By Luca Mătăsaru
Although Christopher Nolan is considered one of the most talented contemporary American directors, his adaptation of The Odyssey has been met with a wide-ranging series of criticisms, from casting and costume design choices to its dialogue and the hero characterization. Despite its box office success, it remains the most controversial film of this year, sparking discussions about the essential qualities of cinematic adaptations, particularly in the case of highly regarded works from the Western literary canon.
When asked in an interview, if he sees himself as “a bard for a civilization at dusk”, Christopher Nolan did not reply directly. Instead, his answer was more oblique. His reply focused on the Ancient Greek text’s own consciousness of decadence. Homer was trying to recapture the greatness of a past civilization from which only ruins remained. For the The Odyssey case, the director was fascinated by the Bronze Age collapse, a theme underlying the film’s historical and philosophical framework.
While it is less obvious, the civilizational collapse also appears in his previous movie, Oppenheimer. In fact, it is remarkable how similar his two protagonists actually are: Oppenheimer feels guilty about his indirect involvement in the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is conscious of the existential threat represented by the atomic bomb, while Odysseus repents his direct involvement in the sacking of Troy and the breaking of Zeus’ law, which is the foundation of Bronze Age civilization in the movie. As such, Nolan’s modern sensibilities have led him to create an anti-Homeric film whose ethos would be unintelligible for Homer’s contemporaries .
Even before the film arrived in cinemas, influencers and intellectuals alike expressed their opinions online and often in strong terms. The public discourse and controversy surrounding the adaptation has mostly focused on the outwards aspects of production. A large segment of the debate strictly focused on casting, costumes, or dialogue. Two tropes haunted the reels: the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen and of Zendaya as Athena, as well as the anachronistic and often fantasy-like armor sets. After the film’s release, viewers realized that many of these aspects are entirely marginal, the best example being that Helen barely appears in a couple of scenes throughout the movie’s nearly three-hour runtime. If Nolan chose to place these elements at the forefront of his promotional material to use them as “ragebait” for ensuring ticket sales, he succeeded.
Other critiques come from a different angle. Elon Musk has criticized the production for its historical inaccuracy and for its political agenda. He also appears open towards funding Mel Gibson in order to make a historically accurate adaptation of the epic “with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek”. He also said that Grok (X’s AI model) will be able to generate a historically accurate adaptation until the end of the year, and has already started to post AI-generated videos on X.
In opposition to this negative appraisal of the film, critics such as Jonathan Pageau have described the adaptation as a Trojan Horse: Nolan has appeased the Hollywood executives’ progressive agenda through superficial aspects, while the real message of the film is actually a conservative one about preserving civilization. On the other hand, Emily Wilson, whose recent translations of the Homeric poems (which Nolan allegedly used for writing his script) have also garnered criticism due to their plain language and their attempt to deconstruct Homer’s heroic figures, has also heavily criticized the film, ironically, due to its “abysmal” writing, excessive didacticism, and simplification of the epic’s complex themes.
The Confusion around Historical Accuracy
As readers of the original text know, filming a truly historically accurate adaptation of The Odyssey is an impossible task. Homer’s epic is full of anachronisms, since the plot takes place approximately four hundred years before the poem was recited and later written down. In broad terms, it is fiction. This means it could be used as a primary source, but not in the terms imagined by Elon Musk. In more literary terms, the text is an epic poem, which is a subgenre of oral poetry. Consequently, the text lacks a proper historical consciousness in our modern sense, since its description of the distant past relies on stories and vague memories, not on archeological evidence and the knowledge of ancient texts. Homer mixes elements from the Mycenaean world (12th-11th centuries BC) with elements from the Greek Dark Ages (10th-9th centuries BC) and from his own time (8th-7th centuries BC). Due to this heterogeneity of temporal layers, Homer is not a historian (even if he may think that the events he is narrating are history), but a poet trying to recover a heroic age he sees as greater than his own. Nolan’s film also combines various aesthetic elements (armor, clothing, architecture) in an anachronistic manner, but this only helps reinforce the confused temporal setting of the original text.
The point that should be emphasized is that Nolan does not try to make a faithful adaptation of Homer’s text. He is in fact shaping the film’s message according to his own modern artistic and philosophical sensibilities, which are decidedly antithetical to those of Homer.
The success or failure of his film should be judged by keeping these aspects in mind. Whether such a movie should have been conceptualized as a free adaptation of the epic, in the vein of Joyce’s Ulysses, rather than the pseudo-historical epic that it currently is (perhaps trying to replicate the success of historical blockbusters such as Braveheart and Gladiator), could be the topic of a fruitful discussion, but it lies outside the aim of this article.
Odysseus – An Anti-Hero?
The Homeric epics approach a considerable number of themes which reflect the values of Ancient Greek society, such as kleos (glory), andreia (courage), or sophrosyne (prudence) and aretḗ (virtue). Among all these options, Nolan chooses to focus on xenia (hospitality). In the film, this theme is directly referred to as “Zeus’ law”.
This principle stands at the core of the film’s ethics and Odysseus’s journey of repentance is constructed around it. The suitors are taking advantage of Penelope’s and Telemachus’ hospitality by constantly feasting at their hosts’ expense. Moreover, they put pressure on Penelope to remarry, as the “peoples from the sea” have started pillaging coastal settlements. This is more than a mere invasion, as it broke the sacred law of Zeus on which Mediterranean society is built and, consequently, announced the end of civilization itself.
