The Odyssey on screen: what Christopher Nolan preserved, changed and erased

1. Thesis

Christopher Nolan has made a large, serious, frequently beautiful film that understands more about the Odyssey than almost any previous screen version, and that resolves the poem’s central ambiguity in the one direction the poem refuses to. It preserves the structure and loses the temperament. What it gives back in its place — a hero organised around guilt, and an ending that makes him pay for his own restoration — is coherent, and is a different subject.

Our judgement is that this is the best screen Odyssey there has been and is not the Odyssey.

2. What the film achieves

Three things, and they are not small.

It keeps the retrospective narration. The wanderings are told by Odysseus, after the fact, to a listener with an interest in the telling — relocated from the Phaeacian court to Calypso’s island, but structurally intact. Adaptations discard this almost without exception, because a hero narrating his own marvels is harder to stage than marvels. It is also the poem’s most distinctive formal feature, and the reason its most famous episodes carry an undertow of doubt.

It gets the underworld right. In Homer, Odysseus does not descend into hell; he sails to the edge of the world, digs a trench, pours offerings, and the dead come up to the blood (Od. 11.13–50). Nearly every adaptation substitutes a descent. This one stages the summoning. It is a small fidelity and it indicates people who read the text rather than the memory of it.

And it keeps xenia as the moral centre, rendered as the law of Zeus. The suitors are not villains because they are rude; they are guests destroying a host, under divine protection they have forfeited. That is what the poem thinks, and the film thinks it too.

3. Visual scale and film-making

The film was photographed entirely on IMAX 70mm, reportedly the first feature to be, across locations in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Malta and Western Sahara, with a single sound-stage sequence. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian described gasp-inducing IMAX-sized landscapes of loneliness, and John Nugent in Empire found the scale jaw-detaching.

The value of the format here is not spectacle for its own sake. The Odyssey is a poem about a small man on a large sea, and a frame that can hold a horizon and a face at once is doing something the material wants. The Circe sequence, widely reported as the film’s most frightening, is the clearest case of scale used for dread rather than for grandeur.

One reservation, and it is not ours originally: the military historian Myke Cole, writing in Slate, objected that the muted palette misrepresents an ancient world whose equipment was polished to catch the light. He is right that Homeric armour gleams in the text — the poem is full of flashing bronze — and the grimy register is a convention of modern historical cinema rather than an observation about antiquity.

4. Narrative adaptation

The compression is intelligent and it is severe. Gone: the Phaeacians entire, Nestor and Pylos, the Lotus-Eaters as a separate episode, Aeolus and the bag of winds, and Laertes. What remains is a straighter line from Troy to the hall.

The Phaeacian cut is the expensive one. Scheria is where the poem shows hospitality performed perfectly, and it is the counterweight to the Cyclops at one end and the suitors at the other. A film that makes xenia its moral centre and removes the episode where xenia works has weakened its own argument. The gain — a location and a set of characters removed from a near-three-hour film — is real, and we would classify this as necessary compression rather than as error. It is simply the most costly necessary compression available.

5. Treatment of Odysseus

Matt Damon is very good, and David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter was right that he goes to dark places. The problem is not the performance; it is the conception.

Homer’s Odysseus is polytropos — a word that means both much-travelled and devious, and which the poem never disambiguates. He lies constantly, to enemies and to friends. He lies to Athena’s face and she laughs and praises him for it (Od. 13.287–299). He tests his own grieving father in an orchard for no strategic reason whatever. The poem declines to resolve whether this is admirable.

The film’s Odysseus is more honourable and more merciful, organised around guilt for the war rather than around cunning. He is reported to warn opponents before shooting. Emily Wilson, whose 2018 translation is the most widely read current English version, told the Guardian that the film gives a quite simple action-hero movie about an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero, and that she would be ashamed to have written any part of the script.

That is harsher than our own view and it identifies the right thing. Guilt is a real form of moral difficulty. It is also a familiar one, and the poem’s difficulty is unfamiliar: a hero whose central virtue is indistinguishable from a vice, and a text that will not tell you which it is. Substituting the first for the second is the film’s largest interpretive act.

The clearest symptom is the Cyclops. Reported accounts indicate the escape does not turn on the Outis trick — the false name that makes the neighbours’ help impossible, and which in Greek puns on mētis, cunning itself. Without it, escape becomes nerve. The untranslatability of the pun is a real constraint; the trick, however, works perfectly well in English.

