Will Hosie: Are the blockbusters of Christopher Nolan the greatest artworks of our time?
With 'The Odyssey', the director has not only made the film of the summer but perhaps that which best captures the anxieties of the 2020s.
What, pray tell, is the greatest artwork of our time? For Spectator editor Michael Gove, a staffer once told me, the answer is none other than the films of Christopher Nolan. Yet this view failed to materialise when the Speccie ran a feature on 21st-century masterpieces last year (the coveted accolade went instead to Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, Channel 4’s adaptation of Sugar Rush by Julie Burchill, and others). Gove, allegedly, had suggested that Nolan’s films also be in contention. Staffers disagreed. Their magazine could not, and should not, be seen as pandering to Hollywood.
Refuting the blockbuster might have made sense were one to erase the epic from artistic history. Yet the genre of The Aeneid and of Paradise Lost is currently enjoying a resurgence. Nolan’s latest effort, The Odyssey, opened last Friday to critical and commercial acclaim: the umpteenth adaptation of Homer’s ancient poem and, akin to the translation it used as source material (Emily Wilson’s, from 2017), set to be the definitive.
It has become unfashionable for artists, whether they be painters or filmmakers, to dwell much on the everyday. The epic offers an antidote to contemporary art’s obsession with banality: the threat of war, surveillance culture and eco catastrophe means audiences have shifted away from stories that deal with relatable absurdities and towards those that grapple with more classical themes such as death, power and fate. The most recent film to win Best Picture at the Oscars, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, explores the theme of heroism in a thinly veiled satire of modern-day America. Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, the movie event of 2026 before The Odyssey came along, gives banality the epic treatment through a seemingly interminable journey into the ghostly, liminal spaces opened up by existential dread.
Nolan, too, is interested both in heroism and the immensity of the world. In 2014, Interstellar followed astronauts searching for a home beyond Earth. 2023’s Oppenheimer explored the journey of a man lionised for his military contributions and later castigated for expressing a conscience. These are the hallmarks of the modern-day epic — and a neat fit for our Odyssean times. Not for nothing have pundits spent the weeks leading up to The Odyssey’s release invoking Homeric epithets wherever the political context appeared relevant.
The modern condition is no longer served by art that edifies ennui. A film like The Odyssey — gargantuan, pedigreed, obsessed with scale — feels far more emblematic of our strange and itinerant times.
This feature appears in the July 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
