All 7 Movies Where Matt Damon Tries To Get Home, Ranked

Largely thanks to The Odyssey, there’s been a realization that “Matt Damon tries to get home” is a weird sort of sub-genre. Maybe people noticed before The Odyssey, but it’s the kind of observation/joke that’s really taken off because of The Odyssey also being a movie that’s really taken off, as one of the more discussed, popular, and acclaimed movies of 2025 so far (at the time of writing, the year is a bit over half-done).

The Odyssey is sort of the ultimate movie about getting home, and it has to appear later here… but where? There are about half a dozen other movies where the main plot (either overall, or concerning Matt Damon’s character, provided he is a prominent character) revolves around Damon trying to get home. There are different circumstances, genres, and places called home, of course, but a bunch of movies can amusingly be categorized in this way. And all the “Matt Damon tries to get home” movies are ranked below, starting with the pretty decent and ending with the pretty great.

7

‘All the Pretty Horses’ (2000)

Image via Miramax Films

The most obscure movie here, All the Pretty Horses is based on a Cormac McCarthy story, though one that’s not quite as heavy-going as the likes of Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country for Old Men. If you look up the plot synopsis on Letterboxd, it states that All the Pretty Horses is about a man named John Grady who “finds himself without a home,” so, there you go. And he does go on a journey.

Specifically, he goes south of the border, and things do progressively go wrong for him in a way that makes him feel like he needs a home, even if he doesn’t have a traditional one to return to. Maybe it’s a bit more of an offbeat “Matt Damon lost” sort of movie, and it’s not as good as the half-dozen that are about to be mentioned, but it still deserves at least a half-hearted shout-out/acknowledgment here.

6

‘Gerry’ (2002)

Image via THINKFilm

Well, okay, Gerry is pretty obscure, too, alongside All the Pretty Horses. Gerry might well have an extra sense of infamy attached to it, just because it’s particularly aggressive as an arthouse film, and one of the more despair-filled “adventure” movies of all time, too. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck star in it, both playing men named Gerry who get very lost in the desert, and then struggle to find their way home.

It stands out against The Odyssey for being anything but epic, since Gerry has some pretty repetitive locations, and then it all plays out with just two main characters the whole time. It has a similar premise, in that people get lost and they want to return to a place where they’re comfortable, but the execution is entirely different. Look, Gerry is a slow movie, but it definitely has more than a few things to offer if you’re willing to sit down and be patient with it.

5

‘Dogma’ (1999)

Image via Miramax

Dogma stands out among the other Kevin Smith movies of the 1990s and the 2000s, being from a time before he made an odd (but sort of/weirdly effective) transition to horror in the first half of the 2010s. Dogma does have Jay and Silent Bob, and takes place in the View Askewniverse, but it’s not just a comedy the way his films like Clerks, Mallrats, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back all were.

It’s still a comedy, and still funny, but Dogma also works as a fantasy/adventure movie about two fallen angels trying to find their way back to Heaven, and one of them’s played by Matt Damon (the other by Ben Affleck). There’s a very strong supporting cast here, and it does something interesting with the whole “Damon trying to go home” thing, since “home” is Heaven and Damon’s character technically isn’t a human.

4

‘The Martian’ (2015)

Based on the well-regarded sci-fi novel of the same name, The Martian is quintessential, as far as “Matt Damon going home” movies are concerned. In this one, he plays an astronaut stranded on Mars by himself, and is considered dead by those back on Earth. But he perseveres and comes up with ways to survive, all the while figuring out a method with which to contact those back on Earth to tell them he’s not dead and stuff.

Earth is very much the place he wants to return to, unsurprisingly. The Martian is about that exactly, all for close to 2.5 hours. It’s pretty entertaining, and also stands as a good showcase for Matt Damon’s ability to carry a movie on his own (while there are other characters here, the isolation Damon’s protagonist has to deal with means he doesn’t really get to interact with them the same way all those other characters back on Earth get to interact with each other).

3

‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998)

Image via DreamWorks Pictures

While Matt Damon’s not the main character in Saving Private Ryan, he is the titular one, so he needs saving, obviously, so he can be sent home safely. His brothers have all died during World War II, so the rescuing of Private Ryan is seen as a merciful and unambiguously heroic act for a group of U.S. troops to carry out, after they’ve participated in the Normandy landings, with that set piece memorably dominating much of the film’s opening act.

Damon’s good here, for the fairly limited screen time he has, and the movie is, overall, quite clearly a classic, too. Saving Private Ryan is the first big movie that sees Damon playing someone who has to get home, and then it’s also one of his first big movies more generally speaking, coming out just one year on from star-making (or star-shaping?) roles in Good Will Hunting and The Rainmaker.

2

‘Interstellar’ (2014)

Image via Paramount Pictures

Of the Christopher Nolan movies that Matt Damon has starred in, one of them very much isn’t a “gotta get home” sort of story, because it’s Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer is a fairly dreary (but also very good) historical war/courtroom drama-type film. Damon’s first role in a Nolan movie came a bit earlier, in Interstellar, and this one can justifiably be called a “get Matt Damon home” movie, but with a bit of a twist.

He plays a character who shows up quite late in the film, to the point that Matt Damon even being in Interstellar was quite the surprise when the movie first came out. His character is also not exactly who you might expect, and that side of the film can still be surprising, all these years later, if you’ve somehow never seen Interstellar. If that’s you, then you really should see Interstellar. It’s pretty great.

1

‘The Odyssey’ (2026)

Image via Universal Pictures

It got mentioned all the way back in the introduction, so there isn’t really a surprise here: The Odyssey. This is based on a foundational text that’s so old it was originally spread and told orally, rather than by books (or the written word) in the traditional/expected sense. It is about a man named Odysseus who, after taking part in the Trojan War, has to find his way back to Ithaca (where he’s king), but finds that much easier said than done.

He does indeed go through quite the odyssey, and some of it’s pretty alarming and intense, too (albeit not gratuitously so). The Odyssey is a phenomenal piece of epic filmmaking, and time will tell whether it continues to earn the #1 spot here, but for now, it feels like the best of the best “Matt Damon getting home” movies. And, for now, there’s potentially even an argument to be made that it’s the best film Matt Damon has ever been in, period.

The Odyssey

Release Date

July 15, 2026

Runtime

173 minutes