera. His Mad Max: Fury Road is a journey film that runs on pure motion and a myth told at full speed. Put it next to Nolan’s newest film and the fit is closer than you’d expect.
The director is a practical-effects true believer, and Fury Road is the modern peak of that faith. When The Odyssey puts its monsters and shipwrecks on screen, this is the tradition it draws from, the conviction that an audience can always feel when something on screen is tangible on set.
‘Frankenstein’ (2025)
The outlier here, and the newest by a wide margin. Guillermo del Toro finally made the film he had chased for more than a decade, with Oscar Isaac as an obsessive Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the creature he abandons. It’s a creation myth staged at full operatic scale and sent to Netflix last November. It shares nothing with Homer and everything with the moment Nolan is working in.
Frankenstein and The Odyssey arrived barely a year apart, two celebrated directors wagering enormous budgets on the idea that audiences still want an old myth told seriously, with real craft and real feeling behind it. And del Toro’s approach to his monsters — his love for them, his compassion, and his commitment to displaying their grotesque, awe-inspiring physicality — is echoed in how Nolan depicts his own mythic beasts. If The Odyssey has one clear peer in the current landscape, this is it.
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Jessica Toomer
Almontather Rassoul
