Matt Damon puts himself among the all-time greats with 2026’s ‘The Odyssey’
Sometimes, due to the sheer amount of content thrown at us on a daily basis, when truly wondrous art does emerge, the kind that genuinely rarely comes along, it’s important to take a moment and properly acknowledge it.
With The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan has illustrated that he is playing a completely different game than anyone else in terms of cinema, and it’s a privilege to be able to sit for a few hours every three years or so and witness it unfold.
You can talk about the Imax cameras, and the use of sound, the non-chronological editing or the sheer bloody scale of what Nolan has produced, but the truth is that what resonates most about the film is the journey of life, of love and loss and redemption and suffering and endurance. And at the heart of it is Matt Damon delivering a performance for the ages.
Again, it’s important to note these events when they happen. There are moments in cinema that transcend, when actors elevate directors and vice versa, so that the images captured are imprinted on the mind as the pinnacle of film. It happened with Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, with Al Pacino in The Godfather, with Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, and with Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.
Because of The Odyssey, and to some extent because of what he has achieved over three decades, Damon joins those ranks now. Nolan has had leading men who have achieved fine work before, of course, most recently Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, and Matthew McConaughey with Interstellar, but Damon is on a completely different level from anything he has put to film thus far.
It also isn’t a performance he would have been able to commit to before he had reached this age, before he had lived a life and understood the various physical and emotional changes men and women go through as the time ticks past over the decades. Yes, Damon’s life has no doubt been privileged; he was a Harvard graduate and he won an Oscar years before he turned 30. But you cannot convey what he achieves across 180 minutes here without an inherent understanding of the human condition.
It is utter commitment, a mastery of his craft, a desire to keep pushing what he can accomplish in his mid-50s, and most essentially, to take the audience on a journey with him, to understand his desperation, to be the focal point of a story that pre-dates The Bible and make it as thrilling and exhausting and vital as any piece of filmmaking in many years. He leaves all of himself behind in making this film. He knows what Nolan needs him to do, and he goes above and beyond it in every scene.
Damon’s performance is bookended by Anne Hathaway, who is moving into a similar realm herself, not just thanks to her work with Nolan but also with films like this year’s Mother Mary. Although their screen time together is limited, Hathaway is so devastatingly truthful in her character’s lifelong, unwavering devotion to Damon’s Odysseus that there were gasps and tears in the cinema when the pair were finally reunited.
There’s no doubt that both Damon and Hathaway should take home Oscars for their work on the film, just as Nolan will no doubt collect a customary haul. But this is the thing, it shouldn’t be seen as routine or taken for granted. The time should be taken to reflect on and appreciate what this collective is attempting to do; to push boundaries and deliver mass audiences cinema experiences that they haven’t witnessed before.
Damon signposted what a talent he is almost 30 years ago with Good Will Hunting: that is not a normal achievement for someone not long out of university, to co-write and co-star in an Academy Award-winning film that goes down as a classic. In the years since, he has put in several excellent performances, across genres, sometimes in great films, the best of which are probably Scorsese’s The Departed and The Martian, in which he showed what he could do with the passing of time as a journey.
But with The Odyssey, Damon has placed himself among the greats. It is a Kirk Douglas in Spartacus moment, a Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Images that will be replayed for generations to come, used to sum up the peak of cinema, a display of devotion to acting that in the fabricated age of AI, prompts the rawest of emotions from the viewer of empathy, love, sadness, and hope.
