The Odyssey Is Spectacular. I Just Wish It Trusted Its Own Mythology.
Updated: Sep 7
Christopher Nolan built a world you can practically reach out and touch. So why does his adaptation sometimes feel reluctant to let us live in it?
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the sort of film I should be completely insufferable about.
Ancient Greece. Gods. Monsters. War. Betrayal. A twenty-year journey home. A wife holding off an increasingly aggressive collection of suitors while her husband is being terrorised by everything from a Cyclops to his own conscience.
Give me a morally complicated protagonist and some Greek mythology and I’m already halfway there.
And there is a lot about The Odyssey that I genuinely enjoyed. Actually, “enjoyed” feels slightly inadequate for some of it.
This is an enormous film. Not simply expensive-looking, which isn’t the same thing, but physical. Nolan and his collaborators have made a world that appears to possess weight and texture. Ships look vulnerable against the sea. Stone looks like stone.
Crowds occupy actual space. Creatures don’t feel like digital things temporarily inserted into somebody’s eyeline.
You can feel the money, certainly. More importantly, you can feel the making.
Which is why my problems with The Odyssey are slightly frustrating to explain. I don’t think Nolan lacked ambition. If anything, I think he may have had too much of it.
Because somewhere inside this enormous mythological blockbuster is a fascinating film about memory, war, guilt, civilisation and the impossibility of returning to the person you were before you left.
I just don’t think The Odyssey always gives that film enough room to breathe.
Twenty years is a long time to wait for somebody
We begin not with Odysseus, but with his absence.
Twenty years have passed since Ithaca had a king. Penelope still waits for him.
Telemachus still believes his father might return. Eumaeus does too. Almost everybody else has begun behaving as though Odysseus is already dead.
The suitors circle Penelope and, by extension, the throne. Antinous is the most dangerous among them, increasingly willing to remove Telemachus altogether if that’s what it takes to claim Ithaca.
And almost immediately Nolan introduces an idea that becomes essential to his reinterpretation of the story: xenia.
The relationship between guest and host. Mutual respect. Hospitality. Obligation. The understanding that there are rules governing how we treat somebody who enters our home and, equally, how somebody behaves once welcomed into it.
It would be easy for that to become a little Ancient Greek vocabulary lesson. Nolan instead makes it something much larger.
Xenia is civilisation.
Break those rules and something begins to collapse.
The suitors are doing exactly that in Odysseus’s home. Penelope also fears murderous “people from the sea” who violate Zeus’s law. Initially, the moral geography seems straightforward: civilisation is here; the barbarians are out there.
Except Nolan spends the next three hours making that distinction increasingly difficult to maintain.
And that’s where I think this adaptation is at its best.
Because Nolan isn’t particularly interested in asking whether Odysseus is capable of getting home. We know where this story is going. He’s interested in a much nastier question:
What happens when the hero gets home and has to confront the possibility that he no longer deserves to be called one?
That is a film I desperately wanted to sink into.
Unfortunately, The Odyssey also has approximately eight thousand other things it would like to show me.
Somehow, three hours isn’t enough
Once Telemachus leaves Ithaca looking for answers, Nolan begins opening up the history that brought everyone here.
Menelaus and Helen give us pieces of Troy. Then we find Odysseus on Ogygia. Athena appears. Calypso wants him to stay. Memory begins returning.
And suddenly the film is moving backwards through everything Odysseus has spent years trying not to remember: Troy, the Trojan Horse, Sinon, Polyphemus, Poseidon, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the Land of the Dead, Tiresias, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the Sun God, the destruction of Odysseus’s crew.
Then Ogygia again.
It is a lot of story.
Obviously, that’s partly Homer’s fault. The Odyssey has never been accused of lacking incident. But cinema creates a particular problem for episodic storytelling.
Events cannot simply follow each other. They have to accumulate.
I don’t only need to know that Odysseus survived one encounter before reaching another. I need to feel that the man leaving each experience is slightly different from the man who entered it.
Sometimes Nolan achieves that beautifully.
At other times, I can see the joins.
Something enormous happens—something that should fundamentally alter how I understand Odysseus, his men or the world—and suddenly the film is somewhere else.
Yet other scenes linger. Certain emotional ideas arrive, make their point and then return later to make it again.
It’s a peculiar pacing problem because The Odyssey somehow manages to feel too long and too rushed at the same time.
