The Odyssey: Nolan Cast a Constellation, Missed the North Star

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It’s July in Europe, the heatwave is relentless - the whole continent suffering, even in Birkenstocks. You're looking for somewhere to hide from the 40 degrees in the shade, so you go out with a friend for a Saturday brunch.

Somewhere in the conversation, you land on movies - what you've watched and loved (or didn't), what's coming up in the near future, etc. You have a vague memory of something to look forward to, but as a cinephile, you check your local theatre's programme, and - boom! Tickets for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey are out. The best seats are gone already, of course, but you manage to grab two for the Tuesday IMAX screening at 19:00, row 11.

You'd been excited for this one for a while - ever since the news broke two years ago. And why wouldn't you be? You studied the epic in school, you grew up on Percy Jackson doing his own riff on it, and you know that Nolan has a stellar filmography with, usually, a cast that resembles a constellation one can see only at the darkest nights. What could go wrong?

Turns out: a lot - but you don’t know that yet.

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The day comes! You’re excited, grab dinner before the screening, some popcorn after - life’s good. Row 11 turns out to be perfect. The lights go down, the IMAX intro swells to fill a screen the size of a building, and for the first twenty minutes, you're convinced you made the right call. The Trojan coastline looks the way Nolan's water always looks - vast and gorgeous. A little weird, because the colour grading is different in every shot, but that’s okay. And then you kept watching, expecting the greatness you were promised by all of the cast interviews, by the early screenings’ reviews, yet it rarely happened.

Here is the thing I kept waiting for, the whole three hours: a moment where this Odysseus outthinks someone. The entire reason the Odyssey has lasted 3000 years and outlived a hundred forgotten epics about men who were merely strong is that its hero wasn't the strongest man at Troy - he was the cleverest. He talked his way out of caves, invented THE horse, lied fluently to his own wife for sport and even went to hell and back. Homer's word for it is mêtisCunning intelligence - the kind that beats brute force by refusing to fight on its terms. It is, arguably, the single most load-bearing character trait in the entire Western canon.

I can understand creative liberty and that an adaptation can never be 100% accurate to its literary source, that’s okay - however, Nolan's Odysseus is anxious. Troubled. Loud, obnoxious. Haunted by a war he cannot leave behind. What he does not have, anywhere in three hours of runtime, is a single moment of being smart.

The main example is the Cyclops sequence - the most famous act of pure cunning in the poem, the "Nobody" trick - is restaged as a straightforward action piece: not even bigger than the poem, just louder and completely uninterested in the wordplay that makes the original scene work, one that shows the warrior’s wit. I’ve been thinking about why and how they chose to alter the most important part of the whole journey, and in Nolan’s words:

“It was not possible to work it in.” ¹

I couldn’t come to a conclusion, because in the most famous adaptation of The Odyssey, “Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters”, the joke is translated perfectly not only in English, but in my native language - Bulgarian - as well, and I guess in all other languages once it was successfully translated once. So if that’s an option for Rick Riordon, why is it not one for a world-renowned Hollywood director with access to every single academic/translator/scholar in existence?

That aside, when thinking about the different reasons for this bold choice, I was able to somewhat justify it: it’s a movie adaptation to an old story that the common man is probably not as familiar with. The script would require a plot device that explains the events that come after the crew escapes somewhat successfully, therefore we need a mention of Polyphemus’s father being Poseidon - which we get after the creature is blinded, during its prayers to the God. This is not mentioned in the poem itself, as Odysseus is unaware of that fact, so they needed a way to sneak it in. Do I believe that the two events can co-exist in the same script? Of course, but I am not the one writing it.

However, nothing could’ve prepared me for what happens next, after the crew escaped and Odysseus decided to shoot an arrow in the cyclops’ already blinded eye. I remember audibly gasping at the sheer stupidity this man expressed by this action, an action that the hero Homer wrote about would NEVER even think of, let alone be proud of. This action, tied with the removal of the wittiest exchange in the poem, leads to the main problem of the movie: the protagonist is solving problems with fire rather than language, therefore this film is no longer portraying what the original story is about.