In Nolan’s protagonist there is very little left of the Homeric hero. He is not particularly cunning, and the plans he elaborates always lead to bloodshed. He is no longer searching for riches and glory, since he has understood the real reason behind the Trojan War: Agamemnon started it because he wanted to prevent Troy from becoming the economic rival of his own kingdom of Mycenae. Odysseus’ pride is also completely absent, since he always strives to be a good captain, putting the lives of his men above his own desires.
Because of Odysseus’ Trojan Horse scheme, the Greeks are able to invade Troy and slaughter its population. Although he was acting on Agamemnon’s orders, Odysseus feels responsible for violating Zeus’ law, and his guilt is personified in the character of Athena. He is a broken man eager to eat the lotus flowers offered by Calypso in order to forget the misdeeds from his violent past.
Thus, Nolan’s Odysseus is actually an anti-Odysseus, a disenchanted warrior who is clearly the product of a modern post-world war conscience, not of the Homeric world that glorified war and violence.
One should not overlook the fact that Achilles does not appear in the film and is thus unable to stand as the physical prowess counterpart to Odysseus’ mental sharpness. In the film, Odysseus is no less a killer than the absent Achilles, having lied to Sinon (a character not present in The Odyssey and mentioned only in Virgil’s Aeneid) by sending him to certain death without warning him beforehand. Thus, Odysseus becomes only a tool in the hands of Agamemnon, who looks like a veritable angel of death, in order to secure his power in the Mediterranean.
For Homeric society he was a hero, being sometimes even called “divine” (dios), like Achilles and Hector. At the same time, the history of Odysseus’ reception does not always see him as a model of virtue. Consequently, the film’s clearest deconstruction of the hero is done by Odysseus himself, when he, still in disguise, tells Telemachus: “Don’t look for gods in men. You’ll just be disappointed.”
At the end of the film, Odysseus does not retake his rightful place at Penelope’s side. Instead, he decides to sail away with her and to let Telemachus inherit the throne and reign for the little time Bronze Age civilization will survive. His decision appears particularly striking, since Telemachus has not yet proven that he has the necessary qualities of a king. Nolan may imply that Odysseus’ hands are too full of blood for him to reclaim his kingdom. His form of repentance will be travelling towards the sunset to honor his men, leaving the younger generation to salvage what is left of the declining civilization, which will still ultimately fall due to the sins of the older generation.
The trope of civilizational decline, which Nolan often approaches throughout his works, is hardly confined to the past. Instead, the director implies that our current social and political crisis is a result of the West betraying its founding principles. Interestingly, the parallel with the present context allows for two contradictory readings of the movie. A progressive reading could center around the sacking of Troy as a metaphor for the violent military interventions of the US, which have damaged the fundamental values the West aims to defend. Thus, Odysseus becomes the symbol of Western man and the guilt he feels towards his violent past. In this interpretation, this film continues a longer tradition of war criticism, with movies such as Apocalypse Now. As Nolan mentions in the interview cited above, modern audiences need the hero to apologize for his greatness.
On the other hand, an opposite reading would focus on the suitors and their violation of the norms of xenia. Even if Odysseus repents for the blood he spilled, this does not mean that the suitors have gained the right to profit from his family’s hospitality. His violent past does not mean that his household (oikos) should be humiliated and he has every right to punish the suitors for their trespasses. In the current climate, the implication would be that the West should overcome its historic guilt and maintain its dignity, while also ensuring that strangers respect its values and customs. Both of these possible interpretations give the impression that, as Titus Techera notes, the film “is a work of decadence”, since “Nolan attempts to [understand the place of Homer’s epic] in the face of the collapse of all our intellectual authorities”.
Nevertheless, Nolan’s attempt to turn Odysseus into a modern, post-traumatic hero lacks the psychological depth such a change would require. Although psychological depth has never been a staple of Homeric epic, this adaptation strips Odysseus of the more complex characterization he had in the original story. Since the film’s protagonist no longer displays many traits of the original character, such as pride or lust for riches, there is no longer any conflict between his desire to return home and his wish to explore the world. Trauma and guilt are the defining traits of Nolan’s Odysseus, but since they define the character from the beginning of his journey, there is very little psychological change throughout the film. The British and American classicist and translator Emily Wilson calls Nolan’s Odysseus “an uncomplicated man”, an irony on the first epithet Homer uses to describe him, polytropos, which Wilson translated as “complicated”, once again stirring a strong debate. As such, Nolan’s decision to stray away from the spirit of Homer does not offer the proper pay-off the film requires, since Odysseus is less interesting than in the epic.
Ultimately, it seems that Nolan was not entirely sure about which perspective to adopt for his Odyssey, which leads to the film being plagued by half measures. It follows the plot of the epic quite closely, including Telemachus’ own journey and various flashbacks as Odysseus tells his story to Calypso, but he creates an anti-Odysseus and an underlying moral framework that is distinctly anti-Homeric. Some viewers were content with the film’s embrace of both blockbuster action and psychological drama, seeing it as a welcome reinterpretation of an ancient story for an increasingly conflictual contemporary context. However, the movie has satisfied neither adaptation purists, who feel that Nolan has desecrated a foundational text of Western civilization, nor those who would have preferred the director to engage with the source text in a more provocative manner instead of “playing it safe” by turning Odysseus into a sympathetic PTSD-driven modern hero. Although the film was a box office success, it shows how a director’s thematic preoccupations may work against his craft, since they impede the flexibility needed for adapting a work from the foreign country that is the past.
Luca Mătăsaru is an Assistant Editor for the Democracy and Culture section.
