Colin Whiting, Dumbarton Oaks, whitingc01@doaks.org
Note: Spoilers ahead
Let’s get the flotsam and jetsam of a film review out of the way first. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is, as one might expect from the director, a grand example of epic film with a tight focus on a single character. After similarly using World War II as the backdrop for individual stories in Dunkirk (2017) and Oppenheimer (2023), The Odyssey takes one of the most famous characters from one of the most famous works of world literature as a means to explore guilt, devotion, fate, and the other subjects you’d expect given the source material.
I will not insult readers of Rhea Classical Reviews with a summary of Homer’s Odyssey nor a rundown of what Odysseus says and does in the course of his journey home. Even if this essay were not appearing in a journal dedicated to the classics, it would be as superfluous as narrating the tale of David and Goliath or Little Red Riding Hood. You know that the sirens’ singing means death, that it is dangerous to parlay with a cyclops in his own cave, that you should be wary of the easy pleasure the lotus flower brings. Some stories have been told, and retold, and retold, and are now a part of the very fabric of our culture—impossible to unravel.
Like virtually all of Christopher Nolan’s films, this one left me in awe in some respects and cold in others. It is visually splendid: water sprays up onto prows, firelight flickers in dark temples, and spectacular vistas stretch out before you. (OK, there were some focus issues in dialogue scenes, but you try to film close-ups of faces in 70mm IMAX.) The special effects, many of them practical, are generally excellent. The much-maligned costuming looked perfectly fine (anachronism has never bothered me) and Agamemnon’s oddly unweathered backbone helmet, which looked a little silly in the previews and on the poster, was suitably menacing in the final cut. Another bit of character design deserves explicit praise: the cyclops’s face appears twisted, with one eye off to the side of his face, sealed shut or undeveloped, and the other eye is wrenched askew into the middle of the face, as though his whole visage was malformed from birth (a far cry from the usual “Well, he’s got one big eye, you see, he’s a cyclops!”). It is unsettling. And for what it’s worth, the woman sitting beside me in the theater leapt up in fright at several points, and she and I and everyone else in the theater squirmed during the Circe sequence. Nolan has never directed a straight horror movie, but there are scenes here that are pretty damn close.
Some other positives: The source material happily plays to one of Nolan’s greatest strengths, his ability to effortlessly skip backward and forward in time without confusing the watcher (The Prestige [2006] remains the ultimate expression). The film must by necessity elide select sequences of the Odyssey, but some are quite cleverly consolidated. Calypso, for example, feeds Odysseus lotus leaves to keep him on Ogygia, and as she weens him off the drug, he recalls and recounts various episodes from his journey. We thus blend three elements of the original (the land of the lotus eaters, Odysseus recounting his story to the Phaeacians, and Calypso) to fashion a tighter narrative, one much better suited for film. Conversely, I was happy to see a few elements added to Homer’s original. We not only get the Odyssey and the obligatory retelling of the Trojan Horse story, but also bits of the Oresteia—a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.
It is not a flawless film. As is traditional with Nolan’s films, women are criminally underwritten (Samantha Morton does stellar work as Circe with very little help from the script, and as an aside, it is very telling that Lupita Nyong’o as Helen has been the focus of discussions about race online while Zendaya as Athena has largely escaped criticism). The twist at the end (discussed below) was potentially interesting but underdeveloped. Ludwig Göransson’s music has a stellar reputation, but it has never done much for me and did even less than usual this time around. Most significantly, though, for me, the movie lacks much emotional heft (I found more emotional resonance in Minions and Monsters, which I saw the same day as The Odyssey, and I still can’t tell if that’s damning criticism of the latter or high praise of the former). I have found impassivity to be a problem with many of Nolan’s movies, and The Odyssey is no exception. I enjoyed Matt Damon’s performance, for example, but I was never particularly invested in it. I never felt like Achilles on the beach in Iliad 24, my great tears falling. Partly, the emotional distance is caused by the constant need to move things along: for example, Odysseus and Penelope get a single scene early on to establish their love for one another prior to his return. I recognize that they have even less interaction in Homer’s version, but I’m not watching Homer’s Odyssey, I’m watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and it was hard to care about a couple’s separation and reunion without any real foundation being established first. Likewise, Odysseus is never really given space to grieve for his crewmates, and if Odysseus doesn’t care, then why should I? Even moments of easy pathos, like Argos finally at rest with his master’s return, felt both pat and rushed.
