A magnificent but superficial Odyssey: the translator speaks

Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action-packed film adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic is an entertaining way to escape the heat for a few hours. Nolan’s characteristic narrative leaps and twists are relatively easy to follow and suit "The Odyssey" well, a tale made up of stories within stories. My teenage children enjoyed it. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, "The Odyssey" isn’t tedious, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to completely ruin. It’s an audiovisual spectacle for the whole family, much like an elaborate 4th of July fireworks display, and possessing roughly the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, manual dexterity, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, misunderstandings, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Once again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Once again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive sequences in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Once again, we witness the desperate endeavour of a male character seeking to win back and/or avenge a female love interest. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity for these Homeric themes might propel him to new creative heights and enable him to conjure up more believable characters. But "The Odyssey" presents his usual combination of grandeur and superficiality.

Without a bucketful of wax for my ears – the sort that Eurylochus, played by Himesh Patel, Odysseus’s eternally anxious right-hand man destined for ruin, uses to pass the Sirens unscathed – I was exposed to the full din of sticks, maces and swords clashing, armour clanging, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, collapsing palaces and burning temples. But, unlike Matt Damon’s wax-less Odysseus, tied to the mast as he is carried past the Sirens – naked women reclining on rather uncomfortable-looking rocks – I watched shipwrecks and carnage without feeling any emotional distress. My eyes remained dry even at the sight of the dog Argo, whose puppy-like adorability is predictably emphasised to suit the animal-friendly sensibilities of our times. If only the human characters had been treated with the same serious attention.

The Homeric epic was itself an adaptation. The poem utilised a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework pre-existing mythical traditions, reshaping the story of a war veteran’s homecoming so that it resonated with the complex concerns of the Greek-speaking peoples of the Archaic period, an era of migration, colonisation and urbanisation. Some Greek communities of the 7th century BC were governed by an oligarchy, others by a single man. The poem explores the tension between the needs and desires of groups of men – Odysseus’s companions or the suitors of his wife Penelope – and those of a single powerful and cunning man, who wishes to rule them all and secure eternal fame for himself.

The gods do not exist, and yet shipwrecks and death are presented as the inevitable consequence of the son of Poseidon being blinded and of devouring the Cows of the Sun. Zeus’s law is described as being of crucial importance, and yet Zeus is not there. Nolan’s worldview is not broad enough to encompass either real gods or real people who might be different from us.

There are giants, including Polyphemus – here a solitary Cyclops – and a few overly fanciful Laestrygonians. Circe, portrayed with earthy energy by Samantha Morton, is a Baba Yaga inside a Hansel and Gretel-style cottage; she resorts to a laborious form of plastic surgery to transform Odysseus’s greedy men into the pigs they already are. There is only one lotus-eater, although the theme of amnesia takes on a new meaning, as one might expect.

Famous scenes flash by: Scylla and Charybdis threaten the ship, Eurycleia recognises the scar on Odysseus’s leg, Antinous hurls a stool at our hero in disguise. Some key sequences from the epic are missing: the film skips over the island of Scheria, home of the thoughtful Princess Nausicaa, where Homer’s Odysseus recounts his marvellous adventures to the hospitable Phaeacians. In this over-the-top film, there is no room for anything as pleasantly mundane and small-scale as Nausicaa’s laundry and her girlish daydreams about a future husband. Damon’s greying Odysseus is neither a great storyteller nor a seducer. More fundamentally, the inclusion of a friendly, wealthy and culturally advanced foreign land would have added further confusion to the film’s already muddled premise: that this Hollywood version of Mycenaean Greece is the only ‘civilisation’ in the world, the only place that still remembers, at least vaguely, that strangers and beggars must be welcomed according to the law of Zeus.

The costumes, armour, ships and architecture form a hodgepodge, in keeping with Homer’s poem, which in turn draws on many generations of storytelling and incorporates fragments from different eras, dialects and traditions. Linguistically too, Homeric Greek is a composite language, although it is always metrical poetry and not a language that anyone has ever actually spoken.

Despite the artificially fuelled outrage online, there is nothing inherently wrong with the film’s attempt to connect with contemporary Americans. When one isn’t setting out to write a screenplay in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, one might as well use something akin to colloquial American English. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s strengths. The language is relentlessly didactic, devoid of humour and flat. Attempts at energetic speech – ‘My father is coming back’ or ‘Let’s get the hell off this bloody beach’ – sit uneasily alongside grandiose musings: ‘Yes, my queen. The violation of Zeus’s law spreads like a plague. Our Bronze Age is crumbling, and perhaps he could not bear the sight of the ruins of what he had wrought. Nowhere. Least of all in his own home.”

As is often said at award ceremonies, I have humbly learnt that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of the Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he quoted my version of the poem’s opening line: ‘Tell me of a complicated man’. But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this screenplay. Unfortunately, Damon’s Ulysses is neither complicated, nor shrewd, nor ingenious.