There were moments where I wanted it to hurry up. There were others where I practically wanted to grab the film by the shoulders and say, No. Come back. We weren’t finished with that.
And this became particularly noticeable whenever the gods and monsters entered the story.
Give me the weird shit
Greek mythology is weird.
I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
There is a giant one-eyed man eating soldiers. A witch turns people into pigs. Dead men give advice. Sirens lure sailors to their deaths. A nymph keeps Odysseus on an island for seven years. Gods intervene in human affairs with alarming regularity.
I don’t need Nolan to make any of that sensible.
It’s The Odyssey.
Give me the weird shit.
What I do need is for the film to establish how the divine fits into the world it has created.
And this is where Nolan and I apparently have a minor philosophical disagreement.
His adaptation is fascinated by human autonomy. This Odysseus isn’t merely a plaything of the gods, blown around the Mediterranean because various deities have opinions about him. Nolan reduces some of Homer’s divine machinery and makes Odysseus far more responsible for the direction of his own journey.
I understand why.
It allows the twenty-year absence to become psychological. Odysseus isn’t only prevented from returning home. Part of him is avoiding it.
He’s carrying Troy. He’s carrying the people who died because of him. He’s carrying things he doesn’t particularly want Penelope to know.
That’s much more interesting to me than simply saying Poseidon made the journey difficult.
But there’s a trade-off.
If you reduce the divine machinery of a story whose universe fundamentally operates through divine machinery, the pieces you retain need to be established particularly well.
Athena exists. Poseidon matters. Zeus matters. Prophecy works. The dead speak. Divine punishment is real.
And yet there are moments where the film seems strangely hesitant about letting its supernatural world simply be supernatural.
Which is particularly bizarre because visually, Nolan does the exact opposite.
Nolan built the bloody thing
If there is one accusation I absolutely cannot make against The Odyssey, it is that Christopher Nolan failed to commit to this world physically.
The man apparently looked at Greek mythology and thought, Fine. We’ll build it.
Troy was realised through an enormous physical set. Multiple Trojan Horses were constructed.
And Polyphemus?
They built an enormous Cyclops puppet.
At some point somebody presumably had to submit paperwork for that.
The approach extends to the sea sequences too: real boats, stunt performers and practical techniques used to give the water genuine physical unpredictability.
And you can tell.
There’s a wonderful vulnerability to human beings standing against something physically enormous. Polyphemus doesn’t feel like a fantasy creature who has temporarily wandered in from another genre. He feels like an actual problem these men have somehow found themselves trapped in a cave with.
The ships don’t look like invincible movie objects. They look like bits of wood floating on a sea considerably larger than they are.
And water behaves like water—which is to say it behaves as though it doesn’t give a shit that Christopher Nolan has a shooting schedule.
That physical unpredictability matters.
The result is a film where mythology possesses extraordinary physical credibility, which makes my problem with its mythological credibility even stranger.
Because I believe in the Cyclops. I believe he’s standing in that cave. I believe in the vulnerability of those men standing underneath him.
What I don’t always believe in quite as strongly is the divine world surrounding him.
Nolan has gone to extraordinary lengths to make the supernatural physically tangible. I wish the screenplay gave the supernatural framework surrounding it the same space.
Because if I already know The Odyssey, I can fill those gaps. I recognise the gods. I understand the significance of certain prophecies. I know what kind of universe this is.
But what about the person sitting beside me who doesn’t?
An adaptation should reward prior knowledge. It shouldn’t require it.
The book can deepen the film. It shouldn’t have to finish explaining it.
And ironically, when Nolan allows the supernatural and psychological elements to become inseparable, The Odyssey becomes considerably more powerful.
The dead know exactly what Odysseus is avoiding
The Land of the Dead was one of those moments for me, because this isn’t merely a fantastical location Odysseus needs to visit so Tiresias can give him directions.
Nolan turns it into a reckoning.
Odysseus meets men who cannot go home because of decisions made during the war.
Sinon confronts him. Agamemnon gives him another version of what returning from war might look like: he made it home only to be murdered by Clytemnestra in revenge for sacrificing their daughter.
Then Odysseus’s dead soldiers pursue him.
The symbolism isn’t particularly coy.
Odysseus can sail away from Troy. Troy isn’t necessarily going to return the favour.