But the real problem is the Odysseus of The Odyssey himself. And my complaint is not that Nolan changed the character of Odysseus, because this movie is an adaptation released in 2026 and he should have changed the character. My complaint is how. The Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey is many-turned, but not just clever—he is complicated. He longs to return to Penelope, but regularly takes other lovers, some for years at a time; he cares for his men, but uses and abuses them until at last they are all dead; he is wily enough to get out of every jam he is foolish enough to get into. The Odyssey’s Odysseus, by contrast, is a pretty good guy: he feels real bad about what happened at Troy; he gives deer a warning before shooting them so that they have a sporting chance; Calypso tells him that they’ve spent seven happy years together, but we never see them intimate (not that Nolan has shied away from sex scenes in the past), and she’s been drugging him into a forgetful stupor anyway, so he’s even off the hook for infidelity. When he finds his men devouring the cattle of Helios, he’s little more than a disappointed dad, standing with his hands on his hips, wondering why his children won’t listen to reason. It’s a peculiarly modern take on the hero, reminiscent of modern superhero movies: we must identify with our protagonist, and he must be good, because we wouldn’t want to identify with someone who isn’t good, now, would we? That might make me feel bad. But an epic about a fundamentally good character who succeeds is boring. There’s a reason we tell stories about the prodigal son and not his upstanding brother.In the end, I am reminded of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003). Not in the hopeful, warm, cheery tone that Jackson gave to his films—gods no, The Odyssey is a long ways off from that, much closer to Tolkien’s vision of decay and ruin. But it is an excellent adaptation of some very difficult source material. If almost every detail is wrong (witness the gnashing of classicists’ teeth), the broad themes are well presented. It is an adaptation that will be pleasing to a vast number of people, and an adaptation that is ultimately a little unsatisfying or even hollow for those whose lives are more deeply imbued with the source material. We are lucky it was made at all. Who in their right mind would drop $250 million on a sword-and-sandals epic? Christopher Nolan is probably the only director alive who could command such a budget for such a project, and we—filmgoers—should be grateful he chose to make The Odyssey. Which raises the question, of course: why?
The World of The Odyssey and the World of 2026
Take it as a given that art reflects the time in which it was made. Roger Ebert, reviewing Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, wrote, “The fact that the story is set 35 years ago doesn’t mean a thing. It had to be set sometime, but it was made now. And it’s about us.” The same is true for any film, any adaptation, any art; the fact that The Odyssey is set over 3,000 years ago doesn’t mean a thing. How does this film reflect the times in which it was made? I’m not talking about the superficial nonsense being bandied about online over the race of various characters or the historicity of the armor. No, this is a film that is deeply imbued with the anxiety and uncertainty of our times and with our grim culpability in the breakdown of modern social contracts.
One of the most striking features of the film is its embrace of ambivalence. I’ll raise just one example, though there are more. Even in antiquity, Helen’s departure from Sparta was messy: did Helen fall in love with Paris and leave with him to Troy willingly, or was she abducted by the Trojan prince? Ancient authors disagree with one another (and Homer sometimes seems to contradict himself). Nolan leans into the ambiguity: while various characters seem to accept that Menelaus and Agamemnon used her disappearance as a welcome pretext for launching their war on Troy, Odysseus explicitly tells us that he does not know if she left willingly or not. This is a far cry from, say, Troy (2004), in which Paris and Helen slip away in the night after declaring their love for one another, Hector hectors his brother for knowing nothing of love, and Priam seems almost charmed at the idea of fighting a war for the sake of love. But I don’t think the difference is particularly surprising. An American audience in 2004 expected certainty, clearly defined lines between right and wrong. “Either you are with us,” the American president at the time said, “or you are with the terrorists.” By contrast, the world of 2026 is virtually defined by uncertainty and dissension. The United States and many other nations find themselves fractured by seemingly incurable internal strife, individuals spend their lives in virtual bubbles where truth is secondary to righteous anger, and new digital tools make us distrust our own eyes and ears. We should not expect an Odyssey that tells us what to believe, only that truth is unsteady, malleable even, in the hands of a good storyteller, or at least a storyteller who knows how to tell us what we want to hear.
