I can’t remember the first time I heard “The Odyssey”; it was read to me before I could read it myself. I came to know the wooden horse, the Cyclops, Penelope at her loom and Odysseus lashed to the mast through illustrated versions long before I understood that they belonged to a pillar of Western literature. My childhood dogs were named Argos and Hector.
That is the peculiarity of The Odyssey: Long before we read the poem, many of us have already been living with pieces of it for years.
That history is why I wanted so badly to love Christopher Nolan’s film. I went into it with a devotion to the story and came out with criticisms of Nolan’s choices. It took some thought to realize those two facts aren’t necessarily in opposition to each other.
I watched the picture in a Roman theater, just days after finishing weeks of work on an archaeological dig and days before my sister and I are set to cross the Strait of Messina to travel Sicily, Malta, Tunisia and the Mediterranean waters that form the backdrop of Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from Troy. If ever a time and setting promised to sweep me away, this was it.
It didn’t.
That surprised me because there is so much in Nolan’s project to admire. At a moment when artificial intelligence promises instant epics and CGI can cheapen the look of a film, Nolan has produced an unarguably human movie. He remains a steadfast believer in actors, physical landscapes and analog craftsmanship.
Still, the cast of Nolan’s Odyssey’s often does not seem able to carry the weight of the material. Matt Damon never quite disappears into Odysseus. Homer’s hero is brilliant and vain, compassionate and ruthless. He is a man endlessly resourceful yet repeatedly undone by his own hubris. Damon portrays a warrior, but rarely the contradictions that render Odysseus one of literature’s most complex characters. Tom Holland’s Telemachus fares worse. In Homer, Telemachus grows from a son overshadowed by his absent father into a man capable of standing beside him. In the film, that transformation, at best, is underplayed.
No change disappointed me more than what Nolan does with Penelope, despite perhaps the best acting in the film by Anne Hathaway. Homer’s Penelope is not merely faithful; she is formidable. She survives her husband’s long absence using the same weapons he does: patience, deception and an extraordinary ability to judge human character. When Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, disguised as a beggar, she refuses to accept him on his word. Their eventual reunion is preceded by a contest between two minds accustomed to testing everyone around them, the apex of which is one of the cleverer moments in epic literature.
Penelope casually orders her marriage bed moved out of her bedchamber. Odysseus can’t contain himself; the bed cannot be moved, because he built it himself around the living trunk of an olive tree. Only then does Penelope accept the stranger as her husband. In an epic defined by Odysseus’s cunning, Penelope outflanks the trickster.
Nolan abandons this scene entirely. His Penelope instead listens to Odysseus confess his guilt over Troy before recognizing him by the pin she gave him. The alteration serves the story Nolan seems to want to tell: a narrative focused less on the triumph of homecoming than on the moral burdens a soldier carries back from war. But it strips Penelope of her agency. Homer gives Odysseus an equal who can challenge him; Nolan gives him someone who can forgive him.
That flattening appears elsewhere. The dialogue repeatedly pulls the viewer out of the ancient world Nolan worked so hard to build visually. Characters casually drop references to “Mom,” “Dad,” and say that people just want “to party.” And like pedantic time travelers determined to ensure the audience understands the action is taking place at the end of the Bronze Age, Odysseus announces, “Our age of bronze is collapsing.” Seemingly to reinforce the point, Penelope exclaims that “our civilization is under attack.”
The issue is not the hindsight and the modern vernacular in itself, which are often necessary to make an ancient story resonant. Homer himself inherited an archaic oral tradition and reshaped it through the cultural assumptions of his own era. The problem is not that Nolan’s script is anachronistic. It is that its anachronisms pull viewers out of the world rather than drawing them deeper into it.
The cyclops sequence manages to capture both what Nolan loses and what he discovers. Homer’s Polyphemus is terrifying, but he is also funny, thanking Odysseus for the wine by promising to eat him last of his men. Odysseus survives the monster not through strength, but intelligence. He calls himself “Nobody,” intoxicates the Cyclops and completes the ruse by escaping with his men clinging to the underbellies of Polyphemus’s sheep. Once safely at sea, however, Homer’s Odysseus cannot resist shouting his real name back across the water. His intelligence saves him; his vanity condemns him.
Nolan strips away this playfulness. His Odysseus exhibits little of Homer’s ingenuity; his final attack on Polyphemus driven by anger rather than calculation. Rage makes anyone reckless. Homer’s Odysseus gives us something more subtle: a man clever enough to escape the impossible who still needs everyone to know he did it.
At first, I thought Nolan had simply diminished one of Homer’s richest episodes. The more I thought about those changes, however, the more another idea emerged. By stripping the episode of its levity, Nolan highlights how war turns every encounter into an act of immediate, unthinking violence. Nolan’s Odysseus assumes the Cyclops is a monster long before he discovers that the creature can speak and worships the same gods. When one of Odysseus’s men asks why the Cyclops never tried to reason with them, Odysseus dismisses the thought: “Do you speak to ants?”
In Nolan’s telling, the dehumanization is mutual. Polyphemus sees men as livestock to be consumed; Odysseus sees Polyphemus as something beneath reasoning. Neither recognizes the humanity of the other until violence has made recognition moot, suggesting that war can strip a soldier’s capacity for empathy.
That all said, it’s easy to view these changes as a loss and mourn the original. But Nolan’s work isn’t a museum piece. Even an imperfect interpretation reminds us why we still care enough to argue with it.
Emily Wilson, the University of Pennsylvania classicist whose 2017 translation of The Odyssey Nolan praised before the film’s release, has since argued that the movie lacks Homer’s psychological and ethical depth. I share much of that critique, but I think Wilson understates what Nolan does find in Homer. If Nolan’s Odyssey feels like a lesser rendition of Homer, such a quality does not reject the tradition of reinterpretation. The argument itself belongs to that tradition.
Ancient writers never treated Homer as unalterable. Plato debated his morality, the Greeks challenged heroic ideals and Virgil constructed the Aeneid as a Roman version of the Odyssey. Every era demands its own Homer. Tennyson imagined an Odysseus who finds domestic peace dull and longs to sail beyond the sunset; Cavafy turned Ithaca into an allegory for life’s journey; Joyce walks Odysseus through Dublin over the course of a day. None of these replaced Homer. Each found something new within his words.
Nolan belongs to that tradition. His audience, after all, is not made up exclusively of people who have spent years with Homer. It is also made up of people meeting Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus for the first time. The film overexplains because many modern viewers have not been exposed to Homer.
As someone who already loved the poem, I often wished Nolan trusted his audience more. But I recognize and value that he has invited millions of people into a conversation they might otherwise never have joined. That is why I find the loudest complaints about the film — particularly those insisting there is one historically authentic version of Homer that Nolan somehow violated — so unpersuasive.
Homer himself inherited stories already centuries old. The Odyssey has survived because generation after generation has retold it, translated it, argued with it and made it their own, just as Nolan does. I’m glad he made his interpretation. It is only through interpretations that The Odyssey first reached me. It is through interpretation that it continues to reach each new generation. That is how great stories survive.
Isabel Menna ‘29 is a reporter from Leavenworth, Wash., is majoring in economics and is a member of the Dartmouth Ski Patrol.
