Should I Take My Kid to See Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey?

The director’s take on an assigned-reading classic is not as violent as you might fear.

The Odyssey isn’t the first R-rated movie Christopher Nolan has made, but it is his first action-adventure to carry that rating. (His previous film, Oppenheimer, a historical biopic about the man responsible for the atom bomb, had decidedly adult subject matter and themes.) That earlier picture made a ton of money, and The Odyssey clearly has even broader appeal as an epic poem that many, many people encountered as required reading. And Greek mythology for kids is a popular subgenre for podcasts and web series. Given the widespread familiarity with the source material, and the fact that nowadays every film Nolan makes becomes an instant cultural event, you might be wondering if it’s okay to take your kids to see his version of the story.

It’s the kind of question I’ve had to contend with over the years as a film critic. When my son was younger, I often wondered which movies it was okay for him to accompany me to. (For a while I erred on the side of caution, but around the time of pandemic lockdown I became more relaxed, so much so that when he was 11 his favorite movie was Michael Mann’s Ali!) My son is 17 now and greatly enjoyed Nolan’s The Odyssey. Older teens should have zero issues with the film, but what about other kids? (Some light spoilers follow, especially if you are unfamiliar with the source material.)

The Verdict

Of course, the answer to the question of whether to take your kids to see The Odyssey largely depends on your kids’ ages as well as on what kind of entertainment they’ve already been exposed to. High-schoolers who have read the poem, which is far more graphic and disturbing and strange than anything in Nolan’s film, will have no problem with the R-rated themes. While the scenes involving violence are intense, they’re rarely graphic. Its extended depictions of the Trojan War are full of general mayhem, but specific violent acts are either seen in very brief snatches or alluded to through cutaways. Some of us might argue this makes them even more disturbing, but again, any teen who’s read The Odyssey has already had to imagine the graphic violence described by Homer.

If your teen — and yes, I would say this is generally for the 13-and-up crowd, though some mature tweens might qualify — hasn’t read the poem, no problem. Nolan’s film retains much of the original narrative, so any kids curious about mythology and the classics will surely enjoy it without being specifically familiar with this piece of literature. If your kid has seen the 2004 film Troy, for example, they’ll be fine. Ditto the Lord of the Rings films or the Avatar films, or Game of Thrones, or other war movies, like Saving Private Ryan. The easiest question to ask yourself would be, Has my kid seen other Nolan movies and liked them? If so, great, they’ll enjoy The Odyssey. The director loves to tackle dark themes and serious subject matter, but he’s acutely aware of making sure that what’s onscreen remains largely within the bounds of good taste, and The Odyssey is no exception. He is a parent of four himself, and he and his producer and wife, Emma Thomas, have had their kids work on their movies.

The Odyssey is long, of course: two hours and 52 minutes. But Avatar: The Way of Water, the biggest movie of 2022, is exactly the same length, and its sequel is even longer. Avengers: Endgame, the highest-grossing movie of all time without the word Avatar in the title, is over three hours. If your child managed to sit through any of those (or through Oppenheimer, which was also longer), they’ll be totally fine.

The Caveats

The horror elements in The Odyssey aren’t particularly graphic either, but the monster characters can be scary. The Cyclops is a man-eating giant, after all, though he mostly chows down on dudes in the dark. The tentacular Scylla is seen briefly but makes an impact, yanking sailors off Odysseus’s ship in a series of loud jump scares. The sequence featuring Circe, the sorcerer who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, might be the most disturbing of them all, not so much for what’s shown as for what’s implied, as the men’s body-horror-like transformations occur in tight shots. Again, the fact that we don’t see everything might actually make this scene even more unnerving.

The One Scene You Should Consider

The most violent sequence of the film is probably the final massacre of the suitors, as Odysseus kills the men who have been angling to marry his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), while he’s been away. This is the classic climax of Homer’s poem as well, and although what’s depicted in the movie isn’t even remotely as savage or as gory as what’s in the poem (nobody’s genitals are fed to the dogs in the movie, nor are Penelope’s treacherous maids forced to clear the corpses out and wash away the blood before being hanged themselves), it’s still a scene with a high body count. Men are hit with arrows and hacked away. Relatively mild by modern action-movie standards. Still, probably one of the sources of the film’s R rating. 

Ultimately you will be perfectly safe taking a teenager to see Nolan’s The Odyssey. Kids a couple years younger might be able to handle it if they’ve proven mature enough to watch other fantasy epics and/or war movies. All in all, The Odyssey isn’t quite as upsetting as its rating might imply, and it’s not particularly graphic. Even the blood is kept to a minimum, despite all the warfare. Perhaps more importantly, Nolan doesn’t shy away from the moral consequences of violence. So in some ways, his depiction of the horrors of war is more responsible than a lot of other movies that traffic in such imagery. Best of all, it might kick off an interesting conversation on the ride home.