The biggest falsehood in Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” is the character of Ulysses

The deviations in Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” are not necessarily errors. They are choices. Shifts, omissions, influences and modernisations through which the director takes Homer’s poem and transforms it into a different story. The sea, the monsters, the gods, Penelope, Telemachus, the suitors and, of course, Odysseus remain. But the question that underpins the journey changes. Homer asks how a man can rediscover his identity after being forced to become many different people. Nolan seems to ask how a man can return home after what he has seen and, above all, after what he has done in war.

The first change therefore concerns Ulysses. In the original, he is polýtropos: multifaceted, versatile, cunning, capable of lying, seducing, fighting and storytelling. He is not a veteran weighed down by remorse. He is proud of his intelligence and even of his manipulations. The sense of guilt that Nolan attributes to him is a modern, almost psychoanalytical concept, which transforms the Homeric hero into a soldier traumatised by the destruction of Troy. Even the horse, which in the "Odyssey" is merely recalled through tales and songs, thus takes on central importance: no longer merely the masterpiece of Greek cunning, but Ulysses’ original sin.

Nolan also blends different texts. The figure of Sinon, the Greek who persuades the Trojans to bring the horse into the city, does not strictly belong to the Odyssey: his story is made famous above all by Virgil’s Aeneid. The film thus merges Homer with the subsequent tradition, as if the entire myth of the Trojan War constituted a single narrative. It is a philological inaccuracy, but an understandable cinematic choice. More radical is the omission of the Phaeacians. In the poem, after being welcomed by Nausicaa and King Alcinous, Odysseus recounts most of his adventures to the court. The Odyssey is not merely one man’s journey: it is the narrative that man constructs about his own journey.

But the decisive transformation is the gradual disappearance of the gods. In the Odyssey, Athena protects Odysseus and Telemachus, Poseidon pursues the protagonist, Zeus maintains the balance, and Hermes intervenes with Circe and Calypso. Human beings act freely, but within a universe in which the divine is present, capricious and decisive. By reducing the gods’ intervention, Nolan shifts all responsibility onto humans. Fate becomes psychology. The fault lies not in the broken relationship with Poseidon, but in Odysseus’s own conscience. Even the Sirens take on a different role. In Homer, they promise knowledge: they know everything that happened at Troy and lure Odysseus with the prospect of learning and listening. In a modern interpretation, however, they can become the voice that instils the deepest doubt in the hero: perhaps he does not really want to return; perhaps the journey is also the way in which he continues to evade Ithaca. Finally, the meaning of vengeance changes. The slaughter of the suitors, in the poem, is brutal, political and restorative: Odysseus eliminates the usurpers and regains control of his home, his estate and his kingdom. Homer does not even conceal the hanging of the female slaves accused of treachery. A contemporary version inevitably tends to tone down or alter this violence, to involve Penelope more closely and to transform the reconquest into atonement. The greatest distortion, therefore, is not a reordered episode, a deleted character or a modified monster. It is Odysseus. Homer’s Odysseus wishes to return to be king, husband, father and master of his own home once more. Nolan’s Odysseus seems to wish to return to understand whether, after Troy, it is still possible to be so. The former seeks Ithaca. The latter seeks forgiveness.