27 Thoughts After Seeing Nolan’s Odyssey

The Odyssey is back on the cultural radar. This poem that was sung more than 2,700 years ago is an echo from the Bronze Age.

This poem has embedded itself in our language all these years later. We call a grueling journey an odyssey, a trusted advisor a mentor, and a dangerous temptation a siren call. We mention lotus-eaters, and of tying ourselves to the mast to survive our own worst impulses.

Now Christopher Nolan is directing a movie on the poem bringing it to a new generation. And his film is followed by a lot of criticism by people who read the poem, even from translators like Emily Wilson.

Adaptations

An artist has every right to reinterpret an ancient work. People have been doing that with Homer since antiquity.

But the closer an adaptation stays to the original setting, the more its changes invite scrutiny. Why change this? What does the change add?

The Odyssey is not just an adventure story. It has a whole view of gods, mortality, hospitality, intelligence, civilization, and fate. Change those things and you change the poem.

That is allowed. But people will notice. And that is probably good. It brings attention back to some of our oldest literature, a welcome break from the culture around us now.

1) A Fine Action Film

I would probably give it a six or 7 out of ten. It’s definetly the type of film that will make a lot of money. Which it is doing.

But I doubt I will watch it again. Truthfully, the source material is just so good that it’s hard for someone talented as Nolan to truly mess up this film. Especially with his budget.

The real problem is the film does not feel Homeric at all. This Odyssey is a continuation of the same themes he plays with in his other films. Which is fine. But that’s not Homer.

2) Nolan Is the Wrong Kind of Director for Homer

Nolan built his career around dark, brooding men trapped inside technical labyrinths. Again and again he returns to the guilty and isolated man whose intelligence becomes a kind of prison. You can see this theme in every movie since Memento.

I think The Prestige is his best film because it brings together everything Nolan does well. It is a story about obsession, technology and secrecy.

But Homer’s Odyssey isn’t like this. It contains darkness but it is also playful. It is sensual and funny.

Nolan is about as far from Fellini directing Marcello Mastroianni as a filmmaker can get. His films lack that lightness of spirit. They struggle to move naturally between the playful and the profound, or between the domestic and the miraculous. Odysseus is not a tortured genius carrying guilt through a hostile universe.

3) The American Accents Are Actually an Improvement

I was surprised at how well the American accents work in this film. Hopefully we can get away from British accents being normal for ancient epics. They don’t work as well as the American ones.

The American accent makes the dialogue feel faster and more immediate. That suits Homer. His poetry can be elevated, but it is direct.

4) Nolan’s Cuts Do Not Work With The Odyssey

Nolan loves cutting. This is one of the reasons why he is so succesful in the modern age. His style works perfectly with the modern attention span. If you look down at your phone it feels like you missed a lot of the film.

His style of editing always building tension. He is progressively shortening shot durations, from four seconds down to two, then one, down to mere frames. This forces the viewer’s heart rate to race. Nolan's technique prevents boredom, but it can also starve a scene of resonance.

He also uses kinetic cross-cutting editing. This is what film theorists call a technique of escalating momentum. It’s great if the plot demands continual panic and urgency.

The problem is, Homer does the opposite in the Odyssey. Characters constantly interrupt the main plot with stories from the past. At moments of action, Homer breaks away into a long comparison about lions, storms, farmers, fires, or animals. The plot briefly stops while the image expands. Homer is decelerating. Not accelerating.

There was no breathing room in the Odyssey. It felt like a rushed horror film.

5) My Favorite Translation

As the screenwriter William Goldman says, “Movies are compression.” And it is obvious that cuts must be made somewhere to Homer’s epic in order to tell the story within the span of three hours. A film is a shadow of the original

If you want to actually read the Odyssey, I liked this translation.

But I recommend actually listening to it. It was meant to be listened to. And you can really feel yourself being immersed in the story when someone is telling you it.

6) The Lighting in the Castles is Excellent

One positive is the film lights its night scenes beautifully. The horizontal yellow and amber firelight is the perfect hue for night time indoor lighting.

It reminded me of when I lived on the beach. No one tells you this about living on the water. During the day it was great. But at night, the water turns black, and the night sky continued onward. It was overwhelming and caused me despair. I needed to get my lighting right in order to feel good.

7) No Gods Allowed

Modern adaptations of Greek classics often remove the gods to make ancient stories feel more serious. Troy, The Return, and now Nolan’s Odyssey all try to minimize the amount of gods as possible.

It’s strange, the monsters can stay, but the gods must become metaphors of nature.

The gods are not decorative mythology in Homer. You are removing the poem’s central explanation of reality. The gods connect human action to a larger moral and cosmic order. Removing them is not trivial.

Ancient belief is interesting. There are entire books written on this topic. Plutarch, for example, criticized superstition and attacked certain ideas about the gods, yet he served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi at the end of his life.

8) Every Island Feels Like the Same Horror Film

My biggest complaint is that Nolan makes every island feel like the same place.

In Homer, each stop opens into a different world. Calypso’s island is a lush paradise. Odysseus is trapped inside a golden cage.

Circe’s island has a different atmosphere. It is strange and enchanted rather than bleak. Wolves and lions move calmly around her house.

The Phaeacians live in a bright and almost dreamlike world. The land of the Cyclopes feels wild and lawless. The Underworld is empty and terrifying. Each place has its own moral order as well as its own visual character.

Nolan flattens these differences into one dark and oppressive mood. Circe is an example. In Homer, she touches the men with her rod and turns them instantly into pigs. The transformation is frightening because it is casual. A goddess changes the nature of a man with a gesture.

