0:03
Inside Ode with Anthropic, the startup betting AI services are the future of enterprise
Ode is a new joint venture that’s trying to prove a handful of engineers can do the work of an entire consulting army. Backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and a few other heavyweight investors, the company embeds its engineers directly inside enterprise teams. The idea is simple: instead of sending a big consulting firm to diagnose and advise, Ode places a small, forward‑deployed squad that builds and runs AI tools on the spot, turning theory into production much faster.
The founders, Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, came out of a startup called Fractional AI, where they already experimented with giving companies on‑demand AI talent. At Ode they’ve taken that playbook and scaled it up, offering a mix of prompt engineering, model fine‑tuning, data pipelines and ongoing support. Clients get a dedicated team that works like an internal department, but without the long hiring cycles or the overhead of a full‑time staff.
What makes the model attractive to investors is the belief that AI adoption is still bottlenecked by talent scarcity. By providing a plug‑and‑play engineering layer, Ode aims to accelerate the ROI on AI projects and reduce the need for costly, multi‑month consulting engagements. The backing from Anthropic also gives them access to cutting‑edge language models, which they can tailor for each client’s specific use case.
In the podcast interview, Taylor and Siegel emphasized that the goal isn’t just to deliver models, but to embed a culture of AI fluency within the organization. They see their engineers as both builders and teachers, helping teams learn how to iterate on AI solutions long after the Ode squad moves on. If the approach works, it could reshape how enterprises think about AI talent—shifting from a one‑off consulting gig to an ongoing, in‑house capability powered by a lean, expert team.
0:50
Inside Ode with Anthropic, the startup betting AI services are the future of enterprise
Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others.   On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, […]
1:06
‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Jaw-Dropping Horror Epic Is His Best Film Yet
If there’s one thing Christopher Nolan loves, it’s telling stories about emotionally unavailable men who lose themselves in their work and don’t have healthy relationships with women. That doesn’t describe all his movies, but it covers the lion’s share. “Interstellar” notwithstanding, Nolan’s films tend to be about detail-oriented professionals who lose track of their souls and may or may not find them again. When they do, it’s not always convincing, whether that’s intentional (“Inception”) or unintentional (“The Dark Knight Rises”).
It’s a big part of why “Oppenheimer” played like Nolan’s most significant film, for better or worse. It’s the movie where Nolan’s emotionally inscrutable protagonist not only let work destroy his relationships, but also arguably the world. In the end, Oppenheimer stands there, staring into infinity, unable to grasp the totality of his actions and wondering what the hell got into him.
Three years later, we now know “Oppenheimer’s” ending wasn’t a question mark, it was a cliffhanger. Homer’s “The Odyssey” may have been written almost 3,000 years ago, but in Nolan’s hands, it’s the spiritual sequel to the invention of the atomic bomb. Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, doesn’t just fall into a series of misadventures as he returns home after sacking Troy. He endures a series of metaphysical nightmares that reflect his guilt, shame and hubris back at him. It’s not an epic sword-and-sandal action movie, it’s a mournful horror story on a scale Hollywood has never seen before. “Oppenheimer” may be Nolan’s defining movie, but “The Odyssey” is his best.
Odysseus leaves the burning wasteland that used to be Troy and embarks, with his men, into the wine-dark sea. He’s so ready to put the past behind him that he veers off, away from the rest of the fleet, willing to take a scenic route if it means never seeing that a-hole King Agamemnon again. It’s the first of many self-serving decisions that backfire and get Odysseus’ soldiers killed. They can’t even stop for supplies without getting trapped in a cave with a demigod cyclops, a vast unknowable creature that treats human beings like cattle, beneath its interest or scorn.
To the gods of “The Odyssey,” human beings aren’t worth much unless we poke them in the eye. Then we’re worth destroying. Odysseus isn’t content to escape the cyclops, he has to add insult to injury, pissing off the deities his men worship at every turn. Odysseus lost his faith in religion; his men are losing faith in him. Their journeys don’t converge, they repel each other, sending everyone into tragedy and supernatural violence.
Meanwhile, Odysseus’ wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) has been waiting at home for 20 years and he’s never met his fully grown son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). His throne is under constant siege, not from warriors, but from scheming creeps who descend on Penelope every night and try to convince her to marry them. She’s running out of excuses for leaving Ithaca without a king and Telemachus is such an innocent dweeb, if she crowned him king, he’d be assassinated. Probably immediately.
