Review: Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey"

Theatrical release poster

When some friends offered me a spare ticket to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey at the Odyssey Cinema, St Albans, I felt I could not refuse their kind invitation. I confess I had been in two minds about seeing the film, partly because, as an erstwhile ancient historian, I was aware of some criticisms from classicists, in particular Emily Wilson's pointed concerns about the screenplay.

Yet, having now seen it, I must concede that The Odyssey is a monumental achievement in filmmaking: a thunderous IMAX epic that brings a version of Homer's Bronze Age world to vivid, roaring life. And yet, in transporting this 8th-century BCE tale to the 21st century, Nolan performs a fascinating act of reinterpretation. His Ithaca is not Homer's, and his Odysseus, played with battered, Everyman weariness by Matt Damon, is a distinctly modern creation: a man haunted by guilt and the weight of his own ingenuity. To my mind, this transformation represents the film's most significant departure: it sands down the wily, Machiavellian edges of Homer's hero, turning a figure of cunning and deception into a moral apologist for the very audience he is trying to win over.

At the heart of Nolan's project lies a pervasive intellectual tendency: presentism. The term refers to the uncritical application of contemporary values, moral frameworks, and psychological assumptions to past eras. It has become a modern habit that, while often producing compelling art, risks distorting the very texts it claims to honour.

Nolan's Odyssey is presentism in excelsis. It judges Odysseus not by the warrior code of his own age, but by the therapeutic standards of ours. It asks not whether he was clever, resourceful, and victorious, but whether he can be forgiven. It reframes his cunning not as a heroic virtue, but as a moral failing. This is not adaptation; it is retroactive judgment.

Presentism is not, in itself, a sin. All adaptations are, to some degree, translations across time. The danger arises when the past is not allowed to speak in its own voice: when modern sensibilities silently overwrite ancient values without acknowledgement. Nolan does not flag his reinterpretation as a conscious departure; he presents it as if it were the natural, inevitable reading of Homer's text. And that, for a work that purports to be an adaptation, is a subtle but significant act of erasure.

Nolan's Odyssey, therefore, is undeniably a 21st-century film. The director's signature non-linear storytelling, a device that can sometimes frustrate audiences, proves surprisingly well-suited to Homer's in medias res structure. The film frequently cuts between Odysseus' present-day struggles and flashbacks to the Trojan War, using memory as a screen for guilt. This is not merely a stylistic flourish; it is a thematic choice that allows Nolan to frame the entire epic through the lens of trauma and regret. As one critic observes, the film becomes a meditation on the idea that "you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

Yet this modern focus comes at a cost. By making the epic's central conflict about Odysseus' guilty conscience, Nolan strips away much of the poem's moral complexity. The Homeric Odysseus is a "complicated man". He is a master of lies and manipulation, a "wily" and "crafty" schemer whose narrative cunning is integral to his identity. The film, however, largely removes this "conniving storyteller" in favour of a straightforwardly tragic figure. In doing so, it aligns more closely with Nolan's previous work, such as Oppenheimer, than with the ancient epic, asking whether a brilliant man can ever be forgiven for the destruction he has wrought.

This is where presentism becomes most apparent. Homer's audience would not have asked whether Odysseus deserved forgiveness; they would have marvelled at his survival and celebrated his restoration of order. Nolan's Odysseus leaves victims in his wake, and the modern audience, by contrast, demands moral accounting. The film answers that demand but in doing so, it replaces an epic of action with a drama of conscience.

The film's central reinterpretation feels most uncomfortable here. In Greek literature, a hero is not defined by altruism, but by exceptional status and qualities that often create moral ambiguity. Odysseus in Sophocles' Philoctetes, for example, could be described as a politician who employs Machiavellian tactics. He is not a completely selfish man, but a "proto-utilitarian" concerned with the common good, using deception as a means to an end. This pragmatic, morally flexible Odysseus is the one from Homer's poem.

