August 24, 2026

After seeing Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey last month, I decided to reread the Homeric epic (in an older translation I read in college). My suspicions about the film were quickly shored up as I got into the poem. While Nolan's Odyssey follows the general structure of the epic pretty faithfully, it does take a lot of liberties, leaving out several episodes from Odysseus' return from Troy, and giving far more narrative weight to his time with Kalypso. The more significant changes, though, are to the character of Odysseus. Matt Damon's limitations in the role became more apparent when I watched the movie a second time with my mom and sis late in the month, but what I thought he did do a credible job with--bringing some weary gravitas to the character--isn't a feature of the epic hero. I thought that was actually to the good, though, since it was part of Nolan's unapologetic adaptation of the story for our current situation. There were other aspects of this aim that I thought worked quite well, in particular the foregrounding of the main female characters: Charize Theron's Kalypso is rather sleepy (perhaps not inappropriately since she has been plying Odysseus with lotus flowers for years), but Samantha Morton's Circe and Lupita Nyong'o's Helen become #metoo avatars, and Ann Hathaway's portrayal of Odysseus' long-suffering wife Penelope is arguably the film's beating heart. Other updates were clumsier, notably Nolan's incorporation of recent Bronze Age scholarship on the "people from the sea" (though they do serve effectively as a sort of displaced metaphor for climate change and other intractable global problems) and the sentimental sail into the sunset at the end, which struck me as a poach from Tennyson's "Ulysses" informed by contemporary rom-com.

A more faithful adaptation of The Odyssey would look much different from Nolan's movie. By our standards, the warrior heroes of Homeric epic were in many ways real bastards, and occasionally monstrous. The punishments Odysseus metes out to the collaborators after the suitors have been slaughtered are pretty gruesome: the goatherd Melanthios, notably, has his nose, ears, hands, feet, and "private parts" lopped off, and the latter are given to the dogs to eat. The women weren't shrinking violets either. When the old nurse Eurykleia goes to Penelope to inform her of her husband's return and victory over the suitors, she assures her that upon seeing Odysseus "standing among the dead men / he had killed,...you would have been cheered to see him / spattered over with gore and battle filth, like a lion." This brutality, though, happens within a cultural matrix that has means of corralling it to prevent it from overwhelming everything, notably the reciprocal relationships among rulers and warriors, and the belief (though not universally observed) that the stranger should be taken in and treated with respect--a fundamental building block of a collective that is larger than the family clan.

The far right, of course, complained about what they perceived as other liberties, notably the DEI casting: Helen played by a woman of Kenyan descent, the Greek warrior Sinon played by trans actor Elliot Page. Their reflexive outrage overlooked some major things (as it always seems to do):

• The eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age was a diverse place. It included not only the various peoples inhabiting what is today called Greece (that word doesn't appear in The Odyssey), but also the peoples of the modern Middle East and north Africa, and they in turn interacted with peoples from further afield. 
• Greek--"Greek"--ideas about sex and gender, and indeed about pretty much everything, were radically different from ours. Even their conceptualization of something as seemingly basic as color was far other. (Tim Whitmarsh's article "Black Achilles" is a terrific discussion of the latter.) In terms of gender, the role played by Athene in the epic is striking for the many guises she adopts in helping Odysseus, since most of them male. She is of course a goddess, but it's notable that none of the other Olympians in the epic engage in this radical shapeshifting.

More basically, though, The Odyssey is likely far more myth than history, and as such lives first and foremost in our collective unconscious, a realm that erases (or ignores) temporal difference and gives us free rein to play with what we find there. The Homeric epics can be analyzed in their historical contexts, but like the other stories from Greek and Roman myth, and those from other cultures, they live because they are retold over and over in different times and places. The ancient Greek stories about the singer Orpheus are different from Joseph Haydn's 1790s opera, which is different from Jean Cocteau's mid-20th century surrealist movie Orphée, which is different from the contemporary musical Hadestown. That's to say that in the end, arguments over the appropriation of mythic material are political.