“The Odyssey” doesn’t have many women in it, and the ones we do see are typically victims, monsters, underwritten or all three. Unfortunately, Christopher Nolan’s protagonists aren’t the only ones who struggle to relate to women. I guess they learned it from watching him. At least the witch Circe, played by Samantha Morton, throws it back in his face. While she’s disgustingly mangling a face.
Anne Hathaway does her level best to convey Penelope’s depth, but the film too often treats her like an obstacle for villains to overcome and a prize for Odysseus to claim. A third act monologue lets her address the injustices she endures in a sexist culture — since she could simply be a queen, no marriage necessary — but it’s too little, too late, and it reads like a self-aware attempt to stave off inevitable criticism instead of a meaningful aspect of Nolan’s larger story. That’s why it’s worth criticizing anyway. (I said this was Nolan’s best film. I didn’t say there’s no room for improvement.)
It’s tempting to say this is Matt Damon’s movie, but Christopher Nolan is the star. He’s the one who gets to show off. Nolan’s filmmaking isn’t just big, it makes us feel small. Many fantasy films include larger than life creatures, but when Ray Harryhausen creates them there’s a sense of magic and wonder. Nolan’s creations are obscene. His “Odyssey” gives birth to gigantic leviathans and vast, hellish locales that chill like a mausoleum. Matt Damon is brought low by the gods — and in this film, Nolan is Zeus, hurling cinematic awe at us mere mortals like lightning bolts. Christopher Nolan won’t settle for being impressive. Not when terrifying is an option.
But even though Damon is technically second fiddle, casting him was still a stroke of genius. He may, at a glance, look out of place in this historical era, but that’s the point, isn’t it? He never gets to feel at home.
3:05
Inside Ode with Anthropic, the startup betting AI services are the future of enterprise
Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others.   On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, […]
3:20
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Is the Epic We Truly Need Right Now: Review
Christopher Nolan’s latest film feels like a breath of fresh myth for today’s world. He takes Homer’s ancient story of a soldier’s long trek home and drapes it in his signature time‑bending style, letting the audience ride the same restless waves that Odysse‑the‑hero, played by Matt Damon, endures. The movie doesn’t just retell the old tale; it reshapes it, making the ancient wanderer’s struggle feel oddly modern, like a veteran trying to find his place after a long, chaotic conflict.
The visual language is unmistakably Nolan—wide, sweeping shots that capture both the grandeur of the sea and the claustrophobia of a ship’s deck. The pacing is deliberate, letting each trial the crew faces linger just enough to feel weighty without dragging. Damon’s performance is grounded, showing a man who’s seen enough to be wary but still clings to hope. The supporting cast adds texture, each character embodying a different facet of the journey’s emotional toll.
What stands out is how the film balances spectacle with intimacy. The grand set pieces—storms, monsters, and the infamous sirens—are rendered with practical effects that keep the audience anchored in reality, while the more subtle moments—quiet conversations under starlit skies—give the story its heart. Nolan’s choice to let the narrative breathe, rather than rush through every mythic episode, lets viewers absorb the timeless themes of longing, perseverance, and the cost of homecoming.
In the end, the movie feels less like a blockbuster and more like a modern fable that reminds us why we still need stories about returning, about redemption, and about the long road back to who we are. It’s a film that fits right into the current cultural moment, offering both escapism and a quiet, necessary reflection.
4:04
The Odyssey Review: Christopher Nolan’s Epic Is A Stunning Achievement
Christopher Nolan’s new film feels like a masterclass in making the impossible feel almost ordinary. He leans into real-world details—architecture that grounds the dreamscape, scientific principles that underpin the magic tricks—so the story never drifts too far from something we can picture in our heads.
What’s striking is how he leans on practical effects whenever he can, and when he has to rely on VFX, he still insists on a level of realism that keeps the audience from pulling away. Every set piece, every shot, seems chosen because it serves the internal logic of the world he’s building, not just for spectacle.
The review points out that this rigor isn’t just a stylistic quirk; it’s the backbone of the narrative. By anchoring the most elaborate ideas in a believable framework, Nolan makes the audience feel like they’re actually following a set of rules they could, in theory, understand. That sense of knowability turns what could be a dizzying epic into something you can follow step by step.
In short, the film showcases Nolan’s trademark blend of imagination and grounded craftsmanship. It’s an ambitious, visually stunning piece that never loses its footing, reminding us why his approach to storytelling still feels fresh and compelling.