There’s a similar ambivalence at work woven into the very fabric of the film, too. Is the movie realistic? Of course not, you say; there’s a monstrous cyclops, a witch, sea monsters, ghost armies, Athena herself shows up, and so on, and so on. Yet the film is shot largely like Nolan’s other movies: it’s dark, gritty, sparse. Tracking shots follow action sequences in the best imitation of a handheld camera that a 300-pound IMAX camera can manage. The low register of the dialogue makes the film immediate and raw, as opposed to the higher register one might have expected from an adaptation of classical literature. Scriptwise, the gods don’t show up, not really. We hear about Zeus, Helios, Poseidon, but we never see them, only Athena. And it turns out Athena isn’t really present, she’s only visible to Odysseus, and it’s an open-ended question as to whether she’s a goddess or a guilt-driven hallucination. Calypso and Circe are familiar with magic, but the movie does not explicitly make them goddesses. Once again, I think the ambivalence is intentional. Nolan is as expert a filmmaker as they come, and if he wanted to film this movie in a traditional epic style more like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), he certainly could have. His immediate predecessors give very specific visions of the gods, too. In The Odyssey (1997), starring Armand Assante, the gods are as real as they come. Isabella Rossellini is perfect as Athena, and anyone complaining about the lower register should listen to Michael J. Pollard as Aeolus shouting “Poseidon this, Poseidon that!” in his New Jersey best. In Troy, on the other hand, the gods are explicitly not a factor (a choice reviled by critics at the time, it’s worth noting). In one of the earliest lines of the film, a boy says to Achilles, “Are the stories true? They say your mother was an immortal goddess. They say you can’t be killed.” Achilles answers, with all the sardonic scruff and grit 2004 could muster, “I wouldn’t be bothering with the shield then, would I?” Nolan instead offers us doubt, a lack of clarity, the uncertain world of 2026 writ in ancient epic.
We ought to discuss the ending, and its many turns. At the top of this review, I noted that there were spoilers; well, despite the fact that the Odyssey is well over 2,500 years old, The Odyssey is only a week old, so I will reiterate: the following discussion includes spoilers.
At the end of the film, the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle come together (did I mention this movie was directed by Christopher Nolan?). The Greeks have been hearing terrible reports of the Sea Peoples, and it turns out those villains are real and, Odysseus realizes, are none other than Odysseus and the other Greeks themselves (He might as well ask, “Are we the baddies?”). As a major theme of the film (and the original epic) has been the importance of hospitality, it is the Trojan Horse itself that here represents the ultimate betrayal of hospitality, a gift as a sign of peace in actuality used as a deceitful weapon of war. The sack of Troy is presented as a culmination of men’s evil, replete with women screaming in the background, flames licking the sides of temples, and Agamemnon appearing at the gates of the city like nothing so much as Darth Vader himself. The Athena of Odysseus’s visions (whether real or hallucinatory) takes her form from a temple priestess whom Odysseus saw beheaded in the destruction of the city. Odysseus, at the end of his travels, has been reluctant to go home because he understands that he, in fact, is the monster. Damon’s closing narration informs us that the tale of Greeks and Trojans will be remembered, but their mistakes will be forgotten and then repeated. The last shot of the film is the horse in flames.
