Jeff Wright@jeffwrightstory
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S ODYSSEY: A HERO MADE EASIER TO LOVE
by Jeff Wright
Did Nolan's Odyssey give me the version of Homer's story I wanted? No.
Should most people go and see it? Absolutely!
That contradiction is the heart of my review.
For the opening fifteen minutes, Nolan completely won me over, handling the exposition deftly. The war, Helen, Paris, Agamemnon—Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus—Nolan knew his material. My question was what he intended to do with it.
But before proceeding, I should pause to pity the person attempting it. Christopher Nolan does not urgently require my pity, of course. He appears to be managing. But The Odyssey is not a modern novel waiting politely to be transferred to the screen. It is a sprawling oral epic shaped by centuries of composition, contradiction and reinvention. It moves backward and forward in time. Its hero disappears for long stretches. Gods, monsters, grief, domestic tension and political violence all jostle for space.
No filmmaker can simply "film Homer."
And Nolan had two hours and fifty-four minutes. My own podcast retelling lasts fourteen hours. Even my ruthlessly compressed stage version requires four and a half hours over two nights. Pity Mr. Nolan—particularly when the fellow reviewing him apparently requires an intermission and an entire second evening.
What Nolan accomplishes within those limits is often magnificent.
Above all, he makes the Bronze Age feel inhabited. The sea is not a blue backdrop; it is a force. Ships groan, sails snap, ropes strain and oarsmen fight the water with their entire bodies. I have spent much of my adult life wilderness canoeing with my wife in a fragile seventeen-foot canoe. I know what it is to watch a sky darken, to feel a small craft shudder and to understand precisely how little nature cares about your plans. Nolan’s storms gave me that feeling.
His interiors are equally convincing. The halls are smoky, scarred, crowded and damp. Men drink, eat, quarrel and knock benches across stone floors. Nothing feels pristine or arranged for tourists. At one point I thought I could almost smell the wet hunting dog lying somewhere out of frame.
Nolan also succeeds where many filmmakers fail: he makes Homer’s impossible images physically credible. One of the finest examples occurs on Circe’s island.
Circe’s transformation of the sailors is extraordinary. The men begin to lose their humanity as they gorge themselves, and Circe then reshapes their faces with her hands, kneading bone and flesh as though performing a violent act of sculpture. It is intimate, macabre and almost unbearable to watch. The men have begun behaving like pigs before she completes the physical transformation. Nolan makes the magic visible without making it ridiculous.
Then there is the Trojan Horse. Nolan rejects the familiar wheeled nursery-toy version. His horse looks heavy, irregular and physically constructed, perhaps from ship timbers. It is found lying near the shoreline, as though the Greeks built it before fully solving the transportation problem. The Trojans haul it with ropes, rollers and exhausting labor. For the first time in any film I have seen, the Trojan Horse feels less like a symbol than an object that might actually exist.
These achievements matter because they demonstrate that Nolan’s departures are not the mistakes of a filmmaker who failed to do his homework. They are choices. Taken together, those choices reveal his governing interpretation of Odysseus.
Nolan has taken Homer’s polytropos man—the complicated man of twists and turns—and made him considerably easier for a contemporary audience to understand, admire, and love.
His Odysseus is courageous, striving, sincere, and fundamentally decent.
And, of course, Odysseus is all of those things. But Homer’s Odysseus is also vain, voracious, vindictive, and an egregiously flawed military leader. Above all, he is a sparkling delight: a man whose first and finest weapon is always language, whether he is fighting a war or talking his way home from one.
Not in Nolan’s Odyssey. Nolan doesn’t just “uncomplicate” Odysseus. He airbrushes away our homecoming hero’s most essential features.
The first crack appeared for me in the Cyclops’s cave.
Nolan gives us a visually impressive Polyphemus and preserves the basic mechanics of the escape, but removes the conversational duel that defines the episode. In Homer, Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk and tells him that his name is Nobody. After Odysseus blinds him, Polyphemus cries out to his fellow Cyclopes for help: “Nobody is in my cave, and Nobody has blinded me!” Comedy ensues, as Homer gives us something remarkably close to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine—almost three thousand years early.
