Four pieces of jewellery, worn by four different characters, do the work that gods and prophecy once did in Homer’s original: recognising a husband, convicting a sorceress and announcing a queen’s scars in The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, released on July 17, 2026 with an ensemble led by Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, Samantha Morton and Lupita Nyong’o, is built on a US$250 million budget and shot entirely on IMAX cameras. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick created more than 5,300 costumes for the production, researching Mycenaean Greece and the late Bronze Age Mediterranean rather than any single historical period.
Within The Odyssey’s world, jewellery does more than dress the cast. It identifies, and it incriminates, and it signals rank. Several pieces are built specifically as plot devices, and none of them exist in Homer’s original text at all.
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Penelope and the Athena Pin
The Athena Pin (Photo: courtesy of Universal Pictures)
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Of the women he encounters across the film, Penelope played by Anne Hathaway is the only one documented handing Odysseus a piece of jewellery. When they say their goodbyes, Penelope gives Odysseus a pin, dubbed the Athena Pin, as a token of remembrance and, crucially, as the object she says she will use to identify him when he finally returns. It replaces Homer’s original recognition device, the bed built from a living olive tree, with something an IMAX audience can actually watch Odysseus hold up to Penelope at the moment of reunion. It also fits Nolan’s habit of giving his protagonists a single signature object, in the way the character of Dom Cobb played by Leonardo DiCaprio has his spinning top in Inception.