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Another bone to pick is that the gods almost disappear entirely. Athena shows up, played by Zendaya, mostly as a voice in Odysseus's head - closer to a conscience than a deity. Poseidon is never seen; his anger is something the crew half-believes in and half-attributes to bad luck. Even Circe, one of the most genuinely uncanny figures in the poem - a minor goddess, daughter of the sun - is played as a straightforward western horror-movie witch, practical effects and all, with no indication she's divine rather than simply sinister.

What’s interesting is that Samantha Morton’s performance is, in my opinion, the best performance in the whole movie, and probably the best supporting performance of the year so far. She steals the show for the 15 minutes of screen time she’s given, as Circe is also the best written woman in the story, probably due to the fact that she exists outside of the Odyssey itself. With that being said, her actions look disproportionate because there is no build up to them. I adore Madeline Miller’s interpretation of the myth, because she provides the backstory of why Circe is cautious of the crew in her house - as when they realise she’s alone in her cottage - no husband, no son - there is a shift in their behaviour. This is the moment the sorceress realises what would happen if she doesn’t take things into her own hands, which leads to using magic as protection.

In Nolan’s interpretation, what we see is…several hungry men saying “we don’t want to hurt you, we only need food and will be on our way”; then Circe molds them into pigs in one of the most grotesque yet beautiful scenes of the year. It doesn't make any sense because they are shown as "nice," but apparently she has this inner hatred towards men, which is never properly explained. The closest the film comes to giving her a reason is a single aside, tossed off after the men are already snouted and squealing: "Back to your disguises." It's genuinely the best line Nolan's ever given a woman - dry and actually funny - and for about three seconds you get a glimpse of the Circe who could have anchored this whole film: someone who's done this before, who's tired, who has a history the movie isn't interested in telling. Then the scene moves on, and so does she - fifteen minutes total, no explanation, no aftermath. Morton finds an entire character in the gaps Nolan left her, which is more a credit to her than to the script that gave her almost nothing to work with.

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It's a small, frustrating pattern that repeats with everyone the film routes through myth: give the actor just enough to be interesting, then refuse to follow up. Even the underworld gets this treatment. Odysseus never actually goes there - no katabasisA descent into the underworld, or a literary account of such a journey to the land of the dead, constituting a temporary visit followed by an anabasis (ascent)., no journey into the underworld at all, and certainly no Achilles telling him it's better to be a living slave than a dead king. He never meets his mother in the movie, which is one of the most heartbreaking parts of the poem. It's implied he's changed by the war, that he carries something like an underworld inside him, yet a movie with a budget of $250 million could’ve created a spectacle in scale and would be tied phenomenally to the end of the story we were presented with.

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Instead we get a man who is haunted, in the vague, prestige-drama sense of the word, rather than one who has literally walked into hell and come back changed by what he heard there. Nolan built a world where the gods are optional beliefs and the magic apologizes for itself, which is sad, because the magic is the point of the Odyssey. Strip it out and you're left with a war veteran's guilt trip that happens to have a cool horse in it, a well-played hag and Charlize Theron’s recreation of her 2004 J'adore Perfume campaign.

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The women fare worse than the gods. Calypso (Charlize Theron) exists almost entirely as an obstacle - a nymph who gets Odysseus addicted to the lotus flower and erases his memory, which is the purest form of a plot device for explaining why he's been gone twenty years. In the poem, she’s not even feeding him lotus flowers, as the Lotus-Eaters live on a separate island visited earlier by Odysseus's crew; he’s trapped in Ogygia through her love and Zeus himself is ordering her to set him free, because Athena begged him to do so; in the movie, we don’t see that, she just feels bad for him in her tortilla blanket. Helen (Lupita Nyong'o) gets one strong scene of defiance and then recedes into being the reason a decade of men died, without ever becoming a person the film is curious about. Nat from “natthebeesknees” has a great analysis about the women in the movie, so if you’re interested, you can watch her video here.

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And we’re not the only ones who noticed. Emily Wilson - the University of Pennsylvania classicist whose 2017 translation of The Odyssey Nolan has openly cited as an influence, reviewed the film for the London Review of Books, and the review briefly crashed the LRB's website under the traffic. Her verdict is blunt: she said she would be ashamed to have written any part of the script. The review argues the film has nothing real to say about memory, war, or the cost a homecoming exacts on everyone around the man coming home - that its characters are never given convincing motivation for what they do.