The joke is not merely decorative. Odysseus defeats the monster by manipulating language and anticipating how his words will be interpreted.
But in the very next beat, having saved his companions through brilliant verbal deception, Odysseus imperils them through breathtaking vanity. From the safety of his ship, he taunts Polyphemus: “I am Odysseus, from Ithaca!” Polyphemus, son of the sea god Poseidon, now has the name and address of the man who blinded him. Odysseus’s voyage home is thereby—and entirely unnecessarily—cursed.
Nolan removes both the “Nobody” trick and the voyage-imperiling boast. We lose Odysseus at both extremes: his dazzling verbal brilliance and his catastrophic arrogance.
The same cleansing extends to Odysseus’s leadership.
Homer repeatedly invites us to ask whether Odysseus is actually a good commander. At Ismarus, he cannot control his drunken, disorderly crew. Men die. On Aeolus’ island, the god of the winds gives him a magical bag containing every wind that might prevent his return to Ithaca. Odysseus squanders the gift—and a nearly guaranteed homecoming. On the island of the Lastrygonians, he sends eleven of his fleet’s twelve ships into a death-trap harbour, while keeping his own vessel safely outside. All eleven ships are destroyed, their crews speared and devoured by cannibal giants. Odysseus grieves—from a safe distance.
Nolan removes Ismarus and Aeolus, then rewrites the Lastrygonian attack as a conventional ambush in which Odysseus fights heroically in the rear guard.
The pattern is revealing. Homer’s Odysseus is a leader whose intelligence repeatedly saves his men, but whose curiosity, secrecy, vanity, and disastrous lapses in judgment just as repeatedly destroy them.
Nolan’s Odysseus, by contrast, is simply a capable commander doing his heroic best in impossible circumstances.
A second pattern concerns Odysseus’s sexual fidelity—or, more precisely, the fidelity a modern audience expects from him.
We need to be careful. In Homer’s world, Odysseus does not owe Penelope the same sexual exclusivity she owes him. But good luck explaining that double standard to a modern audience!
I see the problem all the time in my live shows. Odysseus arrives on Circe’s island and defeats her magic. Delighted, she invites him into her gorgeous bed. And then comes the trouble. Modern audiences expect Odysseus to decline. Of course, he should admire the ravishing goddess, but then explain—in exquisitely diplomatic language—that his heart, and every other relevant part of his anatomy, belongs to Penelope alone.
He does not. He accepts Circe’s invitation—then remains on her island, sharing her bed, for a full year.
Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, Penelope heroically holds off the advances of 108 charming young men, all eager to marry her—and bed her.
When I tell Homer’s tale onstage, audiences sometimes boo. They cannot help importing their modern expectations into the ancient story.
Nolan recognizes the problem and removes it. His Circe is older, severe, and distinctly unromantic. There is no sexual chemistry, no invitation to the gorgeous bed, and no year-long voluntary delay. Odysseus appears to spend less than an afternoon on the island.
Calypso is transformed even more radically. In Homer, Odysseus spends seven years in the goddess’ bed. Eventually the relationship soured. Odysseus wants to leave the island, preferring Ithaca and a mortal wife, to paradise with a goddess. Calypso, furious, will not let him go—not until Zeus himself intervenes. Even then, Odysseus requires the very best of his verbal craft, to placate and appease the snubbed and still dangerous goddess, and to solicit her help in leaving the island.
Nolan rejects it all.
In Nolan’s Odyssey, Calypso becomes something closer to a nurse, a therapist, or a trauma counsellor. Odysseus suffers memory loss, and Calypso’s work is in assisting him to recover his memories—of the war, of Ithaca, of Penelope—and to find the courage to return home. In Nolan’s tale, Odysseus’s seven years on Calypso’s island is something that happened to him, not something to which his appetites in any way contributed.
Again, the choice is understandable. A contemporary audience has more sympathy for a traumatized veteran than for a husband who claims to yearn desperately for his wife but repeatedly pauses whenever a goddess offers him the very best of xenia.
But the most consequential loss is Odysseus the wordsmith.
