SCS instructor Jonathan Ullyot reflects on Christopher Nolan’s film and the reasons its ancient story still fascinates audiences today.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has become one of the year's biggest cultural events. A poem nearly three thousand years old still moves filmmakers, novelists, poets, and readers. Not everyone's convinced — one prominent Homer translator called the film shallow, all spectacle and no soul. That argument is the oldest in the room: every adaptation gets accused of betraying the original. The question isn't whether Nolan stays faithful to Homer. The question is why every generation rewrites him.
The Odyssey has always been a living poem. Vergil rewrote it. Dante rewrote it. Tennyson, Joyce, Margaret Atwood all found a different Odysseus. Nolan joins a conversation that has run for almost three millennia.
His Odysseus is recognizable. But he asks a modern question: what happens when the greatest strategist in Western literature has to live with what his genius cost him?
That shift changes everything.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Troy has already fallen. We hear about it in fragments. Nolan, likewise, skips the spectacle and gives us memory instead: confused, traumatic, fragmented. A tower collapsing. Women screaming. Soldiers moving through smoke and olive trees. Matt Damon collapsing on a stone staircase. A nightmare Odysseus can't wake from.
Odysseus finally reckons with what the Trojan Horse cost. "We violated all that's ever sacred between people," he says. "To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entirely." Nolan turns literature's greatest military victory inside out. The trick that made Odysseus famous also burned down the laws of hospitality and trust that holds civilization together.
Nolan keeps pulling our attention away from monsters and toward people.
Circe is not just a dangerous enchantress. War has shaped her. Her hatred of warrior culture grew out of trauma. "I didn't turn your men into anything. Look at them. This is what they are," she tells Odysseus. Homer's famous episode becomes a meditation on violence and human nature.
Calypso changes too. She no longer delays Odysseus for seven implausible years as he pines for his homeland. She lures him into forgetting. Nolan folds the lotus into her island. The temptation is not just pleasure. It is the temptation to stop remembering. She also gives Odysseus the one thing the Greek hero almost never gets: a chance to change before he dies rather than after. "Give yourself to the storm," she tells him. "Give up the fight, give up control, and live." The tragic hero learns his flaw too late. Nolan lets Odysseus learn his early enough to use it.
The gods change as well. Athena no longer intervenes to push the plot forward. She becomes the Zendaya of the mind—not a supernatural being but a voice of wisdom, compassion, conscience. Nolan doesn't eliminate the divine. He internalizes it.
Few of us believe in anthropomorphic gods. But we understand why people invented them. They figure the competing voices inside us. Our gods today are superheroes and Hollywood stars. Ideally, both: a Telemachus that is also Spiderman.
The monsters change too. The Cyclops, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis remain, but Nolan knows these episodes never worked because they were fantastic. They endure because each names a human temptation.
Take Polyphemus. He prays to his father only once he's already wounded — not before, not for protection, only after the damage is done. "Would you talk to ants?" Odysseus reflects. It's a small, cutting idea about the limits of speaking to anything that doesn't see you as human. And where Homer gives Odysseus a magic herb to resist Circe, Nolan gives him nothing supernatural at all — just a hunter's instinct, reading a stag in the woods and revealing it a man. No god hands him the answer. He works it out.
The Sirens make the case best. Asked what they sounded like, Odysseus says they sang of "all the promises I failed to keep." They told him that what he wanted most was what he had already lost. We never hear them, just as we never hear them in Homer. Some things hit harder imagined than shown.
Nolan's real achievement: he makes us care about Odysseus without pretending he's perfect. He's proud. He takes an unnecessary shot at the Cyclops. (Who wouldn’t?) He lies. He manipulates his own men. He wants to beat Agamemnon home. He wants to outdo his peers.
Nolan's Odysseus is messy. Messy is real. A man living with impossible choices.
The complexity shows up in small moments too. Agamemnon, unrepentant in Homer, becomes a man who regrets his own mistakes. He warns Odysseus straight out: "Don't walk in the front door expecting garlands and praise. Come in disguise. Take your time. Assess." Penelope recognizes her husband but wonders if he can still string the bow. Eumaeus tells Telemachus that no one stays the strongest or the fastest forever, so you'd better be the smartest. When Odysseus finally reveals himself to his household, through his insatiable, suicidal vendetta, his men don't cheer. They kneel — a gesture Homer never wrote, and one that says everything about the Bronze Age hero seen for what he is. The reunion between father and son stays quiet, restrained, almost painfully ordinary. Life rarely hands us the big emotional moment we picture in advance.
None of this "fixes" Homer. This is what every great adaptation does: it finds new questions inside an old story.
The Odyssey refuses to grow old. Not just a poem about monsters and shipwrecks and wandering—it's about intelligence, memory, storytelling, war, marriage, hospitality, identity, and the hard road home after the world has changed us. There is no way to live without the world changing us. All homecomings are terrible.
Each generation finds a different Odysseus because each generation searches for something different in itself.
Nolan's film will send thousands of new readers to Homer. For anyone curious why this ancient poem keeps producing such different visions—from Vergil and Dante to Joyce and Nolan—there's never been a better time to open the original and join a conversation three thousand years running.
Jonathan Ullyot is an expert in ancient and modern literature and an award-winning instructor. He is the author of The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature: The Quest to Fail and Ezra Pound and His Classical Sources: The Cantos and the Primal Matter of Troy. Ullyot teaches several courses at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, including 3244 - The Greek Epic: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
To learn more, or to register for the next offering of The Greek Epic: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, please visit the course page.