Director Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited adaptation of the preeminent classical poem The Odyssey has been steeped in controversy from the moment the release of casting announcements began. The film is helmed by a crop of Hollywood’s most famous faces: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Zendaya. It also features clearly interpretive casting choices, like Travis Scott as a bard (and maybe even the bard himself—the original poem features a character often thought to represent Homer). The film is massive in scale, pulling no punches when it comes to star power, budget, or cinematography; all in an effort to hone out the poem’s most grand aesthetic qualities.

Finally, the public is getting to immerse itself in this thesis on the Odyssey from the director who has brought us many a meditation on the role of time, personal histories, and the promise of the future. Nolan’s The Odyssey provides his answer to a question many fans of the original have often asked –why does Odysseus seem, even at odds with his own voiced desperation and hopes, not to truly want to return home? His answer casts Odysseus slightly against the canon; he is still clever, but far more sanitized than the Greeks, and especially the Romans, often read him to be. In fact, Nolan’s Odysseus is most significantly cast as an honorable man – a man who plucks his bow–  in a world where honor is going out of fashion. His voyage is marked by a secret shame, an original sin, which anchors the film’s most vital reveal, and most compelling Nolanification—that he is the cause of this coming end of the age. However, the film also suggests that he is as much a victim of this deterioration as he is the cause. 

In pursuit of this rhetorical goal, Nolan extrapolates from moments of the poem and of other works from the classical canon that do not belong to the most dominant interpretations of ‘Homer’s’ thematic interests, and repurposes the poem’s narrative salience and aesthetic power as a palimpsest. Audiences might find themselves pulled between past and present, the ‘alwaysness’ of the narrative, the familiarness of the faces and the language, the strangeness of the cultural landscape. Nolan’s Odyssey is not interested in one-to-one adaptation, but instead in superimposing his text on the ancient, in pursuit of some other truth. That truth finds a likeness between the concerns of our day and Odysseus’s: young boys forced to war while their wealthy counterparts are safe at home, genocidal ‘total’ wars, and a world playing fast and loose with the agency of women. 

Monsters share the same Gods as heroes

One of the wonderful bits of the poem that is emphasized in the film is that in the Homeric landscape, the most grotesque monsters and the most elite of heroes all answer to the same Gods, and often, those Gods answer back. This notion plays a crucial role in shattering the cultural anxiety that Nolan is most interested in refusing: the fear of the stranger in your home – a fear of cultural mixing, immigration, and social bonds built on shared humanity rather than ethnic heritage. Because the truth is, the best readings of Homer’s monsters understand that they are not merely monsters at all – they are the other, the out-group, the foreigner. Nolan calls on us to consider that these figures are often cast as the absolute grotesque, in deliberate attempts to undermine their humanity. To this end, two of the film’s major antagonists, Polyphemus and Circe, are both constructed with a grounded, realist lens in mind. 

Why is ‘No One’ ‘No One’?

There are several whole episodes from the poem cut from Nolan’s Odyssey (the Lotus flower, Aeolus the God of the Winds). However, the revision which is most notably purposed towards substantiating Nolan’s vision of the poem is the episode with the Cyclops, Polyphemus. Nolan’s version of the Cyclops scene seems somehow even more petulant than the original – where Odysseus yells his own praises to taunt the Cyclops. Importantly, Nolan’s Polyphemus prays to his father, Poseidon, before Odysseus has ever revealed himself. In the film, Odysseus’s choice to make the Cyclops aware of his impending escape serves to lead to the immediate deaths of even more of his men, but it is not the act that brings the wrath of the Sea God down upon their heads. His shooting of the arrow is made far more perplexing than the poem’s bragging Odysseus. Are we supposed to believe that this, most cunning of men, makes such a miscalculation? Nolan doesn’t seem to want to stop at that premise – rather, it is with this shooting of the bow that Odysseus’s central fears are brought into perspective for the audience. This is a man afraid of his return – which the Greeks called nostos, like nostalgia, meaning ‘the pain of the return ’-and of who he has become in his absence.  For Nolan, the nostalgia of the narrative is that Odysseus may return, only if he can reckon with the pain and truth of his past.

