---
title: "The Odyssey we deserve"
date: "2026-08-13T17:39:10+01:00"
modified: "2026-08-13T17:39:12+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/the-odyssey-we-deserve/"
post_id: 10744
---

# The Odyssey we deserve

![Odysseus and his men, dressed in armour, stand together in a forest](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/08/Odyssey-small-1200x538.jpg)Odysseus and his men in a scene from the film. Credit: Syncopy Production/Universal Pictures/Album---

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*The Odyssey* is a Christopher Nolan movie. Like *Dunkirk*, it shows exhausted soldiers on a beach, desperate to get home. Like *Interstellar*, it gives us an adventurer who has neglected his family for far too long. Like *Memento*, it features a violent man trying to remember who he is and what he has done. Like the Batman movies, it follows a haunted hero returning to purify his corrupted kingdom. Like *Oppenheimer*, it is about a genius who invents a superweapon and has to live with the horror it unleashes. Like all of them, it is about hubris, guilt, memory, time and loss.

Nolan’s authorship needs emphasising because a writer-director’s job is not to faithfully transcribe a story from page to screen. All adaptation is interpretation, especially when you’re dealing with a text that evolved through decades of oral performance, was written down by unknown persons sometime in the 8th or 7th century BCE (“Homer” might never have existed), and then translated numerous times over the centuries. Oh, and the events it describes, set around 1200 BCE, never happened, or at least not like this. Someone certainly could film a version of *The Odyssey* that cleaved to the cosmology and mores of the Ancient Greeks, but myths are there to be reimagined for the times. This is Nolan’s Odyssey, not Homer’s, although they share a love of nonlinear narrative, with its stories within stories and revelations postponed.

The discourse around this film has been gruelling. Complaints about “anachronisms” and “errors” began with the first teaser shot of Matt Damon as the Ithacan king Odysseus in February 2025, before filming had even commenced. Even if we rightly ignore the whining of racist trolls like Elon Musk – who hurled insults at Nolan for supposedly “woke” casting, including choosing Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy – the movie-star casting, vernacular dialogue and American accents have all wound up somebody or other, as if English actors speaking archaically in RP would have been more authentic. As Emily Wilson – whose tough, modern 2017 translation of *The Odyssey* feels most relevant to Nolan – observes, formal English “is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today”.

Nobody else working today could have delivered such an epic spectacle without relying on CGI. Nolan may not be a warm director but he is a visceral one. He wants the viewer to know how it would feel to be driven into the sea by the Wehrmacht or to fight crime dressed as a bat. Odysseus’s men are filthy, frazzled, traumatised and terrified. The inside of the Trojan Horse reeks of piss, shit and dead bodies (suggesting that the AMC cinema chain designed its Trojan Horse popcorn dispenser before anyone had seen the film). Life is arduous and painful, and survival a miracle.

One oddity of The Odyssey is that Homer devotes just one-sixth of the poem to his hero’s colourfully cursed journey (Cyclops, Circe, Sirens) and one-half to his return to Ithaca and his bloody revenge on the parasitic “suitors” who have been abusing his wife Penelope’s hospitality. So Nolan has to make some smart adjustments to both the plot and the ethics of bringing the war home. With apologies to purists, I doubt the movie’s climax would have been improved by scenes of Tom Holland (as Odysseus’s son, Telemachus) conducting a mass hanging of slave girls, or Damon feeding a traitor’s genitals to the dogs.

Nolan’s Odysseus, then, is not Homer’s horny, ruthless, silver-tongued trickster. A hero, to the Ancient Greeks, was a warrior verging on a demi-god, rather than an ethical actor. This notion is as alien to our understanding of psychology and morality as the belief that Poseidon controls the waves. (Wisely, only one god is physically depicted and she is not what she seems. The gods don’t have to be real to the viewer to be real to the characters.)

