Watching Nolan's Odyssey

Where's the wine?

Note: never piss off Poseidon. Vatican Museums, Rome, April 2026.

Joining the fray here ….

Jason, Eleanor and I saw Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey last week in the original version with Italian subtitles, out at a shopping center north of Florence in a Dolby theater where the sound was so loud our chairs (and teeth) rattled. Driving home we had a conversation enriched by familiarity, because fortunately, we all have a deep and recent reading in Homer. Jason is a medieval scholar so never lets it go, really; Eleanor (age eleven) just tackled the Odyssey in Italian sixth grade here in public school. Our son Victor (age fifteen) is up to his neck in classical literature in Italian high school and culture and begged off for the evening.

As for me, last year I finished my own project of reading The Odyssey, inadvertently and in multiple translations, including Emily Wilson’s. (I confess that the Wilson translation was not easily found here in Florence, but which I read in excerpt in the reader notes from A Public Space - APS Together.) People say the Fagles translation (1996) isn’t dated, but I dispute this; it felt so to me and I couldn’t continue with it. The Lattimore translation (1965), was almost unreadable; wooden as the proverbial horse, but with no trick up its hoof. And finally, T. E. Lawrence’s prose poem translation (1932), which I found to be engaging and excellent, probably my favorite for its economy and humanity and candor.

I feel well soaked in the Homeric tradition right now and was therefore thrilled when I learned that the Nolan adaptation was in progress and being filmed on site with an all-star cast. I did not expect to love it whole cloth. I did expect to be annoyed by certain aspects of the adaptation, and was okay with that. Classic literature at its best always deserves a re-read, and creative and ambitious adaptations—whether for screen or stage, or even as fannish fiction (think of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies)—always earn my attention. I will roll up for almost any adaptation of a classic because classics are classics for a reason: they impart enduring wisdom about human nature and the human experience.

The noise around the new Odyssey regarding Nolan’s faithfulness to the text (make me laugh), his blind casting (oh please, read a bit about the ancient world first), and his historic accuracy (people, this is a cinema adaptation almost three thousand years after the purported events took place, if they ever did, and certainly not all, as the content is based in prechristian mythology)—for all the people who want to litigate the accuracy in the film or complain about creative license: very cute, and I don’t care.

(As for Emily Wilson, please note that she neither created the “original” written adaptation of the Odyssey from the oral tradition predating it by centuries, nor did she live in that era, although I wouldn’t be offended if she claimed to be reincarnated. Jason was at Yale with her at the same time, and her family pedigree preceded her; she was anointed, and knew it, and has lived out her family’s expectations. Also, as a Classics and Letters major at university, anytime Classics makes the headlines—especially in the form of a Hollywood adaptation and a woman Classics scholar—I am well pleased. Because, and again, the truth in classics sets off a ripple effect that brings in more truth and elicits ever more truthful observations.)

So: my quarrel is not with Nolan for making an adaptation. He is who he is. He makes huge, expensive, long blockbusters that reflect his cohesive vision. That is his right and his gift. My quarrel is with what that vision costs the material. And my real point is this: no one—no matter how schooled or connected—owns the classics. The classics are an important aspect of global human patrimony, and as such are owned by everyone and interpretable by anyone. I won’t police your metaphors. Don’t police mine. In the freedom and flexibility of interpretation lies the continual renewal and gift of insight and understanding that classic literature brings to open minds.

But first, the technical complaints about the film. (I would have done it differently were I the director, but I wasn’t. Still, here’s my two cents.)

Issue No. 1: insufficient wine. Insufficient golden bowls. Insufficient mixing of wine in golden bowls. Insufficient ritual hospitality.

The Odyssey is a poem about reception and what you offer a guest. The law of Zeus, y’all. Wine, first. Then a bath. Oil. Roasted meat. The sensory abundance of welcome. Nolan gave us sparse bathing, almost no anointing, and thin hospitality. The whole thing felt less Mare Nostrum and more Ruby Ridge bunker. Which is not the genre we’re working in.

Issue No. 2: structure.

Nolan felt confident enough to cut material from The Odyssey. He trimmed. He excised. He made choices about the ancient story. And yet he felt compelled to add material from the Iliad and Oresteia and to import narrative architecture from other epics entirely. Nolan compressed the Oresteia into a single flashback. Agamemnon explains his own murder to Odysseus in the underworld in what felt like ninety seconds: Clytemnestra, the affair, the murder, all compressed into exposition. The film, Eleanor pointed out, also crossed into Iliad territory, with details about the Trojan War that the text itself separates carefully. Why? If you trust your source material enough to edit it, why don’t you trust it enough to stand alone?

