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In a sense, The Odyssey is an exception to that rule. Like the Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan’s adaptation of the ancient Greek epic is relatively straightforward. The plot unfurls naturally and ends neatly without any mind-blowing twists or turns. And yet, there’s still one very good reason to watch The Odyssey a second time, and it has everything to do with the character who gives this story its name.

Odysseus, played in the movie by Matt Damon, is typically defined in Greek mythology by his intelligence. He’s not necessarily the strongest guy around, but he’s the most cunning. That’s how he came up with the idea for the Trojan Horse in the first place, and that’s how he overcomes most of the obstacles in Homer's Odyssey. But on a first viewing of Nolan's film, that intelligence isn’t always so obvious.

Take the Cyclops. Odysseus inadvertently leads his men into a trap when they enter the giant’s cave looking for food, but it doesn’t take our hero long to devise a plan that involves culling a few soldiers from his crew, blinding the Cyclops, and then disguising his remaining men as sheep to escape. On first watch, it can seem like Odysseus is improvising the entire thing one step at a time. Oh, the Cyclops is blind now, let’s pretend to be sheep! On the second watch, a few quick lines of dialogue early on reveal how he planned their escape as he scans the cave and mentally assembles all the tools he needs: hay, fire, a sharp stick.

The same goes for the whirlpool, aka Charybdis. In an earlier scene, Odysseus learns that trying to sail his ship through the whirlpool means certain death. The only alternative is a narrow path that exposes his men to a sea monster (Scylla) who will eat six of them but spare the rest. Of course, Odysseus chooses the latter, but on first watch, the entire scene feels chaotic and random. The crew argues over which path to choose until the last possible minute before just barely making the right choice. Pretty lucky for Odysseus, right?

Image: Universal Pictures

On second watch, however, our hero’s plan becomes clear. Odysseus subtly pushes his men, who already don’t trust him, to head straight through the whirlpool. Thanks to reverse psychology, they choose to make for the pass instead, saving Odysseus’ life in the process. Only once you’ve seen how the scene plays out do you understand the scheme that drives it.

(There are also several other subtle twists in The Odyssey's final act that reward a second viewing. Without going into spoilers, I'll note that both Zendaya's performance as the goddess Athena and the mysterious threat of the "Sea People" take on new meaning once you've seen the entire movie.)

Image: Universal Pictures

Look, it’s possible I’m just dumb or bad at watching movies. Maybe you didn't have any issues picking up on all of this on your first viewing. But based on other conversations I’ve had, both in person and online, I’m not the only person who experienced The Odyssey in this way.

So, assuming it was intentional, why did Nolan add a layer of opaqueness to his movie? I can think of two reasons. First, this is Christopher Nolan. He loves messing with his audience in ways that reward multiple viewings. Why should The Odyssey be any different?

There may also be a more technical explanation. The Odyssey clocks in at just under three hours, which happens to be the maximum runtime for a film on Nolan’s preferred 70mm IMAX format. To pull that off, the director cut tons of footage to fit that restriction, removing anything that didn’t serve the plot directly.

Image: Universal Pictures

As a result, The Odyssey moves at breakneck speed. Every line of dialogue is carefully chosen with almost no extra room for explanation or even a spare second to let one moment settle before moving on to the next. It makes for a thrilling ride, but one that’s surprisingly hard to follow, even when the plot appears to make perfect sense on the surface.

That's perhaps the brilliance of The Odyssey. Unlike Memento, which literally doesn't make sense until you've seen it at least twice, The Odyssey does make sense on a first viewing. However, it's only after revisiting the movie for a second time that you may truly appreciate all the cunning and scheming Odysseus needed to survive his epic journey and make it back home.

The Odyssey is in theaters now. %!s()

The Batman series in question is a new volume of Shadow of the Bat, written by Deniz Camp and drawn by Javier Rodríguez. Camp teased at SDCC that the series is very much about confronting the failure of Gotham's institutions and reinventing Batman for the current moment. Fans of Camp's The Ultimates run (which won IGN's Best Comic Book Series of 2024 award) should be in for a treat.

Also on the Batman front, DC is releasing a star-studded one-shot special as part of Batman Day in September. Batman of Two Worlds features two interconnected tales, one focused on the classic Dark Knight by Batman writer Matt Fraction and DC K.O. artist Javi Fernández, and the other on Absolute Batman from writer Scott Snyder and Doom Patrol artist Nick Derington.

“You have two different looks at Batman,” said Fraction in a statement. “The moral structures, the ethical structures, the political structures. A chance to put them side by side and see the similarities and differences.”

Outside of Batman, Exquisite Corpses creator Michael Walsh is writing and drawing a new six-issue series called Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death. DC's official description teases:

Welcome to the end of the Wild West. Welcome to the quiet life of a broken-down bounty hunter whose own story, one of bloodshed, pain, and guilt, ended long ago—or so he thought.

In a small town called Ashecott, something evil has arrived. Something more dangerous than a gunslinger, more sinister than an outlaw, and older than the town it seeks to infect. Something from a world beyond the only one its victims have ever known. Something darker.

Unfortunately for that evil, Jonah Hex has taken notice. Not just of the otherworldly entities surrounding his home, or the child with mysterious abilities they seek to capture—but also of the chance to finally redeem himself.

Join master of horror Michael Walsh as he begins a terrifying new era of DC’s haunted bounty hunter!