And suddenly the most frightening thing waiting for him isn’t Polyphemus or Scylla.
It’s memory.
This is where Nolan’s treatment of Calypso becomes much more interesting too.
The lotus flowers allow Odysseus to forget. Troy disappears. His men disappear.
Eventually his family can disappear too.
And if remembering means confronting everybody who died, everything he did and the person he became during the war, forgetting starts looking remarkably like mercy.
For a while, Odysseus doesn’t have to be Odysseus. He doesn’t have to remember. He doesn’t have to answer for anything.
And I really like that.
It gives Nolan a modern psychological explanation for something mythological without completely destroying the mythology underneath it.
The gods may interfere. Fate may exist. But Odysseus still makes choices.
And eventually he chooses to remember.
He builds the raft. He leaves. He surrenders himself to whatever the sea decides to do with him.
And finally, after twenty years: home.
Except home has been getting along without him.
Coming home isn’t the same as going back
Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised.
Agamemnon has already warned him what can happen to a king who simply strolls back through his own front door after a long war. Telemachus is attacked. Mentor dies. Odysseus intervenes under the name “Sinon”—which, given what we now know about the real Sinon, is hardly an emotionally neutral choice.
Then Argos recognises him.
And dies.
Because apparently Nolan decided we’d all been coping far too well.
But it’s when Odysseus finally enters his old home that the film’s earlier interest in xenia begins paying off.
Antinous and the suitors have violated it spectacularly. They have occupied another man’s home, consumed his resources, harassed his wife, threatened his son and attempted to take his kingdom.
They’re the barbarians inside the gates.
Except Odysseus can no longer pretend barbarism belongs exclusively to them.
Because eventually he tells Penelope what happened at Troy, and suddenly the “people from the sea” she feared acquire another meaning.
The Greeks were somebody else’s people from the sea.
They entered Troy through deception. Odysseus devised the Trojan Horse. He participated in the destruction of another people’s home.
He violated the sacred laws he now sees being violated inside his own.
And Nolan connects all of this to something even larger: the collapse of the civilisation Odysseus thought he was fighting to defend.
That’s fascinating.
Because now the climax can’t simply be: The king has returned to restore civilisation.
The king helped destroy it somewhere else.
Odysseus has spent the film moving geographically towards Ithaca while moving psychologically towards that admission.
And when he finally reaches Penelope, he doesn’t simply announce himself and expect twenty years of waiting to disappear.
He confesses.
He asks for forgiveness.
For me, that is where Nolan’s reinterpretation becomes considerably more interesting than simply producing the biggest possible version of Homer’s greatest hits.
This is what adaptation can do.
Not reproduce.
Interrogate.
What does “hero” mean when we look at ancient warfare through contemporary ideas about trauma and moral injury? What does homecoming mean when the person returning knows he participated in destroying somebody else’s home? What does civilisation mean when everybody claiming to represent it has violated the rules supposedly distinguishing them from barbarians?
Those questions are sitting underneath the entire film.
And this is where my frustration returns.
Because I wanted more of this.
Not necessarily more minutes. God knows the film has minutes.
More room.
There is a difference.
And then everybody starts killing each other
Penelope announces the contest: string Odysseus’s bow and shoot through the axe heads.
The suitors fail. Odysseus succeeds.
Identity revealed.
Bloodshed.
Telemachus joins his father. Antinous dies. The remaining suitors surrender.
It’s the climax audiences familiar with The Odyssey have been waiting for, and visually, it’s enormously satisfying.
But by this point Nolan has complicated Odysseus so thoroughly that the violence feels different.
He isn’t simply reclaiming his kingdom from wicked men. He’s a man profoundly damaged by violence returning home and immediately using violence to restore order.
Again.
That tension interests me far more than whether every element precisely matches Homer.
Because I’m not particularly interested in adaptation as obedience.
I don’t need Nolan to reproduce every character, every god or every episode. Adapting an ancient epic into a three-hour film requires betrayal. Things have to go. Things have to change.
The important question is whether the adaptation understands why the things it keeps mattered in the first place.
And Nolan often does.
Which is why the ending works for me.
Odysseus doesn’t reclaim the throne. He gives it to Telemachus. Then he leaves with Penelope.
That is such a melancholy conclusion to a homecoming story.
Odysseus spends twenty years trying—and sometimes refusing—to get home. Then he finally reaches Ithaca and discovers something that perhaps should have been obvious all along:
Coming home isn’t the same thing as going back.
