Chapter 1: A Strange Friendship, A Stranger Captain

A restless young sailor calling himself Ishmael, weary of life on land, decides to ship out on a whaling voyage. In New Bedford, waiting for his ship, he's forced to share a bed at a crowded inn with a stranger — Queequeg, a heavily tattooed harpooner from a South Pacific island, who worships a small wooden idol and carries a tomahawk. Ishmael's initial fear turns quickly into deep respect and friendship once he sees Queequeg's quiet dignity and skill. The two sign on together aboard the Pequod, a whaling ship out of Nantucket, owned in part by two shrewd Quaker merchants. Before departure, a ragged stranger on the docks warns Ishmael ominously about the ship's captain, hinting at some unspoken doom awaiting anyone who sails under him.

*An original abridged retelling of Homer's epic*

You must have a general idea about this global classic before watching The Odyssey, the movie, which is releasing July 17, 2026, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus.

Chapter 1: A House Under Siege

Twenty years had passed since Odysseus, king of Ithaca, sailed off to fight in the Trojan War. Ten of those years were spent at Troy itself, and ten more had vanished on the voyage home — a voyage that should have taken weeks. Now his palace stood overrun by more than a hundred suitors, arrogant young noblemen from Ithaca and the surrounding islands, all camped in his halls, eating his livestock, drinking his wine, and pressing his wife Penelope to give up hope and choose one of them to marry. Penelope had held them off for years with a clever trick: she promised to choose a husband once she finished weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's aging father, then secretly unraveled each night's work before dawn. But the suitors had caught on, and her excuses were running out. Meanwhile, Odysseus's son Telemachus was no longer a child but not yet a man, caught in an impossible position — too young to challenge a hall full of grown warriors, too old to simply watch his inheritance be devoured. He had no idea whether his father was alive or dead.

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The first 20 minutes of the Significant Other movie can be slow. You might wonder where the story is going. Nothing really happens apart from a couple misfiring as they try to communicate. It is after this lazy storytelling upfront that the movie picks up some real momentum. You have to be patient. You have to catch the small clues, especially the change in the facial expressions of the couple, to spot exactly when the story shifts in a different dimension altogether. While the first few minutes might make you wonder about a couple aimlessly drifting around in a spookingly empty forest, the last few minutes of Significant Other quietly explain why - something so remote and isolated was critical for the aliens to give shape to their sinister plans. 

On some of the best movie detailing platforms, it has been tagged as a Psychological Horror movie, which it surely isn't. In fact, there is nothing too psychological about it. Linda Liddle does not suffer from extreme personality disorientation. She is not 'split,' and neither is she born with the will to kill or hunt down living beings. She just gives in to her dark side when she is marooned on an island with her arrogant boss. I still believe this is director Sam Raimi's most mediocre outing, considering it is 2026, and he must be a seasoned Hollywood director by now. People isolated in Robinson Crusoe-type situations make chopsticks and weave plates out of vegetation? And to make this worse, you had Rachel McAdams be that person - has the director even seen Rachel's body of work, and on that account, her body? To make it highly difficult to believe in the first 10 minutes, she is presented as a passive, submissive, but brilliant worker on the office floor.

Because holding a grudge has never looked this cinematic...