5 Greek Mythology Films That Best Capture the Epic Scale of Nolan’s The Odyssey

Movies about Greek mythology have always been about the gap between how far a hero can travel and how much of a home a hero can make it back to, and the upcoming The Odyssey, a $250 million act of faith, is the first American studio film in quite a while bold enough to explore that gap instead of filling it with non-stop action sequences. What Christopher Nolan wanted, in his own words, was “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people” (via LA Times). This is the language of a director admitting that he’s less interested in Homer’s poetry than in Homer’s wounds, the twenty years it takes for a hero to lose while the people who love him age without him.

Only a handful of Greek mythology adaptations in sixty years have understood that the monsters were always the least of it, like The Odyssey. Here are the five that got closest. The movies are ranked from worst to best, but even the “worst” is quite successful in capturing the appeal of Greek mythology. The order is according to how much importance they give to the consequences of mortality for their characters, such as loss, grief, and aging, rather than to gods and monsters as mere spectacle.

5 Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

Directed by the helmer of the first two Harry Potter movies, Christopher Columbus, this adaptation fits into the genre in the same way that a case study fits into a diagnosis. It is useful mainly for what it reveals about the wound it doesn’t understand it’s touching. The Lightning Thief, despite Medusa as a suburban Gorgon motif and its relocation of Mount Olympus to the Empire State Building as a corporate skyscraper, is essentially a tale of the child of a mortal woman and an absent godfather. Columbus is normally adept at balancing spectacle with sentiment and tales of lonely protagonists (usually male) being up to no good. But he is not concerned with that abandonment here beyond the setup.

This is the kind of failure one should reflect on before watching Nolan’s movie, since Nolan is essentially doing the opposite thing. Whereas Columbus reduced the problem of the father to mere narrative devices, Nolan seems to base his whole movie on the painful slowness of Odysseus’ absence and the fact that Telemachus (here portrayed by Tom Holland) has to become a man in the absence of any model of what a man is. The Lightning Thief believed the myth was about monsters. It was not.

It is ranked lowest because, despite its blockbuster flourishes, it ultimately disappoints as a depiction of Greek mythology. Decent as entertainment, a disappointment as anything more. Still, it is a fairly fine alternative to watch before The Odyssey releases. The Disney+ series on the same series of books is much better.

4 Immortals (2011)

What Tarsem Singh knows about Greek mythology that very few filmmakers have ever cared to figure out is the fact that the gods were never meant to be comforting in any way. Together with cinematographer Brendan Galvin, he has created the battle of Theseus (Henry Cavill) against Hyperion in a series of scenes drawn directly from Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, human beings illuminated as martyrs because that is essentially what they are — mortal men sacrificed on the altar of a struggle between two sides unconcerned about whether they live or die. This is perhaps the scariest portrayal of Olympus captured on film, gods presented as cosmic bureaucrats intervening solely to protect their own interests.

Where Immortals loses itself is in the connective tissue. There was too much focus on the visual aspects, to the extent that even Cavill struggled with the physical rigors of playing Theseus, a lead movie character shirtless throughout. Singh’s images are staggering in isolation and incoherent in sequence. Myth is reorganized in the service of the next painterly composition rather than the other way around. Nolan’s gamble, if the reactions out of The Odyssey‘s London premiere are to be trusted, is that structural clarity and visual maximalism aren’t actually in conflict, that you can build something as beautiful as Immortals without sacrificing the thing Singh couldn’t hold onto, which is the sense that one thing is happening because the last thing happened. That is why it is ranked 4th.

3 Hercules (1997)

Disney’s Hercules is the most theologically sound Greek mythology movie ever made in Hollywood. When I say that, I have to repeat myself, because no one takes me seriously the first time. The choice to portray the Muses as a Greek chorus reborn as a gospel choir is not a joke; it is a true device of ancient theater slipped into a movie musical by someone on the production team who knows what a chorus does.