4:36
'The Odyssey' Review: Christopher Nolan's Adaptation of the Classic Epic Is Much More Than a Star-Studded Blockbuster
In just shy of three hours, Nolan meets the moment and then some with The Odyssey, producing another stellar entry in his impressive oeuvre. While he is adapting Homer's legendary epic poem, Nolan takes the opportunity to impart to audiences all aspects of the nature of storytelling. How, why, when, where, who? All of these components are important in the movie, all for different reasons, and eventually, it becomes apparent that The Odyssey is a meditation on storytelling itself.
4:51
Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Is a Stunning IMAX Epic
Christopher Nolan’s cinema has been one of escalating enormity, and that evolution reaches its apex with The Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer’s iconic adventure classic that’s epic in every way.
A rousingly gargantuan action extravaganza that was shot entirely in IMAX (the first of its kind) and boasts a mournful and self-critical soul, Nolan’s follow-up to Oppenheimer is in many respects a kindred spirit to that Oscar-winning predecessor, even though its arresting blend of might and magic provides far more visceral, larger-than-life thrills.
The Odyssey (July 17, in theaters) evokes many of the themes Nolan returns to again and again. Like Interstellar and Dunkirk, the film focuses on communing with the past, reuniting with family, and returning home.
But Oppenheimer is its greatest thematic touchstone, given its interest in the regret and guilt born from necessary if catastrophic wartime ingenuity and slaughter. The Trojan Horse is to Greek king and military hero Odysseus (Matt Damon) as the atomic bomb is to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and a mixture of awe and horror, pride and revulsion, defines the director’s stirring take on his legendary source material.
Unsurprisingly, Nolan fragments his narrative, moving freely between the past and the present, reality and memory, in order to echo both the back-and-forth nature of The Odyssey’s story and its patchy origins (it was passed down through centuries via first oral and then written traditions) and the splintered psyche of his protagonist.
Damon’s Odysseus is a stern and resolute commander who’s prone to flights of hubris that jeopardize his and his men’s welfare. His occasional recklessness, however, never quite tips into selfishness, as he remains committed to bringing everyone safely back to their native Ithaca. And Damon’s furrowed-brow performance casts the character’s severity as an outgrowth of his strength of purpose and, additionally, his internalized grief and remorse.
The Odyssey begins not with Odysseus but, instead, with his wife Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway), who’s dealing with a son, Prince Telemachus (Tom Holland), who wants to know the fate of his father eight years after the conclusion of the Trojan War and bristles at being considered unfit for the throne.
An additional headache is a gaggle of suitors—led by conniving Antinous (Robert Pattinson)—who have taken over her palace, eager to be chosen as her new husband and monarch. Penelope and Telemachus yearn for Odysseus’ homecoming, as does blind servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), whose abuse at the suitors’ hands illustrates that Ithaca has lost sight of Zeus’ Law, which states that men should treat others with kindness and respect.
As Penelope fends off her predatory suitors and Telemachus secretly sets sail for Sparta to seek word of Odysseus from his former comrade, King Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), who’s married to Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o), The Odyssey picks up its main narrative with Odysseus.
He’s being held captive on an island by Calypso (Charlize Theron), who’s using the lotus flower to make him forget where he came from. Odysseus is to some extent willingly brainwashing himself, driven by the wounds of the past to retreat into blissful oblivion. Even so, his struggle to recollect what brought him to Calypso makes him one of the film’s numerous narrators (which include Travis Scott’s bard), who together help piece together this fractured tale.
Glimpses of the Trojan Horse ruse and the massacre it facilitated are peppered throughout The Odyssey, whose images—aided by IMAX cinematography from regular Nolan DP Hoyte van Hoytema—strike an invigorating balance between the immense and the intimate.
Shots of men and boats dwarfed by land and sea coexist with intense close-ups of haggard and steadfast faces illuminated in darkness by candlelight and battered by wind, rain, and surf. Whether it’s a chaotic battle against an army of silver-armored goliaths (featuring the director’s finest hand-to-hand skirmishes to date) or a serene panorama of a sun setting over a vast expanse of ocean, The Odyssey is moviemaking on a grand David Lean-style scale.
With Ludwig Göransson’s score roaring with unearthly, drumbeat-of-doom power, The Odyssey is the third straight Nolan effort that’s an overwhelming sensory experience, with an A-list cast that excels at every turn.
While Damon’s staunch Odysseus is the proceedings’ epicenter, it’s a collection of supporting turns that enlivens its portrait of loyalty and treachery, bravery and cowardice, arrogance and altruism.