Clytemnestra and Helen as Twins

In classical mythology, Clytemnestra and Helen are half-sisters, not likely identical twins, as they appear in the film. This revision of the mythos, however, is used to underscore a crucial truth of the Odyssey – that the Trojan War, despite how it is rhetorically cast, even by some of its veterans, was not, in truth, about Helen’s heart (or visage). The narrative uncertainty, as old as the poem itself, about whether Helen left of her own accord, was seduced, or was kidnapped, plays a role in emphasizing this. We don’t know for certain why she comes to be with Paris in Troy, and that might be kind of the point. In Nolan’s Homeric world, where “the face that launched a thousand ships” is literally not one of a kind, the argumentative manipulations of Helen’s “role” in the conflict are brought even more vividly into view. Clytemnestra and Helen, who are typically perceived as foils to Penelope in the poem (Evil Woman vs. Foolish/Troublesome Woman vs. Steadfast/True Woman), are set as two sides of the same coin. Their lives have been repeatedly overturned by the wills of the men closest to them, those they loved and those they trusted. And while the same can be said for Penelope, the film observes the tense randomness in these women’s fates. Penelope, for example, suggests murdering all the suitors to end her troubles. Nolan understands that each of these women, under different circumstances, might have been the other – it is their patriarchal world that has dictated their most notorious moments, not their moral goodness. It is a close and critical interpretation of the poem that echoes Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey, but is also present in older translations. However, in Nolan’s pursuit of a cleaner, more repentant Odysseus, he cuts an event from the poem which closely echoes his understanding of the fate of women in the age of heroes – the hanging of the 12 slave girls by Odysseus and Telemachus. 

Where is Achilles?

Likely because so many people rage-tweeting about The Odyssey had never actually read it in their adult lives, much of the controversy over the movie pre-premiere revolved around the casting of Achilles and his role in the film. Well, Achilles is cut from the text altogether, and for solid argumentative reasons. In the poem, Achilles appears as one of the several shades of the dead who speak to Odysseus in the land of Hades. He levies one of the poem’s most important and foreboding statements, ‘No winning words about death to me… By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.’ This moment is vital to the poem’s exploration of ‘kleos’ (undying glory). Achilles’s reflections –that he would have preferred a life of no consequence to the one that found him bound for eternity in songs and praise– are often read as a direct indictment of Odysseus’s own hubris. However, as aforementioned, Nolan largely cuts the most glaring moments of Odysseus’s pursuit of greatness and pride from his film. Rather than being motivated by the pursuit of kleos, it is a sense of duty and desire (to return home to his wife and young son) that dictate his actions at Troy and beyond. Nolan seems to intentionally minimize a narrative focus on kleos, in pursuit of his sanitized Odysseus, rendering this moment largely irrelevant. However, this choice is not merely a valorization of Odysseus; it works to keep the audience’s focus on Odysseus’s own shame and the perceived deterioration of the world’s social order. 

Instead, Nolan looks to a later classical text, The Aeneid, to fulfil the primary ‘familiar to Odysseus’ shade of the dead role. Sinon, who is sometimes misunderstood as a character original to Nolan, features in Virgil’s rendition of the Trojan Horse episode, playing much the same role he does in the film. Virgil’s Sinon is a cousin of Odysseus rather than a young, rather disenfranchised boy as he appears for Nolan. While Virgil’s Sinon is cunning and intentional, like his cousin, Nolan’s is puppetted and dies without knowing the role he is playing in winning the war. Thus, when Elliot Page’s Sinon appears to Odysseus, angry and betrayed, audiences are asked to focus on the human cost of Odysseus’s clever ploy: the destruction not just of the ties that bind strangers, but of those that bind friends as well.