Then, Ultramega creator James Harren is tackling a new take on an old favorite with The Demon. DC's description teases:

The world is infested with a darkness its people cannot see. Beasts from Hell feast on humanity’s soul, sucking it dry and leaving nothing but a shell behind.

Only one person can see these monsters and cast them back to Hell: Jason Blood! But he is a shadow of the man he once was, wandering the world following the face of a wizard long gone and hearing a voice in his head demanding to be let out.

How can Jason Blood help protect the world from demons when he himself is not sure how to work with the one bound to his soul? Will the Demon Etrigan ever rise again?

Superstar writer/artist James Harren (Ultramega) creates a brand-new epic starring the mightiest demon of them all!

Finally, fans can also look forward to a new Static series by Cody Ziglar and Diego Olortegui and a new Vixen series by Stephanie Williams and Khary Randolph.

In other DC-related Comic-Con news, we think we know the real villain of the Lanterns TV series, and Amazon has revealed an exclusive Batman: Caped Crusader video game.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky. %!s()

“Hadestown: The Musical,” a movie version that records and presents a live performance of the show that took place in February 2025 in London (much as the 2020 film of “Hamilton” presented a live production of that show), offers a splendid opportunity for anyone who hasn’t seen “Hadestown” onstage to experience it. The audience we see at this production at the West End’s Lyric Theatre is so in love with the show that you feel every person there has already seen it three times. And maybe that’s the case, since “Hadestown,” with its free-form jamboree vibe, its spontaneous swirl of musicians and dancers onstage, is as much a happening as it is a musical. It’s a show about ancient mythology — it tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which it interweaves with the tale of Hades and Persephone. That sounds daunting, but “Hadestown,” with its book, music, and lyrics by Anaïs Mitchell, succeeds in making those myths feel timeless, which of course they are. It’s a show about love, but more than that it’s a show about faith.

There is one set, and it looks like the grand interior of a moldering mansion in the late-afternoon sun if it were the New Orleans home of Dracula and he was a bootlegging gangster. The music, in a song like “Way Down Hadestown,” has a jaunty New Orleans spirit (especially when the trombone gets going), but much of the score is more eclectic than that — it’s a collage of brass-band exuberance and rock-musical passion and gospel ecstasy. One number, “Wedding Song,” sounds like “Can’t Find My Way Home” from the Blind Faith album. The lyrics to one of the best songs, “When the Chips Are Down,” play like an update of Madonna’s “Material World.” The show uses its infectious array of musical styles to evoke a big tent of rootsy Americana, and since most of the action is sung, it all has the feel of a patchwork opera.  

The figure who draws us into “Hadestown” is Hermes, the herald of the gods who’s also the show’s narrator. He’s played by the Broadway legend André De Shields, who is now 80, and in a crisp silver three-piece suit, his whitish hair beaming off his head like an aureole, De Shields, with his diffident impish manner, his wavery slow vibrato, and his sunken cheeks that bespeak a pain he will not share, creates a presence of mystical authority. He’s down-home but larger-than-life, and so is the entire show.

In mixing the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with the romantic travails of Hades, the king of the underworld, “Hadestown” creates a romantic saga with a distinct echo of the one in “Moulin Rouge!” In that classic 2001 movie (as well as the Broadway version that premiered in 2018), Christian and Satine were bohemian lovers, while the Duke of Monroth was the moneybags conniver who thought he could buy Satine’s love. In “Hadestown,” Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a struggling poet and songwriter, meets the impoverished Eurydice (Eva Noblezada), and the two fall in love. But they can barely subsist. Hades (Patrick Page), portrayed as a demonic executive who presides over an underworld foundry, has driven away his wife, Persephone (Amber Gray), and he persuades Eurydice to come down to Hadestown, where he will love and protect her. She’s desperate enough to make a deal with the devil.

If and when somebody pulls it together to make the Jeff Buckley biopic, I think we now have the actor to play him. It is Reeve Carney. He looks like Buckley, and has his floppy-haired louche glamour, but more than that he sings like him, with a keening high tenor that’s spellbinding. He makes Orpheus a character who’s a pure expressive force, a vessel of love and art and the vulnerability that comes of valuing both. Eva Noblezada, as Eurydice (she and Carney met during the early stage production of “Hadestown” and are now married), has a voice of ardent richness and a presence of traumatized devotion. And Patrick Page as Hades, the capitalist oppressor in his long leather coat, presiding over his factory world, lends the drama the villainous force it needs, although his Hades is far from inhuman. Page, tall and sculpted, with elegant white hair and a matching beard, is like Ian McKellan crossed with Christopher Lee. When Orpheus travels to Hadestown to retrieve Eurydice, and Hades agrees to let her go (under the condition that Orpheus can never once look back at her during the long journey home), he has designed this infamous conundrum as an elevated test. It will be the test of Orpheus’s faith, and watching the journey we in the audience contemplate what any of us might do. What does it mean…to look back?

The show feels like a street dance crossed with a concert (at one point the musicians are introduced by name) that happens to have a hallowed myth threaded down the middle of it. The three Fates (Bella Brown, Madeline Charlemagne, and Allie Daniel) orbit the action like spitfire satellites. As directed by Brett Sullivan, “Hadestown: The Musical” transmits the show’s earthy electricity. That said, it’s still striking that the bare-bones film version of a Broadway musical that isn’t “Hamilton” is going to make $10 million at the box office this weekend. As the audience response to it in the movie makes clear, “Hadestown” is a show with a worshipful following. The movie made me a believer. %!s()