If you’ve just come out of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey still thinking about it — the scale of it, the way it commits fully to myth without ever winking at the audience, the sheer size of the thing on an IMAX screen — you’re probably wondering what else scratches that particular itch. It’s currently sitting at the top of our best movies in theatres right now list for good reason. The honest answer to “what’s next,” though, is: not much does it exactly the same way. But there are three distinct directions worth going, depending on which part of the film actually got you.
If It Was the Myth: Other Ancient Epics Worth Your Time
Nolan drew openly on the visual language of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion creature work when building The Odyssey’s world, so it’s worth going back to where that influence started.
Jason and the Argonauts (1963) — Harryhausen’s own stop-motion mythological epic, and still one of the most technically dazzling pieces of practical effects work ever put on screen. The skeleton army sequence alone is worth the price of admission, and you can draw a straight line from this film’s ambition to the visual choices Nolan made decades later.
Clash of the Titans (1981) — Another Harryhausen creature showcase, looser and pulpier than The Odyssey but sharing the same commitment to practical spectacle over shortcuts. Worth watching as a companion piece to see how far the technology, and the genre’s confidence, has come.
Troy (2004) — A more grounded, less mythological take on Homer’s world (this one draws from the Iliad rather than the Odyssey, and mostly strips out the gods), but it shares The Odyssey’s interest in treating ancient warfare with real physical weight rather than stylised spectacle. Brad Pitt’s Achilles is a genuinely committed performance in a film that takes its source material seriously.
If It Was the Scale: Other IMAX-Built Epics
Part of what makes The Odyssey work is that it was actually shot for the format it’s shown in, not just blown up afterwards. A handful of other films share that same commitment to genuinely widescreen, big-format filmmaking.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — The film every subsequent desert epic is quietly in conversation with, including The Odyssey’s own Moroccan and Western Saharan filming locations. David Lean’s use of scale — tiny figures against vast, empty landscape — is still one of the most effective visual techniques in the history of epic filmmaking, and it hasn’t dated at all.
Dune: Part Two (2024) — Denis Villeneuve’s approach shares a lot of DNA with Nolan’s here: real locations wherever possible, practical sets built at genuine scale, and a refusal to let CGI do all the heavy lifting just because it’s available. It’s the same instinct we talk about in our piece on why Jaws still holds up — restraint and practical craft tend to age a lot better than digital spectacle. If you liked how tactile The Odyssey’s world felt, this is the closest recent comparison.
Gladiator (2000) — Ridley Scott’s ancient-world epic doesn’t have the mythological creatures, but it has the same interest in spectacle grounded by genuine emotional stakes, and the Colosseum sequences remain some of the best large-scale action filmmaking of the last twenty-five years.
If It Was Nolan Himself: The Rest of His Filmography
If what really got you was Nolan’s specific sensibility — the structural ambition, the refusal to simplify, the willingness to ask an audience to keep up — his back catalogue is the obvious next stop. It’s also worth reading our breakdown of what a director actually does on set if you want to understand more about the day-to-day decisions behind a filmography like his.
Oppenheimer (2023) — His previous film, and the clearest recent example of Nolan doing enormous scale through people talking in rooms rather than spectacle for its own sake. It topped our list of the best films of the decade for exactly this reason. If The Odyssey’s quieter character scenes were what stuck with you, this is where to go next.
Interstellar (2014) — Nolan’s other big swing at myth-adjacent storytelling, this time using science rather than ancient poetry as the vehicle. Shares The Odyssey’s interest in a long, dangerous journey home and the family left waiting.
Dunkirk (2017) — His tightest, most structurally daring film, and a good example of how much Nolan can do with restraint rather than scale. If you want to see the same director working in miniature, start here.
Where to Start
If you only pick one, make it Jason and the Argonauts — it’s the direct visual ancestor of the world Nolan built, and seeing where that influence actually came from makes The Odyssey itself look even more impressive in hindsight. If you’d rather stay in Nolan’s own head, Oppenheimer is the natural next stop. And if you haven’t seen The Odyssey yet, critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes confirm it’s very much worth catching on the biggest screen you can find first.
More “if you loved this” guides are coming — sign up to the newsletter to get the next one as soon as it’s up. In the meantime, if you’re curious how directors make these kinds of visual choices in the first place, check out our breakdowns of how Wes Anderson uses colour to tell a story and the best superhero movies of all time.