Damon, who has portrayed unlikely survivors in films from *Saving Private Ryan* to *The Martian*, plays Odysseus as walking PTSD. He has levelled a city and utterly failed to bring his men home safely, only to find that both his realm and his psyche have been irrecoverably changed. Unlike Homer, Nolan shows us the actual war, sucking in elements of the *Iliad*, the *Aeneid* and historical scholarship on the Bronze Age collapse. We see the sacking of Troy twice, first as a tactical masterstroke and then as a genocidal rampage: “10 years of rage” unleashed on a civilian population in one night.

Odysseus witnesses the carnage with the same kind of horrified complicity that plays across Cillian Murphy’s face when Oppenheimer watches footage of Hiroshima. Is this what his brilliance has wrought?

![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/08/Odyssey-filming-small-1200x800.jpg)Matt Damon and Zendaya (right) filming with Christopher Nolan (left). Credit: Syncopy Production/Universal Pictures/AlbumThe movie’s twists are thematic rather than plot-based and the key is the Greek concept of *xenia*, or hospitality, rendered here as “Zeus’s law”: you “treat strangers as you wish to be treated, for they may be gods in disguise”. Even though Odysseus loses faith in that possibility (“Don’t look for gods in men, you’ll only be disappointed”), the law still serves a vital social purpose. Obviously the suitors abuse *xenia* but so, too, does the Trojan Horse, the gift that kills. As Troy burns, Odysseus realises that “the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore”. To be anachronistic about it, in order to win a war, the Greeks violated the social norms and the rules-based international order that sustained a golden age: “We broke the fragile bonds between men.”

While Nolan is not famed for his female characters, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o) and the sorceress Circe (a show-stealing Samantha Morton) all get to voice their rage at men and their monstrous appetites. Most of the worst things that happen can be explained by the desire to eat. Rape, though never actually portrayed, is a constant threat in the shadows of the action.

Historians will never be able to agree on what precipitated the Bronze Age collapse that occurred around the estimated date of the fall of Troy and plunged most ancient civilisations into four centuries of Dark Ages, hence the later reliance on songs and myths in the absence of written texts. Possible explanations include climate change, a pandemic and a volcanic winter. The spiciest theory involves incursions by hordes of unidentified marauders known as the “Sea Peoples”.

Everybody in the movie talks about these foreign invaders as faceless bogeymen but Nolan proposes that the Greeks themselves, murdering and pillaging in order to get home, are the marauders. Supernatural menaces like Circe and the Cyclops Polyphemus are not actually aggressors whereas Odysseus’s men are greedy, savage, petulant and perhaps not worth saving at all. Odysseus himself makes some disastrous choices. Nolan surely didn’t make a $250 million movie just to bait US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s sadistic obsession with “war fighters” and “overwhelming violence” but it certainly works on that level.

It’s fascinating to consider all this in light of the failed culture-war assault on a movie that is set to become Nolan’s biggest success yet. The online right had fits about the “woke” casting of a black woman as Helen and a trans man (Elliot Page) as Sinon but did not anticipate that *The Odyssey* would ultimately be a profoundly moral anti-war movie in which crimes committed against foreigners far away inevitably poison the homeland.

Nolan has often been described as a fundamentally conservative filmmaker but if so, then his conservatism is of a very old-fashioned sort, whose terror of disorder and concern with actually conserving valuable institutions have nothing to do with the arsonists of the MAGA right. When Odysseus says, “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire,” he is confronting his own culpability for the way of life that has been broken beyond repair and the darker times to come. What kind of civilisation brings about its own demise?

Of course, Homer’s swaggering Odysseus – “this rash lord”, “the master of deception” and “the man who can adapt to anything”, in Wilson’s translation – doesn’t lose any sleep over his military exploits, as you might expect from a man who feeds severed genitals to dogs. The poem’s popularity fed on Greeks’ nostalgia for a more heroic age than their own benighted Age of Iron, but Nolan asks what that “heroism” really involved.

His anguished modernisation therefore runs much deeper than Circe’s proto-feminism or Telemachus talking about “mum” and “dad”. He has extracted from the poem an urgent allegory of crimes and consequences that speaks to our own fears of wilful civilisational collapse. As Odysseus says, anticipating the rulers and myth-makers of the future, “All our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”

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