Twenty years happened.
Telemachus grew up. Penelope survived without him. Odysseus became somebody else. His men died. Troy fell. The world changed.
You don’t get to reverse any of that because you’ve finally reached the correct shoreline.
And so the great hero returns home only to relinquish the identity he spent the film trying to recover.
That, to me, is far more interesting than simple restoration.
I just wish Ancient Greece sounded a little more like somewhere
There is, however, one creative choice that repeatedly took me out of this otherwise painstakingly constructed world.
The accents.
I know. Nobody in Homer’s Odyssey spoke modern Greek.
They didn’t speak RP either.
I am aware that putting on a Greek accent would not magically transport an actor to the eighth century BC.
But accents in historical films have never solely been exercises in linguistic accuracy. They’re part of world-building.
And Nolan’s use of contemporary American English was a choice I could hear.
Every time I heard it, I wondered: Why?
I understand the argument for accessibility. Nolan wants these people to feel immediate rather than embalmed inside the language of a prestige historical drama.
Fine.
But accessibility and Americanisation aren’t synonyms.
And it becomes more noticeable because, for a film adapting perhaps the most famous work of Greek literature ever written, I wanted more cultural texture in the people inhabiting it.
I’m not arguing that every actor needs to share the ethnicity of every character they play. Nor am I interested in pretending there is some historically “correct” modern accent for Homer.
But cultural texture matters.
Nolan physically travelled to Greece. He used Greek landscapes. He built this enormous world around Greek mythology and Greek literature.
I would have loved to feel more of that cultural connection in its voices and people.
Because place is more than scenery.
It’s language. It’s sound. It’s people. It’s behaviour. It’s cultural memory.
And in a story fundamentally about somebody’s desperate relationship with home, that matters even more.
I could see Greece.
I didn’t always feel it.
Create a world, then live in it
There is something Nolan has said about his approach to The Odyssey that rather perfectly captures both what I admire about the film and what frustrates me about it.
The philosophy is simple: create a world, then live in it.
Physically, The Odyssey does exactly that.
They built Troy. They built the Horse. They put actors on real boats. They constructed an enormous Cyclops. They dealt with actual water, actual landscapes, actual bodies occupying actual space.
Nolan didn’t simply ask his actors to imagine the world.
He gave them one.
And the result can be breathtaking.
I just wish the screenplay had occasionally followed the same philosophy.
Create the mythological world.
Then let us live in it.
Don’t hurry through something because Homer already explained it three thousand years ago. Don’t assume recognition is the same thing as understanding. Don’t give an idea thirty seconds simply because there’s another famous episode waiting around the corner.
Trust the mythology.
Trust the strangeness.
Trust us to sit with it.
Because Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is not a bad adaptation. Far from it.
It’s ambitious, intelligent, technically extraordinary and willing to do something genuinely interesting with Odysseus rather than preserving him as an uncomplicated cultural monument.
I like its guilt-ridden Odysseus. I like its understanding of memory as something simultaneously necessary and unbearable. I like its treatment of homecoming as something that cannot undo time. I like the way xenia grows from an ancient social convention into an argument about what keeps civilisation functioning.
I even like its willingness to change Homer.
Especially its willingness to change Homer.
I just don’t think every one of those ideas gets the space it deserves.
Perhaps that’s the impossible problem of adapting something this old and this influential.
Everybody arrives carrying their own Odyssey.
The classicist carries Homer. The Nolan fan carries Oppenheimer, Dunkirk and Interstellar. Somebody else just wants to see the Cyclops. And somebody sitting three seats down hasn’t read the poem at all and would quite like to know why that woman just turned everybody into pigs.
That person matters too.
Because an adaptation isn’t illustrated homework. It isn’t a companion piece. It isn’t a reward for recognising references.
For the duration of the film, it has to become the story.
And The Odyssey frequently does.
When it does, it is enormous and intimate, ancient and surprisingly modern, spectacular and morally uncomfortable.
When it doesn’t, I can feel Homer’s poem standing just behind it, quietly supplying information the film hasn’t quite given me.
Christopher Nolan went to extraordinary lengths to build a world his actors could physically inhabit.
I wanted him to give his audience just a little more time to inhabit it too.
Because the book should enrich the film.
It shouldn’t have to explain it.
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