That’s a lot to take in. Does it work in the context of the film? I’m not sure. A twist ending can make you rethink the entire framing of a movie. The Sixth Sense (1999) is all the more poignant, for example, when you realize that Toni Collette can’t hear Bruce Willis speaking while he tries, desperately, to reach out to her after it’s already, er, too late. But a twist ending can make you feel cheated, too. In The Usual Suspects (1995), the ending reveals that everything you’ve been told was a lie. Well, now I’m just no longer invested in the story you just told me.
The Odyssey sits somewhere uncomfortably between the two. We’ve had isolated references to the incursions of the Sea Peoples throughout the movie, and it’s satisfactory, if not all that impressive or revelatory, to realize that Odysseus himself is basically responsible for the rumor. It even makes sense of some small, puzzling moments from earlier in the film, like when Odysseus and his crew land near a village whose residents have all just fled in the face of the coming of the Sea Peoples. But it’s not a big twist, really. Odysseus’s recognition of his own culpability also serves as his character development, though it’s a little undercut by the fact that he seems to have had this realization at Troy itself, before embarking on his adventures. You can play with the timeline of your film to establish character development, but it’s tricky business, and I’m not sure Nolan pulls it off here. If it were the sack of Troy that made Odysseus realize he’d been evil, then he spent the vast majority of the movie having already learned his lesson.
Ah, but what’s the horse bit all about? The central theme of the story on its face is about the importance of hospitality and of being a courteous guest (“Zeus’s Law,” in the shorthand language of the film). Obviously, the original epic emphasizes this moral as well. It’s not quite a heavy enough theme to justify a three-hour film in 2026, though, and we are right to dig a little deeper. It would be easy to read themes of immigration into the narrative, that being the modern issue most relevant to questions of hospitality, but immigration doesn’t quite square with the depiction of Odysseus and his sailors as a roving band of lost imperialist soldiers. These are not guys looking for hard work and new opportunities—they destroyed a city so thoroughly that rumors of their coming send entire villages fleeing to the countryside. And it’s here where Nolan points us to the real meaning of the story, at least as he’s constructed it, and at least as I read it.
The movie doesn’t quite end with the slaughter of the suitors and reunion of Odysseus and Penelope. It ends with the horse on fire and Odysseus in exile from his own home. It’s not like Zeus’s Law was broken by Odysseus’s Trojan Horse and then balance was restored by the execution of Antinous. Zeus’s Law was irrevocably broken. I’ll try not to harp on this point, but anyone observing the world of the last decade should see some immediate parallels. Hospitality is, more or less, broken, as we shuffle off toward a new era of civil strife, one where families and friends divide themselves on intractable and mutually exclusive political lines. And indeed, how should I act toward someone, even someone in my family, who argues that my friends should not be allowed to marry? That my daughter has no right to make decisions about her own body when she is an adult? The bonds of hospitality are indeed broken; we are moving ever more rapidly past a time when one’s political opinions could be set aside for the sake of going along to get along. This modern state of affairs is probably as irrevocable as The Odyssey’s vision of the end of the Bronze Age, too. I’m not sure that any reconciliation will be possible in my lifetime, anyway, and as I’m as much a participant in the fragmentation as anyone is, I’m not sure I want reconciliation. Perhaps we are all, in some ways, Odysseus burning down the city of Troy.
The damage is already done. It is easier to break a social system down than it is to rebuild it. So the grim ending to the film maps onto the grim feeling I have about the world in 2026. I wish it offered a more hopeful future than simply sailing into sunny exile, but I’m not sure it would have been right to do so. I don’t know if these thoughts passed through Nolan’s when he made The Odyssey. But I don’t know how you could avoid them, either.
The Order of The Odyssey
In fine, where does The Odyssey sit alongside other adaptations of the story? I take as my touchstone T. S. Eliot’s observations in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) on poetry and the canon:
What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.
We should, then, ask how The Odyssey was shaped by the films that came before it and how it changes our own appreciation of those films now that it exists. I’ll forego a full recitation of past film versions of the story, with apologies to Kirk Douglas and others, and just take two more recent examples I’ve already noted above, The Odyssey(1997) and Troy (2004), as well as The Return (2024). Rather than extended discussions of each, let’s just focus on the films’ individual ethos, particularly as reflected in the character of Odysseus.