6. Treatment of Penelope

Anne Hathaway is given more political weight than the poem gives her: a queen who has governed for twenty years and is not eager to hand the government back. That is a genuine strengthening and it is well judged.

And then the film removes the test of the bed.

In Homer, Penelope refuses to accept the man who has just killed a hundred and eight people in her hall until she has proved him. She orders the marriage bed moved out of the chamber; he explodes, because he built it around a living olive trunk rooted in the ground and it cannot be moved (Od. 23.173–206). It is the only moment in the poem when anyone outmanoeuvres Odysseus, and his wife does it, by provoking him into revealing himself.

The film has her embrace the wounded Odysseus after the killing. The reasoning is legible — the massacre is the climax, and a test afterwards would deflate it. But ruling competently is a state, and out-thinking the cleverest man alive is an action, and it is the action by which the poem establishes that her intelligence matches his. This is the change we regard as most damaging, and it is made worse rather than better by the film’s evident wish to take her seriously.

7. Treatment of Telemachus

Tom Holland carries the earnestness the part needs; Rooney’s line that he comes across as Peter Parker in a tunic is funny and not entirely unfair.

The film expands the father-son relationship considerably. Homer gives them startlingly little: a recognition in a hut with no evidence at all, immediately doubted, and then a conspiracy (Od. 16.186–218). The expansion is the film’s own and is defensible; a screen relationship needs more surface than the poem supplies.

What is lost is the poem’s sharper account of what Telemachus is becoming. His development in Homer is not moral improvement but the acquisition of authority, and the poem shows him using it first to send his mother out of the hall and last to hang twelve enslaved women in preference to the clean death his father ordered. A gentler arc is a warmer film and a smaller idea.

8. The gods and the supernatural

The production is reported to have pursued a maximally realistic treatment, declining to depict gods acting. Athena is present, and connected with a young Trojan priestess killed during the sack; divine hostility registers as weather and as fear.

The defence of this is stronger than it first appears. Homeric gods characteristically act through a human faculty rather than around it: Athena puts strength or a thought into someone who then acts and is held responsible for acting. A rendering in which divine action is felt from the inside is arguably nearer that than gods on clouds would be. Zeus’s own opening speech insists that mortals bring ruin on themselves (Od. 1.32–43).

The cost is structural and it is real. The poem’s plot runs on Athena’s advocacy and Poseidon’s grievance. Remove both as agents and the delay has no stated cause and the return no engine. And tying Athena to a woman killed in the sack converts the goddess of practical intelligence — an independent power with her own interests, who admires the hero because they share a professional specialism — into an emanation of his conscience. That is a coherent modern reading and a substantial demotion.

9. War, trauma, and homecoming

This is where the film is most confident and where its reviewers have been most persuaded. Myke Cole, a combat veteran writing in Slate, argued that the film succeeds at the psychological truth of the poem even where its material culture fails, and that the Odyssey has always been about the impossibility of returning unchanged.

The reading is anachronistic in its vocabulary and sound in its substance. Homer has no concept of trauma and no word for it. But the poem does show a man weeping on a beach for seven years, and weeping again when a stranger sings about his own greatest triumph, and the widow simile of Book 8 — where the sacker of cities is compared to a woman being dragged from her husband’s body into slavery — is the most morally serious thing in it. A film that takes homecoming to be difficult is reading the poem correctly.

10. Hospitality and political order

Strong, and the film’s best sustained fidelity. Rendering xenia as Zeus’s law keeps the poem’s actual moral architecture rather than substituting a modern one, and it makes the suitors’ offence legible as something other than bad manners.

The political anatomy is thinner. Homer’s Ithaca is a kingdom whose institutions exist and cannot act: the assembly in Book 2 is the first in twenty years and it achieves nothing, because the only authority the society recognises is an absent man’s. That diagnosis is what makes the killing legible as restoration rather than as private vengeance, and a film with less room for assemblies inevitably carries less of it.

11. The suitors and Ithaca

Robert Pattinson’s Antinous is reported as an outstanding villain, and the film gives him a back-story — service avoided by sending a servant’s son in his place — that ties the Ithacan crisis to the war’s guilt.

It is good screenwriting and it is an invention. Homer’s suitors have no back-stories; the poem complicates them differently and more subtly, through Amphinomus, who is decent, who is privately warned by Odysseus to go home, who is troubled, who stays, and who is killed. The poem takes care to establish that the massacre catches a man who did not deserve it. A single villain with a motive is a cleaner structure and a smaller moral problem.