Nolan has her physically reshape their faces with her hands. It works as body horror. But it turns Circe from a goddess of effortless magic into a grotesque surgeon.

The scene is disturbing, but it belongs to the same visual world as the Cyclops and nearly everything else in the film. This grey monochromatic horror film.

Homer gives Odysseus a voyage through many worlds. Nolan gives him one long nightmare.

9) Calypso relationships are real.

You may be in one. They are hard to get out of. Some people dont want to leave. I completely understand.

10) Greeks Don’t Bow to Kings

Greeks honored kings. They did not treat them as divine masters.

Bowing belonged to the gods. To bow before a mortal ruler was associated with barbarians and Persian peoples.

Nolan dresses Homer’s heroic world in the political language of the Middle Ages. His kings rule like feudal monarchs and his warriors behave like subjects. That is not Homer.

11) Child Soldiers

One thing Nolan’s Odyssey gets wrong is the scene in which young boys are recruited from the island to fight at Troy.

Premodern warfare strongly favored the adult male body. You had to march under heavy equipment and armor. Your body had to be physically strong to carry load.

Modern firearms changed that. That's when you see young soldiers pop up. Once a young person was strong enough to carry a gun, he could kill an adult

The world wars showed that teenagers could be absorbed into mass armies. Something unprecedented in history. later civil wars in africa and asia showed that even children could be turned into cheap infantry.

War still favors adult men. but it simply no longer excludes everyone else now.

12) Why Are People So Passionate About Film?

I recently saw Letterboxd, a movie-review site, being acquired, the tweet announcing it gots 4.2 million views and thousands of angry comments.

You tend to see a lot of passion from regular people with films that you don’t see in other mediums of art.

The reason is supply.

Books and music span thousands of years and millions of titles, but film is barely a century old. Once you skip the difficult silent era and ignore recent mediocre releases, you are left with only sixty to seventy years of great movie culture.

Tiny supply changes everything. An ordinary person with a job can watch films, form strong opinions, and feel fluent in the medium within a few years. Small supply also explains why cinephiles converge on the same favorites more often than readers or music fans do.

This manageable scale gives everyday people a sense of expertise and it drives the intense debates and fierce passion you see across movie culture today.

13) AI Movies Are Coming

While watching Nolan’s Odyssey, I realized that I cared far more about the story than the stars. For an epic like this, I would not mind an AI-made film, provided it looked and sounded convincing. I would not want to watch AI made films in general. but for historical epics, it may be ok.

Nolan’s Odyssey may even be the last major human-made epic before AI cinema becomes viable. By the end of the 2020s, we may see a fully synthetic adaptation that feels more faithful to Homer than any studio production could afford to make.

You can see people trying them now. But it’s not right. and the actors are all wrong.

14) Hide Your Strength

Odysseus wins by making himself look harmless through disguise.

His return to Ithaca repeats the fall of Troy. The suitors have occupied his home like an enemy city. Odysseus enters in disguise, studies the men inside, seals the exits, and destroys them from within. It’s the same strategy.

15) The Film Is Strangely Sexless

Odysseus spends years on Calypso’s island and lives in Circe’s bed after neutralizing her magic. Physical intimacy is power. Just like it is today. By editing out erotic energy the movie weakens its own portrayal of temptation.

16) The Underworld

Nolan cuts one of the poem’s most important encounters.

In Hades, Achilles tells Odysseus that he would rather be the poorest laborer among the living than rule over all the dead.

But the conversation does not end there. Achilles immediately asks about his father and his son. When Odysseus tells him that his son fought bravely at Troy and returned home in glory, Achilles rejoices.

The scene is about what survives death. Achilles can no longer act in the world, but he can still take pride in his son. Death ends a life without entirely ending the bonds of family.

This hits Odysseus hard, his own household is close to extinction.

Unfortunately, Nolan turns the dead into another tribunal for the hero’s guilt.

17) The Film Never Feels Mediterranean

Homer’s world is bright, and close to the sea. Nolan replaces it with grey beaches, heavy skies, mud, and medieval gloom.

The 1991 film Mediterraneo, filmed on a Greek Island, about Italian soldiers occupying land during World War 2 shows you the warmth and feel of the actual islands.

18) Why Do Americans Embrace Norse Mythology?

Greek myth helped shape both European and early American culture. The founders studied Greece and Rome. American government, architecture, education, and political language were deeply classical.

Yet, Norse Myths dominate the American cultural scene today. What happened?

My guess is that maybe Norse mythology fits the superhero genre more easily. Thor has a hammer. Loki is a trickster. Odin is the father. Ragnarok is the final battle. The characters already feel like comic-book heroes. There is a lot of war.

Greek myth is harder to simplify. Its heroes are mortal, flawed, and often destroyed by the same qualities that make them great. The gods are not a team. They are dangerous forces with their own motives.

But maybe there is a better explanation. It is strange.

19) Statue Decapitation

There is a scene where the Achaeans decapitate a statue of Athena. One soldier shouts, “Destroy their idols.”

This makes little sense for Greeks. They were polytheists. The Greeks wanted divine favor. Ancient armies sometimes stole sacred statues. But they did so because they believed the statue carried the god’s power. They wanted to bring that power home. That is very different from destroying an idol because it represents a false god.

20) No Greeks In Greek Mythologies

was not surprised that the film contains almost no Greek actors or even many actors who look recognizably Greek. Hollywood has always treated Greek identity as strangely interchangeable.

Even in myths. Scandinavians play Scandinavians. Japanese actors play Japanese characters. French actors play French characters. Greeks are usually played by English actors or a generic international cast like in the Nolan Odyssey.

This feels especially strange in an era obsessed with authentic casting.

21) Arrow Through the Axes

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