08/24/2026
As soon as Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey opened, quite a few former Ancient Mythology students emailed me excited reviews filled with praise for Matt Damon and Tom Holland as Odysseus and Telemachus. “When you see it, Dr. Kietzman, let me know what you think.” This post is my answer to Sarah and Alicia and Mel and any other Greek mythology fans out there. I enjoyed the film—it packs more in than I would have thought it could and the Cyclops is pretty damn cool. Because I don’t want to be THAT professor who ruins by nit-picking another person’s creative effort, I’ll make only two critical points: Matt Damon did not strike me as “polytropos”—a man of “many ways” or “complicated” (in Emily Wilson’s translation), and I missed all the women characters who help Odysseus transition from war to civilian life. There is no Queen Arete, no Nausicaa, and Circe is debased into a wicked witch stereotype instead of the powerful and very knowing goddess who sends Odysseus to meet his mother Antikleia in the underworld. Antikleia, too, the great mother who died of heartbreak, missing her son, is absent, too. Calypso (s*x kitten therapist) comforts Odysseus but doesn’t re-educate him.
Nolan did a great job portraying Odysseus’s complicated relationship with his crew members though. He played up the PTSD reading first popularized by V.A. psychologist Dr. Jonathan Shay, whose Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America use the Homeric epics to help Vietnam veterans heal and to indict the American military for a range of things: not preparing men adequately for war, not keeping units together as they transition out of service, and not providing men ways to grieve (a widespread cultural problem).
Overall, I thought it was a good film—more gripping than Oppenheimer, although like the famous physicist, Odysseus struggles with the repercussions of his own techne—the Trojan Horse.
We all know that films are interpretations. Directors make choices. Nolan created a film that made me think about whether and, if so, how Homer’s poem might speak to our own end-of-empire moment. If that was his aim, and I think it was, then the ending seems pretty weak. Telemachus accedes to the throne and Odysseus retires to go on a cruise with Penelope. I think I'd rather have the sea full of monsters, elections (implied in the text), and mentor-gods which are absent in Nolan's film.
Having read the poem countless times, the most powerful image of the returned Odysseus is as the beggar, the “nobody,” the man who must take his cues from Eumaeus (Leader of Men) and find new ways to be at home. His beggardom—drawn out over ten books in Homer—is rushed in Nolan’s film so that he suffers little and has more screen time as Rambo. In Homer’s epic, even after the suitors are dead, Odysseus remains the beggar, waiting to see if Penelope will accept him, trying to discern whether the olive tree around which he built his marriage bed is still growing or whether the bed has been moved which would imply that some other man has cut it. How's that for a castration image?
But by giving more poem-time to Odysseus the beggar, Homer sends a strong message to listeners and readers 3,000 years later that the path forward requires unmasking and walking humbly like the swineherd. You, Eumaeus, are Homer’s true leader. Here, too, is the proto-Christian path to redemption commentators like Ezra Klein seem to be looking for. To anyone experiencing their first Odyssey through Nolan’s film, Eumaeus, regrettably, will probably be read as little more than a side character.
The beggar is a powerful narrative image but there are so many others like Odysseus’s scar, exposed in the foot-washing episode. Toward the end of the poem but before Odysseus is open about his return, Penelope asks the maids to bathe the stranger, who insists that it must be one particular old woman (his former nurse, Eurykleia), who may only wash his feet. When Eurykleia sees the scar on his calf, she gasps and before she’s exhaled, Odysseus has her by the throat: “Nurse, are you trying to kill me?” Nolan quiets this terrifying response to a shush and a finger on lips which robs it of its intensity and significance. In the poem, Odysseus’s murderous reaction, his scar, and the story digression about how he was wounded in a boar hunt rite of passage tell us much about how Odysseus came by his calculating, kill or be killed personality.
Both the film and the translation Christopher Nolan used (Wilson’s iambic pentameter verse) are drivingly linear and without the potent poetic pauses that give us meaningful images to ponder. These moments ARE the reader’s experience of the epic, held out to us like guest gifts—burnished cups from which we drink deep--or like flotsam to hold onto: Odysseus’s raft, Achilles’ shield, Penelope’s loom, and the tears two immortal horses weep every time the good comrade, Patroclus, dies.