It's worth sitting with who Wilson is before you weigh her review too heavily, because her own history with this exact material makes her the most loaded possible person to have written it. Her 2017 Odyssey was the first complete translation of the poem into English by a woman, and it became a cultural event - a bestseller, a MacArthur fellowship ², a fixture on best-of lists - for using plain, contemporary language instead of the ornamental, archaic diction translators had defaulted to for two centuries. And almost immediately, critics started calling it "a feminist translation," treating her modern diction and attention to characters like Penelope and the enslaved women in Odysseus's household as an ideological project rather than a stylistic one.

Wilson herself has pushed back on that label. ³ Asked about it directly, she said she finds it limiting to treat anything a woman produces as inherently feminist, just for having been made by a woman. This framing was handed to her ^{4 5}, and it followed her from op-eds to lecture halls to the online harassment she's spoken about receiving as the first woman to do this type of translation.

In my opinion, Nolan’s Odyssey takes liberties at least as large as Wilson's - an invented character in Sinon, an Odysseus who never goes to the underworld, a Circe stripped of her divinity, gods reduced to psychology. Some of it, down to the vocabulary, is cut from Wilson's cloth: the same instinct toward plain, contemporary language that got her translation labeled "feminist" and "dumbed down" shows up in his script too - Antinous calling Telemachus's absent father a "daddy," Telemachus himself saying "dad," Odysseus rallying his men with "Let's go!" Witney Seibold called it dialogue that lacks "the ring of ancient poetry." ⁶ But Nolan's version of this same choice was received as a directorial risk, defended in the press ⁷, mostly forgiven by opening weekend - not the years-long referendum on whether he had the right to touch the text at all that Wilson is still fielding.

Yet Nobody's asking whether Nolan's masculinity shaped his reading of the text, or whether a man should be trusted to reinterpret Homer for a new generation. He is a "visionary." He gets a $250 million budget and an A CinemaScore. She got a decade of being asked to defend her right to translate the thing at all - and then, when she finally said something critical about a man's version of the same story, watched a website crash under the backlash.

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I could keep pulling this thread - Calypso, Circe, Helen, all of them interesting women flattened into obstacles or motivations for a man's journey - but that's really a bigger essay than a movie review, and Nolan has given me over a decade of material to work with. It's the same conversation that followed Oppenheimer, and Interstellar, and the entire Dark Knight trilogy before it: a filmmaker with a genuine gift for scale and structure, who still hasn't figured out how to write a woman who exists for reasons other than a man's arc. That's worth its own piece - an actual accounting of what makes a female character work on the page, using Nolan's filmography as the case study - consider this a preview. ;)

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So, back to that theatre, row 11, the lights still down in memory. The cast really was a constellation - every name on that poster earned its place, and for stretches of this film, you can feel Nolan's genuine command of scale: the IMAX cinematography, the sheer physical size of a fleet of ships or a cave full of screaming men, a witch morphing people into pigs with no CGI involved. Nobody is going to walk out of this movie unimpressed by what it looks like.

But a constellation, however bright, is only useful if it points somewhere. Homer's Odysseus survives 3,000 years not because he's strong, or tragic, or played by a movie star - he survives because he's clever, and cleverness is a harder thing to write than grief. Watching this film, I kept thinking Nolan wanted a war epic and picked the wrong poem to adapt. The Iliad is the one about scale, rage, and the brutal arithmetic of men dying for something already lost; it would have let him do the huge, epic, grim, IMAX-scaled war movie he clearly has the appetite for, without having to pretend a homecoming story is secretly about something else. Instead he took the Odyssey - a story about wit, patience, and a man’s journey home - and tried to make it into the war movie he really wanted, stripping out the one trait the hero needs to survive it.

Nolan had, arguably, more resources than anyone who has ever adapted this poem: a $250 million budget, a cast that could carry three separate awards campaigns, and a sitting classicist's own translation to work from. What he built instead is a well-lit, beautifully shot monument to a version of this story with the wit surgically removed - gods turned into feelings, an underworld turned into a metaphor, a Circe turned into a horror-movie set piece, a hero turned into a man who solves problems by killing. Even the translator he claims as an influence looked at the finished thing and said she'd be ashamed to have written a word of it. ⁸ And sadly, despite my anticipation for over 2 years, I'm inclined to agree with her.

Anyway, the popcorn was great.

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