One of the funniest – and most famous – tricks in Homer’s *Ulysses* is telling Polyphemus that his name is ‘Nobody’. When the blinded giant shouts to his neighbours for help, the other Cyclopes are reassured on hearing that ‘Nobody’ is harming him. In the film, Ulysses doesn’t need to outwit Polyphemus, because the Cyclops is a brainless puppet. Nolan’s one-eyed, grunting giant is referred to as ‘it’, barely speaks, doesn’t get drunk and has neither neighbours nor a favourite sheep.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, given that it comes from the director of "Oppenheimer", Damon’s clumsy Ulysses also seems to lack technological ingenuity, or "polymēchania". He does not build a double bed using a tree growing inside his house – it would be a waste of effort, given that he seems to sleep or have sex so rarely. The raft on which he escapes from Calypso is cobbled together haphazardly from a few pieces of driftwood, in stark contrast to the elaborate woodworking and shipbuilding described by Homer. We do not witness the design or construction of the Trojan Horse: on the contrary, a kitsch and poorly designed horse, lacking wheels, appears on the windswept beach as if it had been dropped there by a drone. The difficulties of transporting large and bulky objects over rough terrain must have been very much on the director’s mind as he hauled his IMAX cameras across the film’s numerous and challenging locations.

The most striking new element introduced by Nolan compared to the original material is a subplot based on a story from the Aeneid, which describes how the Trojans were deceived and tricked into bringing the Trojan Horse – an invention of the ‘cruel Ulysses’ – into the city, thanks to the machinations of a Greek double agent named Sinon, whose name means ‘harmful’. In contrast to the relatively positive portrayal of cunning intelligence in Homer’s *Odyssey*, Virgil depicts Odysseus as cruel and predatory; Sinon is his deceitful accomplice. In Nolan’s film, Sinon is played by Elliot Page and, far from being a villain, is the moral centre of the film. He is recruited for the Trojan War whilst still a brave young man, due to the treacherous machinations of Antinous, a teenage draft-dodger, played as an adult by a charismatically slimy Robert Pattinson.

The film’s main emotional arc centres on Ulysses’ belated realisation: he realises that he is complicit in the exploitation of Sinon because he did not tell him the truth about the Trojan Horse. Once his memory has returned, Ulysses is tormented by guilt. The film does not address the moral dilemmas raised by its own narrative invention: for example, why it is so important that Batman told the valiant Robin the whole truth, given that the latter would have been killed instantly anyway, or why the innocent Sinon would want to take part in the plan, if the sacking of Troy was as terrible as the film suggests.

Ulysses’s lie to Sinon does not trigger the Trojan War, and presumably the Trojans would have brought the horse into the city anyway, just as they do in Homer’s Odyssey. This convoluted subplot is forced into the film to allow Nolan to convey a relentlessly didactic message about the contemporary English-speaking world: the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit have set in motion a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear.

Nolan’s other major contribution to the Homeric narrative consists of repeated references to threats against ‘our civilisation’ from the ‘Sea Peoples’: a now-discredited nineteenth-century theory concerning seafaring tribes thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BC and also to have been responsible for the collapse, which occurred at roughly the same time, of the Mycenaean Greek civilisation.

“Our civilisation is under attack,” laments Penelope. Odysseus comforts her by telling her that “Bronze Age civilisation”, including writing, will rise from its own ashes. The current consensus, as Nolan evidently knows, is that there was never a single phenomenon known as the ‘Sea Peoples’, and that the transition of the Greek-speaking world from the more centralised and literate Mycenaean palace culture to the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age in the 11th century BC was caused by a series of factors, including climate change, earthquakes and internal unrest. Nolan uses these competing historical theories to construct a distinctive plot twist regarding the identity of the Sea Peoples, which I shall not reveal, although it is probably possible to guess.

Zeus’s Law is a version of the ancient Greek concept of xenia: the idealised set of relationships between strangers, guests and hosts, who are called upon to treat one another with mutual respect and thereby forge multigenerational bonds between unrelated families. In the film, xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity: the wealthy should show kindness to the poor and hungry living amongst them, without necessarily doing anything to alleviate their poverty.

Many of the film’s underlying values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, war, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abuse of women and the pursuit of honour – all perfectly acceptable in Homer’s world – are, in this version, portrayed very negatively. This in itself is not a problem; it becomes one, however, when the film’s values and vision are at odds with one another and the characters’ motivations make no sense even by the story’s own internal criteria.

In Nolan’s Odyssey, slaughtering people through deception, technology and weapons is wrong when the Greeks kill the Trojans, who have violated xenia, but it is right when Odysseus kills the suitors, who have violated xenia. Taking possession of something that Odysseus and his companions have apparently abandoned is natural and forgivable when the Trojans lay claim to the horse, but unnatural and unforgivable when the suitors lay claim to the palace, the food, the wine and Odysseus’s wife.

