An imperial review by His Most Sinister Majesty, Sheev Palpatine, Galactic Emperor, Sith Lord, Senior Film Correspondent for Death Star Inc.
My loyal subjects, gather close. The mortals have released a new piece of moving holography — a “trailer,” they call it — for one Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, set to grace your primitive theaters on July 17, 2026. I have watched it. I have rewound it. I have watched it again while sipping a cup of fresh younglinng tears. And I am prepared to render judgment.
For those of you who skipped your classical education to play Pod-Racer in the back of the speeder, The Odyssey is the tale of a Greek king named Odysseus who spends twenty years trying to get home from a war. Twenty. Years. I conquered an entire galaxy in less time. I built a moon-sized superweapon, lost it, built a bigger one, and was halfway through a third before this man could find his own front door.
Let us begin.
“TELL ME WHAT YOU REMEMBER. A WIFE. A SON. AND THEN WHAT?”
Already we are in trouble. Our hero cannot remember his own family. Twenty-two seconds into the trailer and Odysseus is doing the “hold on, don’t tell me, it’s on the tip of my tongue” routine about the woman he is allegedly sailing across the known world to reunite with.
A Sith would not forget. A Sith would have her name carved into the hilt of his lightsaber and her face holographically projected on the bridge of his command ship at all times. This is basic dictator-husband behavior, Odysseus. Get it together.
“WE WON THE WAR. HELP ME GO HOME.”
Won the war? Won? You unleashed a wooden horse full of soldiers on a sleeping city. That is not “winning a war,” that is what I would call a mildly clever Tuesday afternoon. I once executed Order 66 across an entire galaxy simultaneously using nothing but a comm channel and the word “now.” Get back to me when you’ve coordinated genocide on that scale, you bronze-age amateur.
“ITHACA’S KING IS COMING BACK.” “NO HE’S NOT.”
This exchange takes place because, as I understand it, Odysseus’s home has been overrun by one hundred and eight suitors who are squatting in his palace, eating his food, drinking his wine, and pressuring his wife Penelope to remarry. One hundred and eight. One hundred and eight men, just hanging around someone else’s house, indefinitely, for years.
My friends, this is precisely the sort of household management failure that a fully operational Death Star resolves in approximately 0.3 seconds. One trigger pull. One green beam. Problem: solved. Suitors: vaporized. Real estate: now a delightful asteroid field. Penelope is, frankly, doing more crisis management than her absent husband, and I respect her for it.
“YOU’RE PINING FOR A DADDY YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW, LIKE SOME SNIVELING BASTARD.”
Now this — this — is the line of the trailer. Whoever delivered it deserves a promotion to Moff. The contempt. The cruelty. The casual dismissal of a young man’s emotional core. I have not heard daddy issues weaponized this efficiently since I told a certain young Jedi that his father was, in fact, standing right next to him in a black helmet.
Speaking of which: Telemachus, my boy. Twenty years you waited. Twenty years. I had Anakin fully turned, married off, betrayed, immolated, mechanized, and operational as my number-two enforcer in less than half that. You are pining. I was recruiting.
“I NEED EVERYONE IN HIS PARTY DEAD.”
Finally. Finally. A line I can endorse without reservation.
Whoever speaks this — I assume one of the gods, or perhaps Charlize Theron, who I am told plays someone called Circe and who, based on the trailer’s lighting, appears to run a very upscale magical hospitality business — understands the fundamentals of governance. You do not negotiate with rivals. You do not exile them to a remote system. You do not place them under house arrest on Naboo. You kill everyone in their party. This is leadership. This is vision. This is the kind of decisive action I would expect from a graduate of the Imperial Academy, not a sea witch.
Ten points to House Theron.
“YOU’RE A MAN WHO NEEDS TO CONTROL HIS FATE. BUT YOU CANNOT CONTROL THIS.”
I beg your pardon?
I beg your actual pardon?
Do you have any idea who you are speaking to, Odysseus? I orchestrated the Clone Wars as both sides simultaneously. I wrote the script for my own rise to power and then performed every role in it including the villain who lost. I control fate so thoroughly that fate sends me thank-you notes. The notion that there is something a sufficiently determined Sith Lord cannot control is the kind of cope I expect from a man who got lost on a boat for two decades.
You cannot control this because you are a Greek. I would have controlled it by lunch.
“NO ONE CAN STAND BETWEEN ME AND HOME. NOT EVEN THE GODS.”
Okay.
Okay.
I will admit it. This line goes hard.
Declaring open war on the gods themselves to get back to your wife? That is Sith-grade commitment. That is the kind of overreaching, hubristic, fundamentally-doomed-but-magnificent energy I look for in my apprentices. If Odysseus showed up at my throne room with this attitude I would, at minimum, hear him out. I might even let him have a small moon.
Poseidon, for his part, holding a personal grudge against one mortal man for an entire decade because said mortal blinded his giant son? That is also Sith behavior. Petty, vengeful, wildly disproportionate. Poseidon, call me. We should talk.
“I THINK IT’S ASLEEP.”
This is, of course, the Cyclops. A one-eyed giant the size of a small AT-AT, and Odysseus’s grand strategy is to wait for it to take a nap and then poke its eye out with a stick.
A stick.
My friends. My friends. I had access to planet-killing superlasers, legions of clone troopers, Force lightning that could level a city, and an apprentice who could choke a man across a hologram connection. Odysseus had a sharpened log and the element of surprise. And somehow we are both called “the most cunning man of our age.” The standards have fallen, my apprentices. The standards have fallen.
THE EMPEROR’S VERDICT
Christopher Nolan, I will say this: the man knows how to point a very large camera at a very wet ocean and make it feel important. The cast is acceptable. Matt Damon has the haunted look of a man who has seen things, which is good, because he is playing a man who has seen things. Tom Holland will presumably do his patented “I am a sad young man with a sword” routine, which is fine. Robert Pattinson will whisper. Zendaya will be lit beautifully. Anne Hathaway will weep with dignity.
But let us be clear about what this film is: it is the story of a man who could not get home, fighting monsters he could not outsmart, commanding a crew he could not keep alive, all so he could murder one hundred and eight houseguests with a bow.
This is what passes for an epic in your culture.
In my culture, we have a similar story. It is called The Rise of Palpatine. It is shorter. The body count is higher. And the protagonist actually wins.
Imperial Rating: ★★★☆☆ — “He should have just used the Force.”
The Odyssey opens in theaters July 17, 2026. The Emperor will be attending in IMAX, in disguise, in the back row, judging silently.