The Slaughter of Mentor

The film begins with the expository intertitle, ‘In a time of apparent magic.’ This isn’t a mere handwave at the subjectivity surrounding how one might read the magic of the Odyssey. Instead, Nolan continuously undermines the narrative’s magic as a central argumentative impulse. The suggestion that the magic, including the Gods, are all merely ways our characters understand their world and cope with its strangeness, rather than real acting figures, underlines Nolan’s focus on the familiarity of Odysseus’s circumstances. Odysseus’s shame, fear of the past, and turmoil over his future are set as his real obstacles. The poem’s metaphoric interests are made far more literal in the decisions Nolan makes to accomplish this narrative transformation. For example, audiences will watch the slaughter of Mentor by the suitors in a temple of Athena. Lovers of Homer recognize this subversion – Athena appears as Mentor throughout the poem. As Mentor bleeds out in the holy place of the Goddess who may or may not be known to wear his skin, the hope of a direct divine intervention slips away. It is Odysseus who must act to save his son’s life. Mentor’s visible shock at seeing Odysseus’s otherwise hidden face seems to underline his humanity. Additionally, the suitors’ conspiracy, which leads to Mentor’s murder, mirrors Odysseus’s ‘murder’ of Athena, revealed in the film’s final act. Odysseus’s great shame, his role in the total violation of xenia at Troy, is directly echoed by the suitors, who have invaded Telemachus and Penelope’s home and conspire for the same outcome. Likely, neither character is actually Athena, but both events symbolize the violent destruction of social bonds to gain power.

When Old Man Odysseus reveals to the audience, by way of Penelope, his turmoil over the fate of Troy, he also reveals that his north star in the journey –his Athena – has been the face of a victim of the Greeks’ crimes against Zeus’s law at Troy. Nolan once again levies the ‘apparent’ in the expository card against a literalist reading of the poem. Audiences are left unsure, forced to question whether Athena has ever really been with Odysseus at all – or whether she is a figment of his shame and regret. In the latter reading of the film, Nolan suggests once again that the power of life and of destruction rests not with magic, but in people and society. Odysseus’s own words to Penelope, his pain over violating ‘the only thing that’s ever sacred between people’ – not Gods, not magic, but trust and a recognition of shared humanity- are of vital importance. 

In a reading of the film where Athena has simply been wearing the face of the murdered Trojan girl, audiences must consider her appearances as charges levied by the Goddess of war and wisdom against Odysseus. Interestingly, this seems to even more significantly diverge from the poetic text. Homer’s Athena loves Odysseus’s cleverness and in fact inspires the construction of the horse. She is not haunting him, but guiding him. In Nolan’s epic, this is a dual task which must culminate in Odysseus facing his truth – facing home, his return, and thus facing the impacts of his crimes and his avoidance. 

Circe

Similarly, the most notable difference between Homer’s Circe and Nolan’s is a lack of smoke and mirrors, pomp and circumstance. Circe, who in the poem appears as beautifully refined, finely dressed, and living in a palace. The poem’s Circe episode is dripping with the alluring enchantment which marks the danger she poses to Odysseus and her men. This aesthetic vision is entirely cut from Nolan’s version of the episode. Instead, Nolan opts for a shabby wooden cabin and a rather plainly presented Goddess-Sorceress. Circe’s magic leans into the grotesque of the film, and refuses to turn away from what it would mean to turn a human body into an animal one. The transformation of the Pig-Crew back into human men, as actress Samantha Morton whispers ‘back into your disguises,’ is chilling, repulsive, and darkly beautiful in its artistry. Nolanified Circe seems less to be testing the men; her disgust for them is more heavily tied to her belief that their nature is to violate –and that given the chance, they would have done so to her. In the epic, this might be read as a more general violation of Xenia –guest/host relations. However, Nolan’s interpretation –which in part echoes sentiments of Madeline Miller’s Circe novel– continues to emphasize the tenuous circumstances of the women of the Odyssey. Once again, ‘Zeus’s law’ is placed at the center, and this time it is the host, a seemingly regular but lone –and therefore vulnerable-looking woman – who is actually a Goddess in disguise. Morton’s Circe seems to shake with an exhaustion, a revulsion, that is based in lived experience: ‘a good commander thinks their men’s savagery is actually discipline.’ Her words echo implications of what the Greeks had committed at Troy, a total war – or hunt, as Odysseus later himself describes – that spares not even the life of a young priestess. 