Strangers arriving in Ithaca must be treated with benevolent courtesy, for they may be gods in disguise; strangers in foreign lands, on the other hand, are usually monsters to be blinded, robbed and slaughtered.

Defying the gods is noble and courageous when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, son of Poseidon; it is foolish and greedy when Eurylochus eats the Cows of the Sun. Deception is wicked when Odysseus deceives Scylla or when the suitors deceive Telemachus, but it is good when Telemachus and Odysseus deceive the suitors.

Sharing is a good thing, and we see Odysseus taking his place at an oar alongside his men; but the rule of a single man is also unequivocally a good thing, and those who challenge the monarchy or autocracy, or seek to take more than their allotted share, are either wicked – the pretenders – or fools – Eurylochus. In both cases, they must die. Fighting and killing to amass wealth, as Agamemnon does, is wrong; fighting and killing to preserve wealth already acquired, even through war, is right.

Homer’s Odyssey provides a clear and moving account of the feelings, stories and perspectives of many of Odysseus’s companions and subordinates, including Eurylochus and the slave swineherd Eumaeus. Kidnapped, trafficked and sold into slavery as a child, Eumaeus dreams that his long-lost master, Odysseus, might one day return and give him a home of his own. In the film, none of these subordinate characters possesses an independent personality. Mentor, played by Ryan Hurst, who helps Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, is not a goddess in disguise, but merely a caring individual with a beard; Eurylochus is not a bitter rival of Odysseus, but another caring individual with a beard. John Leguizamo does his best in the role of Eumaeus, now afflicted by the curse of cataracts to ensure he does not recognise Odysseus until the right moment, but Nolan’s screenplay offers him nothing to work with. This ‘servant’s’ – the term the film prefers to ‘slave’ – sole desire is to make Odysseus’s life more comfortable. But Damon’s Odysseus remains unhappy as he stubbornly strides towards the camera, passing through yet another marvellous landscape.

The Trojan War is portrayed as an aberration, the fault of a monstrous, faceless Agamemnon – the one in the strange Darth Vader costume – who failed as an American family man by killing his own daughter. Ulysses is an idealised leader who would never willingly endanger his own people: it is his foolish men who insist on going to snoop around Circe’s hut, and he kindly goes to fetch them back, without stopping to have sex with the goddess for even an hour, let alone a whole magical year. Damon’s Odysseus is driven primarily by anxiety and guilt, though he is also eager to protect his son. Holland does a fine job of portraying a scatterbrained twenty-year-old who looks twelve.

But the portrayal of Ulysses as a reluctant warlord renders the world imagined by the film nonsensical. We are not shown that war or killing are wrong, but merely that good men sometimes feel guilty for having committed them: a very different concept. Any serious portrayal of violence, ancient or modern, must show the victims’ perspective as well as that of the perpetrators, and the Homeric epics easily pass this test; Nolan does not.

The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks: we know neither the names nor the faces of any of them. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are stained with blood only through the most ‘just’ and video-game-like forms of killing, and we feel neither pity nor horror at the deaths of their victims, be they Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sacking of Troy – which he is supposed to have organised himself – Odysseus looks around, bewildered and horrified, as if he had never witnessed a massacre before.

At the same time, we are encouraged to despise Antinous – the ‘contrary mind’ – Penelope’s chief suitor, because he is a coward, a liar and a schemer. The film asks us both to be horrified by war and to celebrate the action sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood begins to flow. The massacre of the suitors is probably the most entertaining sequence in the film. The gleefully villainous Antinous – Pattinson is the only person on set who seems to be enjoying himself – clearly deserves to be stabbed to death with Sinon’s dagger, but he also deserves one of the Oscars that will rain down on this film like Zeus’s golden rain.

Nolan’s "Odyssey" lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing compelling to say about time, memory, history, war or the relationship between a warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, his adversaries, his comrades, his friends and his neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is contrived. The writing is dreadful. None of the characters have credible motivations for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks awful.

The most troubling ethical issue surrounding Nolan’s "Odyssey" concerns the decision to shoot part of the film in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thereby normalising the violence still being perpetrated against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly infuriating that Nolan has used that land merely as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres on, glorifies and redeems the hero of a territorial war by virtue of his belated and partial acknowledgement of his own guilt.

Despite all this, the release of "The Odyssey" remains an occasion to celebrate. In what is described as the age of streaming, this epic is drawing audiences back into cinemas. In what is described as an era of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of "The Odyssey", including my own, are flying off the shelves.

Some of those who buy the book or go to the cinema to see Tom Holland might then take up the study of Ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade some university administrators not to cut literature, languages and history departments. Nolan, who studied English literature at University College London – where students still tackle the Odyssey in their first year as a ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to bring the general public back to reading, and I am grateful to him for that.

Emily Wilson

Copyright London Review of Books, 2026