12. Dialogue and tone

Contemporary English, which is the only practical choice for a film of this budget and reach, and not in itself a fault: every English Odyssey is a modernisation, and Chapman and Pope were period interpretations too.

One reported detail deserves more scrutiny than it has received. An ancient historian writing at Tales of Times Forgotten objected to a single scene using Modern Greek, on the grounds that the effect is to place the Greek language on the far side of a comprehension barrier while English-speaking characters stand in for the ancients — an implication with an unpleasant intellectual history behind it. We have not been able to verify the scene independently and therefore do not enter it in the ledger. We note the objection, from a qualified source, as unverified.

13. Geography and landscape

The locations are the film’s least contestable achievement. Shooting in Messenia, the Aeolian Islands, Iceland and the Moray coast gives the sea a range of moods that a single Mediterranean unit could not, and the poem’s sea has moods.

Homer’s geography is not a map, and attempts to make it one have failed since antiquity — Strabo was already sceptical of the literal-minded versions. A film that treats the wanderings as taking place in a plural, unlocatable world is closer to the poem than one that pins them to a chart.

14. Costume and material culture

The most criticised aspect online and the least well-founded criticism. Full treatment at costumes and material culture; in brief: there is no configuration of equipment that is simultaneously faithful to Homer and accurate to the Late Bronze Age, because Homer is not accurate to the Late Bronze Age. The poem contains bronze weapons and iron tools, a boar’s-tusk helmet four centuries obsolete, and Phoenician traders who belong to the poet’s own era.

Some specific objections survive that argument — the ships, which have been widely described as Norse rather than Aegean, and the uniformity of the helmets, where the record shows variety. Those are real and minor.

15. Casting and source fidelity

Assessed decision by decision at casting and authenticity. The summary position: Homer supplies almost no physical description of anyone, the descriptions he does supply do not map onto modern racial categories, and the objection with an actual argument behind it is a different one — that a film adapting the foundational work of Greek literature, filming in Greece, has no Greek performer in its principal cast. That objection was made in Greece and is answerable by the production.

16. Major departures from Homer

Set out in full, with evidence, in the adaptation-claims ledger and element by element in the comparison table. The largest are the Phaeacian cut, the removal of the bed test, the lotus-drugged Calypso, the absence of Laertes, the transferred guilt for the desecration of Athena’s statue, the imported Virgilian Sinon, and the ending.

17. Changes that work

Relocating the retrospective narration to Calypso: the frame survives and one location is saved. Giving the Sirens’ song a content — that he does not truly want to go home — since Homer withholds it and something must be supplied, and since knowledge rather than seduction is what the Sirens actually offer (Od. 12.184–191). Circe reconceived as a woman transforming men from fear: the poem gives no motive at all, so this fills a silence rather than contradicting a statement. Compressing Telemachus’s two hospitality visits into one.

18. Changes that weaken the poem

The bed test, for the reasons above. The lotus at Ogygia, which removes the refusal of immortality that is how the poem prices a homecoming — a drugged man is not refusing anything. The removal of the sexual relationships with Circe and Calypso, which tidies away the poem’s own double standard and makes the execution of the maids in Book 22 less legible as the atrocity it is. And the loss of the Outis trick.

19. Artistic freedom versus source responsibility

We do not hold that fidelity is a virtue in itself. The tradition that produced the Odyssey reworked its material continuously, and the wooden horse most people picture comes from Virgil rather than Homer. A film is entitled to interpret.

The responsibility is narrower and it is real: a production presenting itself as an adaptation of a specific ancient work owes its audience clarity about where it has departed, because most viewers will take what they see as what the poem says. That is not a demand for footnotes on screen. It is a reason for criticism to exist, and it is why this cluster keeps a ledger.

20. Verdict

A major film and a serious adaptation, better read and more formally intelligent than any previous screen Odyssey, which nonetheless resolves the poem’s defining ambiguity and substitutes a familiar difficulty for an unfamiliar one.

Homer’s Odysseus endures twenty years to get his household back, and gets it, and the poem ends with a peace imposed by a goddess because the violence that recovered the house cannot settle the community. Nolan’s earns his return and gives it away, and the film ends with the exile the poem does not impose.

That is not a smaller ending. It is a different argument, made well, about a poem that was making another one.