And the reason it’s ranked third is that, even though it’s not technically about Nolan’s The Odyssey, it is literally a nostos film in the guise of a bildungsroman. It doesn’t have anything to do with becoming a hero. It has to do with a son trying to find his place in a legacy he never sought out, and that’s the whole premise of the Telemachus half of Homer’s story: the boy who had to come to terms with a presence he didn’t want and couldn’t change. And Disney hid all of that pain beneath snappy dialogue and a Hades that speaks like a Hollywood producer. But it’s all still there beneath the surface.

2 Clash of the Titans (1981)

We are, of course, talking about the original Clash of the Titans as the remake… well, the less said about it, the better. It seems there is a certain way of describing Ray Harryhausen’s final movie as a nostalgic, outdated technique in the face of CGI invasion, but this approach fails to realize that it is the very effort put into each frame that makes Clash of the Titans a masterpiece worth watching over again. The very motion of Medusa as she is approaching her temple, shot by shot and taking several months of somebody’s hard work to make just a few minutes of action on the screen, is something that no modern rendering can replicate. You can feel a human hand insisting that this monster be believed in, one photograph at a time.

This obsessiveness is the only thing Clash of the Titans truly has in common with Nolan’s project. Different techniques, same obsession, the inability to allow the machine to do the work that only pain and perseverance can do. Nolan filming with his own IMAX 65mm camera designed exclusively for this film and Harryhausen painstakingly animating one frame after another in his garage are, ultimately, two versions of the same claim, which says that the myth must be made in the difficult way because it is the only way it will leave its mark. It ranks 2nd because it just falls short of the movie at the top.

1 Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Every other film on this list is, in one way or another, an argument for why Jason and the Argonauts still wins. Don Chaffey’s film appreciates, unlike virtually anything since, that Greek epics are not a single quest leading up to a climactic conclusion, but journeys that are episodic and digressive from one landfall to the next. Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation of the skeleton army represents the pinnacle of practical effects in this genre, but what makes this film a classic is not the skeletons themselves. It’s that Chaffey never once mistakes the skeletons for the point.

That’s the thing every subsequent adaptation, Immortals included, forgot how to do, and it’s the thing Nolan’s reported structure, a journey rendered in fragments and detours rather than compressed into a single linear push toward home, suggests he remembers. Jason and the Argonauts demonstrated more than half a century ago that the horror of the myth wasn’t the monster ahead of you. It was the time it took to get back and what would be left of you by the time you got there. If Nolan knows that, and all his statements on the film seem to suggest that he does (even if The Odyssey becomes his least-Nolan movie), then this film will be one of the finest Greek mythology films. It will also be the first one in decades that knows why the genre even exists. For now, this remains the best Greek mythology movie. But The Odyssey may change that.

Here are all the 5 movies, summarized:

#TitleDirectorPremiseIMDbRotten Tomatoes

5	Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)	Chris Columbus	A teenager discovers he is the son of Poseidon and embarks on a quest to recover Zeus’ stolen lightning bolt to prevent a war among the Greek gods.	5.9/10	48% | 53%
4	Immortals (2011)	Tarsem Singh	Theseus must unite with the gods to stop the ruthless King Hyperion from unleashing the Titans and destroying humanity.	6.0/10	50% |49%
3	Hercules (1997)	Ron Clements & John Musker	The son of Zeus strives to become a true hero and reclaim his place on Mount Olympus while battling Hades’ schemes.	7.3/10	83% | 76%
2	Clash of the Titans (1981)	Desmond Davis	Perseus undertakes a perilous quest to defeat Medusa and save Princess Andromeda with help from the gods.	6.9/10	65% | 70%
1	Jason and the Argonauts (1963)	Don Chaffey	Jason leads the Argonauts on a legendary voyage to recover the Golden Fleece, facing mythical creatures and impossible trials.	7.3/10	89% | 79%

Which Greek mythology film do you think comes closest to capturing the scale and the spirit of The Odyssey? Let us know your pick in the comments.

The Odyssey releases in US theaters on July 17, 2026.