Nolan's Odysseus, by contrast, is a man who views his creation of the famous gift horse as a god-defying abomination. The Trojan Horse, the ultimate symbol of his cunning, becomes less a brilliant stratagem and more a "violation of Zeus's law": xenia, the sacred, unwritten moral code of hospitality that required people to treat strangers, travellers, and guests with absolute respect. Nolan frames this code not merely as a religious rule, but as the foundational social contract, a contract that Odysseus, through his deceit, has violated. This deception, which led to the destruction of Troy and the appalling massacre of its people, haunts the hero throughout the film.

Damon's performance, lauded for its "battered inwardness," portrays a man "shadowed by shame, self-doubt, and exhaustion." The result is a compelling character, but one fundamentally different from Homer's. He has been transformed from a master of deception into what one critic calls a "superhero whose moral virtue makes him lonely and sad." The film is more interested in the exhausted man beneath the legend, asking whether a man "can ever truly return after becoming someone else." This is presentism at its most potent: a Bronze Age warrior rendered as a modern veteran grappling with PTSD.

One of the most striking omissions in Nolan's adaptation is the treatment of Penelope. In Homer's epic, Penelope is Odysseus's intellectual equal: a woman of matching cunning who holds off a hundred suitors for twenty years through her own elaborate deceptions, most famously the weaving and unweaving of Laertes' shroud. She is, in many ways, the domestic counterpart to Odysseus's maritime guile. In Nolan's film, however, Anne Hathaway's Penelope is rendered almost entirely as a figure of stoic suffering and waiting. She is given few lines of agency and almost none of the playful, strategic intelligence that makes Homer's Penelope so captivating. The film shows her weeping, clutching Odysseus's abandoned cloak, and enduring the suitors' harassment with grim dignity, but it never allows her to outwit them on her own terms. This is a profound loss, as it reduces one of literature's great female strategists to a symbol of fidelity rather than a co-architect of the household's survival.

Even more telling is Nolan's treatment of the gods. Homer's Odyssey is saturated with divine intervention: Athena guides Odysseus, Poseidon pursues him with relentless fury, and Zeus presides over the cosmic order. These gods are not mere metaphors; they are active, capricious, and deeply invested in human affairs. Nolan, ever the secular humanist, largely evacuates the supernatural. The gods appear as fleeting visions, ambiguous whispers, or psychological projections of Odysseus's own mind. Athena is reduced to a spectral, ghost-like figure who appears only in flashback, offering counsel that feels more like Damon's internal monologue than divine wisdom. Poseidon's wrath is rendered as a series of increasingly improbable storms and sea-monster attacks, stripped of any theological weight.

In excising the gods, Nolan removes the very framework that gives Homer's epic its moral and cosmological dimension. Odysseus's suffering in the poem is not merely physical but existential; he is caught between divine forces that he can never fully comprehend or control. By making Odysseus the sole author of his fate, Nolan turns a cosmic drama into a psychological one, diminishing the epic's scope while gaining intimacy. This, too, is presentism: a modern, post-Enlightenment sensibility that cannot countenance genuine divine agency, replacing it with the interior drama of a single troubled mind.

Another crucial departure lies in the film's handling of the slaughter of the suitors. In Homer, the massacre in the great hall is a scene of brutal, cathartic justice. Odysseus, with Telemachus and two loyal herdsmen, methodically murders over a hundred men who have dishonoured his household. There is no hesitation, no moral hand-wringing, only the cold, efficient execution of revenge. It is a scene that has troubled readers for millennia, precisely because it resists easy moral judgment.

Nolan's version, by contrast, is a strange mixture of Hollywood action violence, worthy of Jason Statham, but at the same time our hero appears drenched in guilt. Damon's Odysseus pauses before each kill, his face contorted with anguish. The film inserts flashbacks to Troy, suggesting that each suitor's death echoes the slaughter of Trojan youths. In one particularly telling scene, Odysseus nearly spares the lead suitor Antinous (played with oily perfection by Robert Pattinson) before a sudden memory of a fallen comrade forces his hand.