After leaving Calypso, Homer’s Odysseus washes ashore naked, exhausted, and alone. He wakes to find Nausicaa and a group of young women washing clothes on the beach.
He needs their help. He also understands that a large, naked stranger emerging suddenly from the bushes is unlikely to inspire confidence.
He has no clothing, weapons, crew, or visible social status. Homer strips Odysseus of everything to demonstrate that, even completely naked, he remains formidable—because he can still talk.
He flatters Nausicaa, reassures her, appeals to her compassion, and persuades her to help him. Nausicaa is no fool. She recognizes his verbal dexterity and responds in kind.
Verbal brilliance, sexual tension, and situational comedy: Homer—and Odysseus—at their sparkling best.
Nolan cuts the scene.
Athena suffers the same fate. In Homer, she is Odysseus’s delighted co-conspirator. The two sit together, joyously plotting. They discuss the suitors, risks, strategies and lies. Athena loves Odysseus because he embodies her own kind of intelligence: cunning, adaptability, and practical wisdom.
Nolan’s Athena barely speaks. She is diminished from a delightful—and formidable—divine accomplice to a vague, inconsequential presence who occasionally flits in and out of the story.
Penelope loses still more. Homer’s Penelope is not merely the faithful wife awaiting rescue. She is Odysseus’s equal—the one mind capable of meeting his own. Their reunion is a wary conversational dance. Odysseus has spent the entire poem testing others. At the end, he encounters the one person entitled and able to test him.
Nolan removes most of it.
While emotionally sincere, husband and wife’s reunion is conversationally wooden. There is little sense of two formidable minds cautiously recognizing one another after twenty years apart.
Nolan’s most substantial invention arrives at the end.
He understandably removes the torture of Melanthius, the hanging of the twelve slave girls, and the awkward uprising by the families of the dead suitors. He also transforms the slaughter in the hall into something closer to heroic self-defense. Almost any modern adaptation hoping to send viewers home cheering would make similar choices.
But Nolan does not simply stop with the reunion. Odysseus and Penelope leave Ithaca together, choosing voluntary exile as penance. Odysseus feels responsible for the men he lost and for the destruction of Troy—especially because he invented the wooden horse.
The parallel with Oppenheimer, Nolan’s previous film, is hardly subtle. Nolan’s Odysseus creates a weapon whose consequences he fails to comprehend, watches it destroy a civilization, and carries the moral wreckage afterward. The horse becomes the Bronze Age atomic bomb.
This is not Homer. Homer’s Odysseus is not tormented by guilt for inventing the Trojan Horse. But it is a coherent Nolan idea. Nolan replaces Bronze Age vengeance with a twenty-first-century story of trauma, guilt, and moral responsibility.
I understand what he has done.
It simply did not work for me.
When the credits rolled, the theatre applauded. My wife turned to me and asked, “So?”
I searched for the word that captured my immediate response.
“It’s complicated,” I said, with a wink.
I had watched an extraordinarily polished, visually magnificent, and carefully constructed film. I simply did not feel that I had watched Homer’s Odyssey.
But the longer I sat with that reaction, the more responsibility I had to accept for it. The audience around me was celebrating the movie Nolan made. I was grieving the movie he did not make.
Perhaps, then, Nolan’s simpler Odysseus is not entirely a defect in the film. Perhaps my disappointment is partly the baggage of twenty years spent living inside Homer’s more unruly version.
That possibility matters to me because I have just published my own retelling of the Trojan War, The Full Disclosure Iliad: From Mythic Origins to Trojan Horse. Scholars will inevitably object to choices I made: a source preferred, a character reframed, an episode omitted. When they do, I will have to absorb precisely the kind of criticism I am directing at Nolan.
Nolan has added his Odysseyto a conversation nearly three thousand years old. He has made the Bronze Age tangible, restored credibility to images dulled by familiarity, and created a hero accessible to the classically curious.
Perhaps some viewers will leave wanting more. Perhaps they will open Homer and discover a more sparkling, nuanced, and interesting Odysseus.
Go see the film and have fun!
And welcome to the argument about who Odysseus is—and how his story ought to be told.
