Those who criticise Nolan for a lack of realism have failed to grasp the meaning of the Odyssey

There’s been a lot of talk about Christopher Nolan’s film "The Odyssey". Its success with audiences is undisputed, with groups of people travelling from one city to another to catch screenings on 70mm film and in digital IMAX cinemas. So much for the cinema crisis – people are actually travelling to see a film.

Alongside popular acclaim come the accolades of film critics, though these are soon followed by outright criticism, which is the most vocal. Whilst critics acknowledge the film’s ability to deliver the spectacular pleasure of the cinematic experience (“three hours that fly by without a moment’s boredom”, M. Mancuso) and its capacity to convey the epic nature of the story whilst allowing “Homer to be Homer”, the nit-picking criticism comes from a short-sighted historical perspective. Those obsessed with impeccable realism (see the Anglo-Saxon model) complain of alleged historical inaccuracy: the armour is said to be incorrect, the helmets are claimed to belong to different eras, Odysseus’s ship is said to resemble a Viking vessel rather than a Mycenaean one, whilst the costumes and sets appear to come from Classical Greece rather than the Bronze Age. And then there are the doubts about the actual geographical accuracy of Ithaca, the Circean Peninsula, and so on. These are all pointless questions that betray a lack of faith in the fantastical and lead to the most futile of all questions: did Homer really exist? Both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are already the result of an anachronistic overlay at the heart of the oral tradition.

This desire to understand the film solely through a realist lens fails to grasp its meaning, confusing myth with historical record and reducing all symbolism and imaginative power to mere factual data. Such research would not in itself be wrong for a programme such as Quark, but it is the sort of discussion that starts from a false premise. The scholars of antiquity and the Mycenaean world consulted do not deny that these inconsistencies exist; rather, they argue that the underlying question is poorly framed. To ask whether Nolan has accurately depicted Homer’s world is to attribute to the Odyssey a relationship with history that the poem has never had. The ancient Greeks themselves did not treat their myths as fixed and immutable narratives. The stories of the Trojan War were continually reinvented, enriched and transformed. This capacity for adaptation is not a betrayal of the myth but one of its fundamental characteristics.

Then along comes Elon Musk, who announces on X, threatening (or threatening whilst announcing): “Before the end of the year, Grok Imagine will produce a feature film based on the Odyssey, historically accurate and faithful to Homer’s art”, a message accompanied by a three-minute video showing what an Odyssey created entirely using artificial intelligence might look like. Nolan reinterprets Homer at a time in history when the legacy of the classical world is being invoked by right-wing circles (both radical and otherwise) as a symbol of a supposedly ‘Western civilisation’ under threat. The film distances itself from this ideological appropriation by showing how the heroic myth upon which Odysseus’s fame is based is profoundly different from the reality of the facts. In fact, a gradual revelation emerges as the narrative unfolds: the Odysseus portrayed by Matt Damon is not simply the hero celebrated in legends, but also the man who broke a fundamental moral pact, thereby contributing to the crisis in the society around him. His adventures, viewed as glorious episodes, gradually take on a different meaning, bringing to light a truth that calls into question the entire construction of the myth. The film therefore presents a clear vision of what it means to adapt the Odyssey today. And, as we know, every era reinvents its own heroes. Greek vase-painters depicted Achilles and Odysseus in the armour of their own time. Renaissance artists imagined them with Italian features. The nineteenth century transformed them into pure, white figures, sculpted in white marble, unaware that the ancient world was, in fact, rich in colour. Hollywood continues this very same tradition.

The image of antiquity that Nolan constructs does not, therefore, claim to recreate the past as it was, or as it might have been, but reveals the way in which our present imagines the past. Now. It is this that makes the Odyssey an extraordinary classic: its malleability in relation to the present. So Nolan does not merely transpose a classic faithfully; he uses the poem to interrogate the present, and it is precisely this choice that seems to foreshadow the controversies the film would provoke.

From the artificial intelligence behind deepfakes, which make it impossible to distinguish the real from the alleged or the implausible, to artificial intelligence used as an infallible tool for historical truth. It is a short step, but the paradox is clear: to invoke the most advanced technology to claim a supposed authenticity of the past that never even existed in Homer’s work means failing to understand either how myths or how history work. This contemporary obsession with historical accuracy reveals, rather, the cultural disorientation of the present. The interesting question is not whether the film is accurate, but rather what it says about contemporary sensibilities. That, my dear, is the value of the classic.