This is a 21st-century sensibility imposed upon an 8th-century BCE warrior code. Homer's Odysseus does not apologise for killing; he boasts about it. Nolan's Odysseus cannot stop apologising. The film's final shot, rather than Odysseus reclaiming his throne with bloodied hands, shows him as a haunted man, recalling the dead. It is a powerful image, but it belongs to a different story entirely, which is about PTSD and moral injury, not about kleos and timē (glory and honour). Here, presentism does not merely colour the interpretation; it fundamentally rewrites the genre, turning heroic epic into trauma narrative.

Despite these significant departures, Nolan's The Odyssey is a breathtaking cinematic experience. The film is a non-stop showcase of thrilling set-pieces, from the harrowing encounter with the Cyclops, which is rendered as a claustrophobic, night-vision nightmare, to the lush, unsettling island of Circe, where Nolan's trademark practical effects transform human actors into swine with stomach-churning realism. The Scylla and Charybdis sequence is a masterclass in tension, with IMAX cameras plunging into whirlpools and scaling sheer cliffs. Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography is nothing short of majestic, capturing the Aegean's blinding blue and the underworld's charcoal gloom with equal virtuosity. Ludwig Göransson's score, a thunderous blend of ancient Greek instruments and modern electronic pulses, never lets the audience forget that this is both a period piece and a contemporary blockbuster.

The casting is inspired across the board. Robert Pattinson's Antinous is a revelation: he is sleazy, charismatic, and terrifying in his entitlement. Samantha Morton’s Circe is a magnetic, dangerous presence, all seductive menace and simmering rage. And Matt Damon, though, I believe, miscast as the wily trickster, is perfectly suited to Nolan's guilt-ridden interpretation. His Odysseus is a man who has lost everything, including his own moral compass, and Damon conveys that inner collapse with every furrowed brow and trembling hand.

It is worth returning, finally, to Emily Wilson's reservations: the very concerns that initially gave me pause. Wilson, whose acclaimed translation of the Odyssey has done so much to restore the poem's linguistic vitality and moral complexity, has spoken of the danger of adapting ancient texts without respecting their otherness. She warns against the temptation to make Homer "relevant" by smoothing over his strangeness, his brutality, his uncompromising vision of honour. Nolan's film, for all its brilliance, falls into precisely this trap. It makes the Odyssey relevant by making it comfortable, by giving Odysseus a conscience that resembles our own, by stripping away the gods, by turning Penelope into a passive mourner rather than an active strategist. In doing so, it sacrifices the very qualities that make the poem enduring: its alien moral landscape, its theological terror, its celebration of a hero who is not good but effective.

Wilson's critique, then, is not merely academic pedantry. It is a plea for fidelity, not to the letter of the text, but to its spirit. And by that measure, Nolan's film, for all its visual splendour and emotional power, falls short. It is not Homer's Odyssey; it is Nolan's. And while that is not necessarily a mark against it, it is a distinction worth making.

In the end, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a film of our time. It is a visually spectacular and intellectually ambitious retelling, but it is also a deeply modern one. It takes a story about a cunning, Machiavellian survivor and re-crafts it into a narrative of guilt, trauma, and redemption. While this makes for a powerful and emotionally resonant film, perhaps Nolan's most human work to date, it does so by removing the uncomfortable, morally ambiguous edges of its hero. The Odysseus who returns to Ithaca is not the one who left, but a 21st-century man wrestling with his conscience. This is a far cry from the master of spin and deceit who has captivated audiences for millennia.

Does that make it a bad film? Absolutely not. As a work of cinematic art, it is extraordinary: ambitious, beautiful, and deeply felt. But as an adaptation of Homer, it is a translation that loses as much as it gains. The original Odyssey does not ask us to forgive Odysseus; it asks us to marvel at his survival. Nolan's film, by contrast, asks us to pity him. That pity is well-earned within the film's own logic, but it comes at the expense of the very qualities that made Odysseus the prototypical Western hero: his cunning, his pride, his unapologetic will to live and return.

Nolan has given us an Odysseus for an age that cannot stomach untroubled heroes. It is an age that demands its protagonists bear the weight of every choice, every death, every deception. It is a worthy homage, but it is not Homer's Odyssey. It is Nolan's, and that, perhaps, is the most honest thing one can say about it.

Did I enjoy the film? Yes, definitely – you do need to see it.