The answer, I think, is control. Nolan hedged because he needed the scaffolding. He needed more exposition, more explanation, more structure to hold the story in the shape he’d decided it should take.

(We were not complaining when, at intermission, the cinema staff rolled out a snack and drink cart so that Odyssey watchers did not need to enter the robust adolescent fray in front of the concession counter. I credit Nolan for creating the circumstances that permitted Eleanor to purchase a paper bucket of gummies for eight euros mere steps from her theater seat.)

Issue No. 3: no character has interiority.

Not the women. Not the men. Not anyone. Hell, not even that poor wee Cyclops.

Because Nolan doesn’t do inner life. In fact, he might not have an actual inner life. He does architecture in the form of plot, structure, spectacle, the machinery of storytelling. Characters live inside his vision; his vision does not bend to theirs. This is a hallmark of his storycraft. He tells a beautiful long story, but in the end it’s superficial, somewhat stilted, and lacking spirit. I felt the same about Oppenheimer. Similar film. Similar issues. Three thousand years apart.

The women suffer first sans arc because there’s nowhere for a woman to exist in a story that centers on war and men. Penelope (Hathaway) is the loyal wife holding the fort without interior reckoning with abandonment or complex feelings about Odysseus’s return, and no sense of a woman who has become someone else in twenty years. Circe (Samantha Morton) is the enchantress who listens and desires but doesn’t want anything for herself. She’s a beautiful functionary. Athena (Zendaya) is the cool mentor who guides but never questions or doubts or grows. She looks with pity on Odysseus when he continues to make bad decisions that prolong his wayward journey home. These aren’t characters; they’re positions.

But Telemachus (Tom Holland) is arcless too. He’s anxious, then he fights one guy, then he has a kingdom. Odysseus (Matt Damon) is the only performance that breathes, and even then he’s witnessing his own suffering from behind glass. We see the toll of war on his body and his face, but we don’t feel what he feels. Nolan won’t let us inside.

And this is the point: the Odyssey needs interiority. It’s built on it. The whole poem turns on how people change when they’re forced to reckon with loss and time and mortality and desire. Penelope’s patience isn’t a trait but a slow interior transformation. Telemachus’s growth from anxious boy to capable man is the emotional spine. Even Circe’s choice to let Odysseus go is an act of feeling, not function. The poem is about interior life—about what happens to you when you’re alone with your thoughts, when you’re forced to wait, when you have to choose.

Nolan’s control removes that entirely. He tells you the story happened. He doesn’t let you feel why it matters.

Elliot Page as Sinon came closest. Page gave the character genuine arc and moral weight both in life and in the Underworld. The performance breathed in ways others couldn’t. That’s what happens when a character has permission to have an inner life.

Eleanor couldn’t watch about a quarter of the film. Too much blood, she said. Too scary. I agreed. The Dolby sound alone with its relentless percussion, chairs vibrating through every battle made it hard to stay present. We did agree that we loved the live-action ship recreations and sails set across blue water. How the heart swelled!

A more sensitive, less wide-release scion of Hollywood—think Jane Campion or Phoebe Waller-Bridge—would have made a radically different film even with an identical script. They would have trusted the audience to sit with complexity and contradiction. They would have let the women want. They would have let Telemachus doubt. They would have let Odysseus feel.

There would have been sufficient wine. Golden bowls. And mixing of wine in golden bowls. Honestly on the page you think, will they ever stop mixing and drinking wine? But no. No, they won’t. Because that wasn’t how things were in ancient Greece under the law of Zeus.

And that’s not Nolan’s vision. And he’s earned the right to his vision.

But don’t let one filmmaker’s interpretation police yours. Read the Odyssey yourself. Read it in multiple translations. Reckon with Homer. Make your own adaptation—in your head, in your heart, in whatever form calls to you. How are you like Odysseus, like Penelope, like Telemachus, Circe or Calypso or Nausicaa? What have been your triumphs, where were your errors in judgment and why? What did you sacrifice, and what did you gain? For this is what it means to live a life.

The classics belong to all of us. Your reading is as legitimate as Nolan’s. Your right to imagine Penelope’s inner life, to feel Circe’s real desire, to let Telemachus become wise—that’s not secondary to the “official” version. That’s where the renewal lives. Let no one dispute that.

That’s where the gift is. Claim it.