An imposing, agonized Hathaway proves the film’s emotional core as Penelope, and Holland—in his most assured screen work yet—captures Telemachus’ need, anger, and insecurity with affecting candor.
6:45
'The Odyssey' Review: Christopher Nolan's Majestic, Haunting Adaptation Is An Epic Like No Other
“Epic” doesn’t do Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey justice. In the strictest definition of the word, that’s what The Odyssey is, both in scale and genre: a sweeping and spectacular adaptation of Homer’s ancient mythic tale of Odysseus on his long journey home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. But it’s also so much more. For every moment of awe-inspiring spectacle, there’s the quiet terror of the aftermath. For every heroic feat committed by Odysseus and his men, there is the savagery of war. And for every grand victory, there are the horrors.
Introspective and haunting, The Odyssey feels like Nolan is turning a new page in his filmography; a film that continues the soul-searching introspection that his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer grappled with, and deepens our understanding of one of the oldest stories in history. But it’s also a crowdpleaser in every sense of the word, a rousing and spectacular feat of blockbuster entertainment that wrestles with monsters and myths in equally dazzling ways.
The Odyssey begins much like Homer’s epic poem, in medias res. Eight years after the Trojan War ended, many of its veterans have returned home — except for Odysseus (Matt Damon). His son Telemachus (Tom Holland) has grown weary of the dozens of rowdy suitors vying for the hand of Penelope (Anne Hathaway), Odysseus’ long-suffering wife, and decides to travel to Sparta to learn if his father is alive, ignorant of the suitors’ plot against his life, led by the scheming Antinous (Robert Pattinson). But while Telemachus embarks on his journey, Odysseus is just restarting his, having lost his way and his memories after recuperating for years on Calypso’s (Charlize Theron) island.
Urged on by visions of the goddess Athena (Zendaya), he slowly recalls his troubled journey from Troy to Calypso: after engineering the downfall of Troy with his legendary Trojan Horse trick, he and his men depart for Ithaca through uncharted waters. But when they ignore the ominous warnings from the villagers that they pillaged, they find themselves soon beset by terrible storms and terrifying monsters. There’s the giant Cyclops, Polythemus (Bill Irwin, in a design that recalls Guillermo del Toro’s best monster designs), who traps Odysseus and his men in a cave and eats the ones that try to escape. There’s Circe (Samantha Morton), the witch who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs. There are the giants that ruthlessly slaughter half of Odysseus’ men. There’s the whirlpool and Scylla, the sea monster. And there are the shades of the underworld, who offer both wisdom and seek retribution against Odysseus for all his follies.
All the familiar beats of the very old, very classic story are there. And Nolan adapts them loyally — in spirit, if not in minutiae. But it’s how Nolan uses those classic mythic beats to ponder bigger ideas about humanity’s hubris and potential for destruction that The Odyssey soars.
It’s present in the very remarkably grounded and straightforward way that Nolan, who writes and directs, adapts The Odyssey. His film streamlines the Homeric epic and doesn’t play with form and structure in the way that Nolan’s movies are known to do. It may in fact, be even more linear than the original epic poem, which employed several more framing devices. Instead, Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame give the story itself a sort of fluidity — the film suddenly cuts to flashbacks when characters tell a story, as if the memory is interrupting them mid-conversation. One story that Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), Odysseus’ blind and faithful swineherd, recalls to Telemachus about Odysseus’ dog Argos employs fleeting images that suddenly enter and exit the frame in an almost dreamlike way. It’s a kind of lyrical, Malickian direction that feels directly opposed to Nolan’s typically rigid, tactile filmmaking.
In fact, The Odyssey feels like Nolan playing with many new bags of tricks, after perfecting all his old ones in Oppenheimer. Through several sequences, The Odyssey dips into the surreal in a way that Nolan rarely does, and flirts with body horror in a way that Nolan has never done. There’s a little bit of Cronenberg in the horrifying transformations of Circe’s victims. And in the eerie, ghostly landscape of the underworld, where shades emerge dripping from the sand, it feels like Nolan is paying homage to Ingmar Bergman. And in some of the action sequences, there’s a dash of the Ray Harryhausen swords-and-sandals epics that most memorably brought Greek myths to the big screen. It’s a film as steeped in cinematic history as its story is steeped in mythology.