I saw The Odyssey (1997), or at least parts of it, several times in classrooms when I was in middle and high school. I would not be surprised if it made appearances in quite a few classrooms, perhaps shown on a TV that was wheeled in on a large, metal cart by a teacher trying to get their students interested in classic literature and finding the man of many turns not quite up to the task without digital help. It has a surprisingly deep cast, and modern readers may find it easier to understand how impactful a TV movie or miniseries could be from the 1970s to the 1990s if they think of them as the ancient equivalent of a Netflix or Amazon limited series (which are just miniseries in all but name).
I’m not sure if Nolan took anything from Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Odyssey (1997) except a laundry list of what not to do. The two-part TV movie is a fundamentally bright and cheerful film, and it is often unapologetically goofy, a perfect representation of the brash confidence and positivity of the 1990s. Humor leavens almost every scene. Armand Assante as Odysseus veers toward brawn over brains, and he often looks befuddled by the various challenges thrown at him. But what strikes me about The Odyssey (1997) in light of The Odyssey is how prominent the female characters are. Second-billed is Greta Sacchi as Penelope, and rightly so; she has a huge amount of screentime and uses it to good advantage. Anticlea, Odysseus’s mother, is another major character in this version (played by Irene Pappas, no less), and she and Penelope share numerous scenes together up until Anticlea’s suicide. They are active characters who plan and argue and have, you know, characterization beyond “patient wife” and “patient mother.” “If Odysseus is dead, you must bear it and go on. You must live for your son. As I did. You must raise a king!” says Anticlea. Penelope retorts, “You have a heart of stone.” Anticlea is not so unfeeling, though: “Yes, if stone can shiver and bleed.” Maybe that bit of dialogue is a little overwrought, but Nolan’s version of the story could have benefited from a conversation or two between its female characters. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Bernadette Peters, who devours the scenery with abandon as a hyper-sexual Circe. Let’s just say that Armand Assante’s Odysseus is not off the hook for infidelity. As The Odyssey (1997) hews a little closer to Homer’s text than The Odyssey, and doesn’t carry an R rating, I suspect its time in the classroom has not yet come to a complete end.
If The Odyssey (1997) gives us a freewheeling, go-go 90s feel, Troy is a much stodgier, conservative film. I do not mean that it reflects the policies of the Republican party, either now or in 2004, merely that the values it espouses are, broadly, very traditional: love and country are inherently worth fighting and dying for, it is bravery to fight and cowardice to run, the bonds of family run deeper than any others (it is admittedly more ambivalent about the role of faith and belief). Sean Bean’s version of Odysseus is certainly capable of fighting, but compared to Armand Assante, he is marked more by his wit and power of persuasion (“You have your swords, I have my tricks,” he tells Achilles and Patroclus). The Trojan Horse is a clever ruse, not a source of guilt; the real violators of the rules of hospitality are Agamemnon and Menelaus, who plot to launch a surprise attack on Troy after Menelaus kills Paris in one-on-one combat (he is surprised to find himself slain by Hector before he can land the finishing blow on Paris, which astute viewers will note is a fairly major deviation from the Iliad).