Circe’s acts follow the same cycle of violation and violence that Odysseus’s do – from an original violation, the broken social bonds usher in the ‘end of the bronze age’ – a world where to be good is to be victimized and taken advantage of. 

Who says you can’t go home?

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is about the shames, griefs, and even idiocies that we are too afraid to remember. How we stumble, afraid of these truths, into more hardship, and often steal years away from ourselves in the process.  Nolan’s Odysseus sees his conceptualization of the Trojan horse and part played in the following destruction as the sin that births a dark age. That dark age is built on a fear of a  ‘people from the sea’ who will invade the homelands of others and enact senseless violence and domination. But the film itself understands that the act belongs to a cycle. It is Agamemnon’s lust for expanded power that forces Odysseus to Troy. It is their loyalty and fealty to Odysseus that forces his men to the venue of their deaths. In the end, these men are doomed by the war, by Agamemnon’s ambition, but just as truthfully, by themselves. In the film, Odysseus is set apart, not by his cunning or his role as a minor king, but by his self-knowledge. It is the fact of his guilty conscience and his ability to eventually reckon with it that deliver him from his voyage. Tied to the mast during the siren episode, Odysseus is forced to hear his own truth: “what you most can’t have, is what you already had…it told me I don’t really want to go home.”

 As in the poem, Nolan’s Agamemnon is a notable foil for Odysseus. He returns home dripping in aura, ready to be bathed and receive the welcome of his dutiful wife. Except – he gives no thought to how Clytemnestra might be inclined to welcome the man that sacrificed her daughter for favorable winds. Like Odysseus’s men, this inability to see his own guilt and then to deal with it orchestrates his downfall. 

In contrast, Odysseus’s final act of return and the slaughter of the suitors is characterized not simply as a return to his seat of power (an act of entitlement) but as a cathartic battle with the cycle of his own making. However, in constructing the slaughter in this way, Nolan is forced to make a final significant divergence from the Homeric episode, and instead follow in the footsteps of later classical tales. Odysseus must immediately abdicate power. The violation at Troy is just that; his guilt is built into something real, he can overcome it, but he cannot return to a life from before it was true. In the film’s closing moments, as Odysseus and Penelope head west towards the setting sun –right to the dusk of their age– Nolan gives a final warning: ‘Songs will be all they have left to remember those of us who could write.’ A reminder of time’s funny pattern – that things like ‘intellectual progress’ have not always worked forwards, and can even be destroyed or ‘sent backwards’. At the end of their world, Nolan’s Odysseus and Penelope have each other in arms, so they have love, fealty, and hope for the future –even if it won’t come to fruition for centuries to come. The audience is called to consider the cyclical nature of the narrative, society, empire, and life. 

Nolan understands the Odyssey as a story with the central question: can you go home again? His answer is complex. Yes, but you might not be able to stay; you might return so changed that the best you can do is clean house for the next generation to take the floor. Nolan’s epic warns of the violence we might do while focused only on our own discomforts and desires, our fear of the other, and how there will always come a day when the host becomes the stranger and back again. In a moment of constant rhetoric against immigration and wars constructed in pursuit of greater power and influence, Nolan’s reading of the Odyssey reminds us why the classics are the classics.  In the strangeness of the Homeric landscape, modern audiences should still be able to recognize their anxieties, realities, and innermost hopes.

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