Two visions of scale: Packham's prehistoric canvas and Nolan's turn at Homer

Two of the most ambitious screen projects of the year landed inside a single seven-day window, and the Guardian's review columns have reached the same verdict from opposite directions. Chris Packham's return to the long arc of life on Earth trades the formulas of natural-history television for something closer to a geological epic. Christopher Nolan's long-rumoured adaptation of Homer's Odyssey does the reverse, dragging an oral epic into the cinematic register of IMAX, surround sound and an ensemble cast.

What links them is a willingness to spend money, patience and screen time on material that the prevailing economics of streaming would normally grind down to a single mid-budget episode. The contrast is instructive: one project treats the past as a site of evidence; the other treats it as a script.

Packham goes deep, and stays there

Packham's Evolution takes viewers not to the savannas where his Really Wild Show and Springwatch audiences first encountered him, but to the origins of complex life itself. The reviewers note the show's commitment to long takes and a quietness that lets fossil sites and reef systems breathe. Where mainstream natural-history formats pace themselves to a commercial break every five minutes, this series reportedly holds a single sequence for several minutes at a stretch.

The gamble is that viewers trained on fast-cut, music-led BBC America or Netflix nature specials will tolerate an unhurried tone. Early reviews suggest enough of them will. Critics single out Packham's narration as a counter-weight to the visual bombast, framing the science through the voice of a broadcaster who has spent three decades earning the audience's trust on simpler material before daring them to stay with him on something harder.

Nolan's Homer, shot like a war film

Nolan and Homer are both names that attract a certain kind of press release. The director's announced adaptation of The Odyssey reportedly treats the poem less as a literary monument than as a logistical problem: how do you shoot a voyage, a war and a homecoming on a budget that allows for the kind of set-piece his recent films demand? The Guardian's reviewers, drawing on trade reporting from earlier in the year, frame the project as a hybrid of prestige-television pacing and feature-film scale, with principal photography mapped across Mediterranean locations standing in for Ithaca, Troy and the Cyclopes' island.

The risks are easier to read than the rewards. Casting a global ensemble against a text that every secondary-school pupil has met in translation invites instant comparison with prior adaptations, from the Italian peplum era to the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Nolan has form in adapting material his audience thinks they already know, and the trade-offs he has made on earlier projects will be familiar to anyone who sat through the liberties taken with Oppenheimer's source material.

Two economics, two audiences

The structural contrast is sharper than the marketing suggests. Packham's series sits inside a public-service broadcaster's commissioning logic: a fixed budget, a defined run, an audience measured in reach rather than per-hour revenue. Nolan's film sits inside a financing logic that demands a global theatrical release on a cost-recovery basis before any streaming window matters.

The Guardian's reviewers are careful to distinguish between the two registers. An expensive and visually ambitious natural-history series can succeed on conviction and patience alone, because its distribution and its audience metrics are working in its favour from the first minute. An expensive literary adaptation has to perform in the same week in every market where it opens, against a marketing cycle that pumps oxygen into the launch and withdraws it almost immediately. One project can lose a viewer slowly and win them back. The other has to win them in the first trailer.

Who gets to make big things

Both projects also raise a quieter question about who, in 2026, is still permitted to make something on this scale. Packham's series exists in part because the BBC continues to commission long-form specialist work on its natural-history strand, a category that has held its budget even as other areas of the corporation's output have been pruned. Nolan's film exists because private capital is still willing to underwrite a single movie at a price that would fund an entire year's slate of mid-budget drama for a streamer.

The middle of the market has shrunk around them. The series of medium-length documentary, the auteur drama in the £5m–£15m range, the foreign-language feature picked up on the festival circuit, all of these have become harder to place than they were a decade ago. What remains is either cheap enough to be a tax-efficient streaming instalment or expensive enough to be an event. Packham and Nolan are working at the two surviving ends of that distribution, and the reviews this week suggest both finds have paid off.

What remains uncertain

The Guardian's rave-reviewers are working from screeners and trade screenings. Their verdicts on Evolution are based on the broadcast cut and the wider critical conversation about Packham's seriousness as a science communicator; their takes on Nolan's project lean on announced casting, location reporting and Nolan's track record rather than on a finished film few outside the production have seen. The honest qualifier is the obvious one: nobody writes the final review of a project this big until the public sits with it. What the column confirms is that the ambition is real, the financing is in place, and the early signs are good. What it cannot yet confirm is whether either work will travel as well as it intends to beyond its launch audience.

Desk note: Monexus treats the weekly review roundup as a reading guide rather than a verdict, useful for tracking what serious critics are taking seriously, less useful as a buying signal for projects whose full cultural footprint only becomes legible months after release.