The movie opens with a voiceover from Sean Bean that offers a succinct statement of Troy’s worldview: “Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity. And so we ask ourselves: Will our actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear our names long after we are gone, and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved?” And the movie does indeed stick to those themes. In teaching terms, you might disagree with the paper’s thesis (and think its phrasing is a bit hackneyed), but at least the body paragraphs go about trying to prove it. Again, I suspect Nolan used that opening narration as a thesis to argue against. It’s not that The Odyssey is an inherently liberal film, much though certain subsets of the terminally online might want it to be. After all, setting aside the fact that Elliot Page exists as a person in the movie (quelle horreur), the central theme of The Odyssey is that the old social order is breaking down, and that is a bad thing, virtually the definition of a conservative standpoint. The distinction between The Odyssey and Troy is more fundamental: in Troy, we tell the cool stories, and they’re pretty frikkin’ cool, aren’t they? In The Odyssey, as Odysseus warns us, we often tell the cool stories but leave out the real, lingering evils. Aside from how blindingly obvious it is that one film was made in 2004 and the other in 2026, Wolfgang Petersen’s desire to provide spectacle set alongside Nolan’s ambitions to provide spectacle and introspection make for a marked contrast (all the more surprising given Petersen also directed Das Boot [1981]). I have always stood up for Troy, which I have long thought was a pretty fun movie, if not a very good one. I have to confess, though, seeing The Odyssey, for all its faults, leaves Troy feeling comparatively unsatisfying. One wonders what could have been, given the depth of introspection in the Iliad, and if The Odyssey doesn’t always succeed, it at least takes a big swing in a way Troy does not. Perhaps that is not fair; Troy has its own ambitions. But if it is not fair, it is nevertheless true.
Some readers might be surprised to find that The Odyssey is actually the second significant Homeric movie of the 2020s. In 2024, a mere two years ago, Ralph Fiennes starred in The Return, which only appeared in limited release (it made about $3.2 million). That film contains only the final episode of the Odyssey, from Odysseus’s return to Ithaca to the slaughter of the suitors. Fiennes’s Odysseus is scarred by war, a victim of what we would now call PTSD, unsure of his role and his own abilities. The violence at the end of the film is brutal: Odysseus is drenched in blood while Penelope is screaming and begging Telemachus to spare Antinous, only to watch with horror as Telemachus beheads the defenseless man. The brutality is emphatically not cathartic. We instead see the cycle of violence, neverending, spiraling on down to the present. The same scene in The Odyssey, by contrast, is a bit muddled. The violence is not celebrated, per se, but it’s not not celebrated. Odysseus tells us this whole story about the evil deeds that happened at Troy…before eviscerating countless suitors in a Hollywood action scene. Yes, he heads out to exile afterward, but it feels more like a retirement than a punishment. The scene in The Odyssey lacks the visceral horror of The Return, and to the extent that it tries to match it, I cannot help but unfavorably compare it to The Return. If I thought Pasolini’s film was a bit plodding on my first watch, I find it increasingly intriguing after watching the rapid-fire editing and muddled messaging of The Odyssey. The Return has a specific and focused story it sets about telling and it does so well; perhaps that’s better than trying to retell all of the Odyssey in one go.
Which brings me to my final question: What next for Odysseus? We likely won’t see another movie based on the Odyssey for a long time. What director would dare put some new work up against a critically acclaimed, audience-beloved, box-office smash featuring the biggest stars and biggest budget of its day? Hollywood obviously has an addiction to remakes, but I suspect we might, instead, see more limited stories like The Return, but from Odyssey-adjacent literature: Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005) or Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018) make for good candidates. Perhaps some enterprising director will tackle the Aeneid, which has never been adapted for the screen outside of some minor Italian works of the 1960s and 1970s. But the Odyssey? I’d be surprised to see another adaptation on this scale in my lifetime.
Then again, who knows. We do move on, time passes. L’Odissea (1911) is one of many silent films from cinema’s earliest years. If Christopher Nolan has seen it, it doesn’t show. Virtually every shot in his film is constructed differently, the structure is completely different, everything is…different. But why should he? Apart from antiquarian interest, L’Odissea lacks any real appeal to a modern audience. It’s a more or less straight adaptation of some of the more famous scenes of the Homeric poem, marked by dodgy costumes and some surprisingly good special effects (composite shots and forced perspective went a long way at a time when “computer” usually referred to a woman tasked with doing arithmetic). I only watched it in preparation for viewing Nolan’s film and I’ll probably never revisit it. There’s little reason to. Someday, too, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will be mostly forgotten, remembered only by those with an antiquarian interest in the tumultuous 2020s. But I suspect it will be quite some time before that comes to pass.
Leave a Reply