But, true to Nolan, the rest of the film feels grimly realistic, almost apocalyptic, especially in the stark color palette beautifully employed by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema — sapped of any saturation that could hint at a rosy recalling of some mythological golden age.
8:41
‘The Odyssey’ Review
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN HAS ONLY ONE official trilogy under his belt. His Dark Knight Trilogy involves a masked man waging war on crime bosses, yes, but it doubles as a comment on the post-9/11 age and the collision of liberty and order that occurred as a result. The Dark Knight remains right at the top of any list of movies about the Global War on Terror despite never once mentioning al Qaeda.
Nestled in between his Batman films was a sort of shadow trilogy. And while The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar couldn’t seem more different—a period magic drama; a near-future sci-fi action flick; and a Spielbergian space adventure—they are all connected by a thematic unity, the drive of parents to reunite with their children. Watch them all in order; it’s a series of films about semi-negligent fathers attempting to protect, and get home to, their kids. That’s what drives the action in each of them, and it’s the best rejoinder to any dolt out there who insists on calling Nolan a robotic fashioner of multiplex puzzle boxes.
His three most recent films—Tenet, Oppenheimer, and The Odyssey—are, on the surface, also radically different. A Bond-inflected sci-fi adventure film; a historical drama about the fashioning of the atomic bomb; and a recreation of one of the West’s foundational myths. But they too have an underlying thematic unity, albeit one that’s a bit darker than his other films. They are, all of them, fascinated by the human compulsion toward self-destruction. Toward annihilation.
The Odyssey, then, is the conclusion of Nolan’s Death Drive Trilogy.
Odysseus (Matt Damon) speaks to the shade of the blind seer Tiresias (James Remar), whom Circe (Samantha Morton) has told the hero of the Trojan War to summon from Hades for guidance home. There are two ways forward, and a choice: risk Charybdis, a whirlpool that will kill every man on board, or sail past Scylla, a multiheaded serpent who will snatch precisely six men from the ship. Regardless of the path chosen, Tiresias foresees that all of Odysseus’s men will die. A sacred island beckons. Its livestock belong to Apollo. If they eat of these beasts, they will be punished by the gods. Why worry about the fate of the six when they’re all doomed anyway?
“I can still save them from the gods,” Odysseus replies. Not haughtily or with hubris. More in desperation. And Tiresias’s reply is, I think, key to the whole film.
“But not from themselves.”1
The Odyssey is driven by the belief that man is, inherently, self-destructive. That our inability to hew to the laws of the gods—the most important of which is repeatedly stated to be Zeus’s law, the command to host strangers as if they were gods in disguise in the understanding that you should be treated similarly in a stranger’s home; basically, to uphold the golden rule about doing unto others—will be our undoing. That violations of sacred norms have consequences which cannot be foreseen or defended against. And Odysseus, by flouting one such law, ushers in a dark age from which it will take centuries to recover.
Odysseus’s wife, the queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, the young prince Telemachus (Tom Holland), labor under the pretense of Zeus’s law even as the suitors who vie for her hand in Odysseus’s halls scorn it. The suitors eat like locusts, they abuse the beggars who line the halls seeking succor, they plot to kill Telemachus. The most locust-like among them is Antinous (Robert Pattinson) who, as a young man, convinced a poor boy to take his place on Odysseus’s voyage to Troy.
Troy, of course, is where this story truly begins. Ten years on a beach stalemated by the world’s strongest walls, driven into war by a king hoping to destroy the last remnants of opposition, ended by a wily trickster’s violation of sacred norms.2 The reverberations of that violation—the question of whether man can save himself from his own self-destructiveness, whether he will learn any lessons from it—are the main concern of The Odyssey.
I’m hopping around, but that’s because the film itself hops around, and that’s because Homer’s epic poem hops around. If The Odyssey has a fatal flaw, it’s that it’s almost too faithful to the structure of the poem on which it is based, which takes six of its twenty-four books just to get to Odysseus, and then tells the story of his journey in a fractured flashback. The result is a herky-jerky, stop-start style of storytelling that feels less fluid than Nolan’s previous works. This is the secret mastery of Oppenheimer: It’s a historical biopic that’s edited like a high-caliber comic book movie, seamlessly flowing between timelines and characters, using the rhythm of the cuts to make a congressional hearing or a deposition feel like a fistfight.
The Odyssey is more fractious, more fissured. It is, first, two hours of abuse and defeats and arguments and disappointments and the occasional bit of grubby cleverness, followed by an hour of glorious vengeance.
