Christopher
Nolan has made an Odyssey for our times – by sacrificing the delicious darkness
of Homer’s epic
Charlotte
Higgins
There’s
no denying the power of the film on the big screen. But how far should modern
moral sensibilities influence adaptations of classics?
Sat 25
Jul 2026 06.00 BST
Everyone
knows how dumb it is to be this person: the one who mourns the film adaptation
of a favourite text because it misses out this scene, or misreads that
particularly beloved character, or has a slightly “inauthentic” take on some
detail. Of course I’m talking about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the
Odyssey, a poem I have loved since I was a teenager. I enjoyed the movie, in
common with a huge number of other people. It seems remarkable, even dizzying,
that the adaptation of a nearly 3,000-year-old poem took $264m (£196m) at the
box office over its opening weekend, has sent translations of the Odyssey
surging up the bestseller charts, and is sold out (for instance) at London’s
BFI Imax screen deep into September. We are living in an Odyssey time, amid an
Odyssey frenzy.
There is
no point trying to be a purist about a beloved classic text. Whoever reads the
Odyssey, including Nolan, inescapably does so through the prism of their
prejudices, informed by the conditions of their own place and time. Since the
Odyssey is the result of decades, maybe centuries, of non-literate oral poets
working with memory and improvisation, there’s no precise “original” place or
time to return to, anyway. But what I can’t help doing is observe the choices
Nolan has made and think about their consequences – because there are always
divides in the road, paths not taken by any adapter.
Nolan is
brilliant at recreating one aspect of the original poem: its complicated
structure. The poem tells the story of the decade-long return journey from the
siege of Troy of its hero, Odysseus: the adventures he has along the way and
how he reinstates himself as the head of his household once he’s home. There
are monsters and witches and magic and storms at sea. And then he must
infiltrate himself into his home disguised as a beggar, before a
Tarantino-esque bloodbath of revenge. It is a story told not in sequence, but
through parallel timelines and flashbacks. Nolan, as I had hoped of the creator
of Inception, Memento and The Prestige, follows the spirit of the original
poem’s twisted, coiling structure with his own complex design.
But his
Odysseus, as filtered through Matt Damon’s performance, is a grim and agonised
figure, not the loquacious, rhetorically able, charming liar that I see in the
poem. Cinema is a visual medium – not a genre for wordy speeches – but
nevertheless, Nolan’s hero is a notably laconic figure. He is also
guilt-stricken and conscience-laden in a way that speaks more of a
Judeo-Christian inheritance and Nolan’s sense of a war-weary world than
anything in Homer. Where the poem has Odysseus inducting his son Telemachus
into the life of a warrior, the pair fighting their domestic enemies together,
the film finds a way to release the younger man from the burdens of a killer’s
life.
The
Odyssey, though, is not an anti-war poem, though it is a post-war poem. Homer’s
Odysseus is placed in a genealogy of warriors stretching back from the great
veteran fighter Nestor and beyond (Nestor is absent from the film, so this
layer of inheritance is lost) and forward to the next generation. War is, for
the Odyssey, a fact of life – albeit one that is grievous and destructive. But
the idea that Odysseus bears a moral burden for the destruction of Troy is pure
Nolan. He has swamped the poem with his own preoccupations and anxieties, as
all readers do in the end, and created an adaptation that is tamed and tuned to
modern sensibilities. Had he cleaved closer to the source material, I’m not
sure the movie accountants would be now totting up the money so gleefully.
Would modern cinemagoers really queue up to see a row of enslaved women hanged,
like doves caught in a trap (says the poem) their feet twitching as they are
killed?
Nolan has
added, but of course he has also subtracted. He has removed not just dark and
horrific moments like the hanging of the slaves, but also, by contrast, the
epic’s lightness and wit. This is especially apparent in his treatment of
female characters. Nolan’s resentful Helen, played by the excellent Lupita
Nyong’o, is literally and metaphorically scarred, rather than poised and
gleaming and elegant. His Circe is magnificent and strange (and given an
extraordinary performance by Samantha Morton), but not funny or enticing.
Because he has removed the Olympian gods from any meaningful role in the film,
we miss a blissful moment in which the divine Calypso (played by Charlize
Theron) rails to the god Hermes against the sexual double standard (it’s OK for
gods to have sex with mortal women, she complains, but not for goddesses to
sleep with men). The relationship between Zendaya’s Athena and Damon’s Odysseus
lacks the flirtatious spark that’s so enjoyable in the poem.
There is
no nervous young Nausicaa finding Odysseus battered and naked on the beach (a
delicious scene), because Nolan has eradicated Nausicaa, and her enigmatic
mother, Arete, too. Odysseus’s mother is also cut – and I would argue, his
wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is also short of a couple of layers of
complexity, her strange obliqueness gone. More or less removing the gods is an
understandable decision, if you want to focus on human motivations and choices.
It’s easier to imagine gods in a poem than to have them quivering awkwardly on
a cloud in a film. I was reminded of novelist Colm Tóibín telling me why there
were no gods in his story House of Names, which also inhabits the world of the
Trojan war: the novel is a deeply human form, he said, and the gods have no
business in it. And for Nolan, at least, so is cinema. But why lose the sexual
spark? I had a sneaking suspicion that by damping down Odysseus’s extramarital
sexual adventures (and also Penelope’s ambivalence towards the men who are
competing to marry her on Ithaca), Nolan has found another way to tame the
Odyssey into modern moral acceptability.
Read the
poem. You won’t regret it. (If it feels forbidding, Mary Beard and I have a
podcast series for this.) And preorder Alice Oswald’s book Rhapsody: a
Manifesto, which comes out in September and superbly draws out the qualities of
Homer’s liquidness, the full wonder of his stories within stories, those
Odyssean tales that peel back like layers of an onion to reveal further tales.
She will show you the way the poem’s similes and apparently formulaic
descriptions of characters are a form of time travel in which different,
incompatible realities can coexist in a shimmering haze of poetic temporality
that cinema, or at least this kind of cinema, cannot replicate.
Such
things you will experience only if you engulf yourself in the poem. What you will
learn in the film is about ourselves: about Nolan’s preoccupations, and about
what modern sensibilities can stomach. Reading the poem turns the gaze outward
– towards another reality that we recognise, but is at the same time foreign
and wild and strange and delicious and disturbing and so different from our
own. Watch the film, yes. Then open the pages of a book and disappear into a
another world that no Imax cameras could ever summon.
Charlotte
Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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