I have a complicated relationship with The Odyssey, which is to say I’ve read it twice, at different points in my life, and liked a different character best each time. At seventeen, I was captivated by Odysseus. The cunning, the disguises, the man who talks his way out of everything, including his own name. In my early twenties, it was Penelope. I think that’s just what happens when you get older.
Here’s what struck me on my reread, in a way it hadn’t before: of Odysseus’ ten year journey home, seven were spent on Calypso’s island and one with Circe. Do the math Homer clearly wants you to do. The man was shipwrecked, actively fighting his way back, facing divine punishment for something closer to two years. The rest of the decade, he was, in the most generous reading, being hosted.
Penelope, on the other hand, was weaving, unraveling, stalling, and strategizing. Homer doesn’t moralize about this, which is part of what makes the poem so much more interesting and thought-provoking than its mainstream reputation as an epic about perseverance.
THE ODYSSEY ADAPTATION
Naturally, I went to see the Christopher Nolan adaptation. A $250 million production filmed across six countries and shot entirely on 70mm IMAX film because apparently regular cameras were beneath the scale of Nolan’s ambition.
A word on the experience itself, because it deserves one: this is a film that wants your undivided attention (and your nervous system). Being an IMAX movie, it’s exactly as loud as you’d expect. The screen takes over your peripheral vision entirely, while the sound design makes it feel as though you’re out in open water yourself.
Many of the battle scenes unfold in near-total darkness, lit only by firelight, which somehow makes everything feel even larger. You start wondering how much better the actual IMAX 70mm film could be.
We’d already established the spoiler three thousand years ago. Still, somehow the story got to us. Which is probably the highest compliment you can pay a film adaptation most people already know the ending to.
The film appears less interested in faithfully adapting one particular text than in drawing from the wider mythology surrounding it. It folds in events that aren’t part of Homer’s Odyssey, which technically begins after the Trojan Horse and the fall of Troy.
The story unfolds largely in flashback, telling the story of The Odyssey while simultaneously looking back to the events preceding it, with little regard for chronology. It sounds confusing on paper; in the cinema, not so much.
THE CHARACTERS
Homer’s Odysseus is charming, funny, and a little vain about his own intelligence. Though punished by the gods for his hubris, he never appears to suffer a moment of moral doubt. The text is almost amused by Odysseus. It loves him the way you love a friend who’s brilliant and exhausting and always, always has an excuse.
Nolan gives us someone else entirely. Matt Damon plays Odysseus as a man doing penance, a melancholic veteran carrying his violence as a burden, making visible an internal reckoning where Odysseus is haunted by his own actions. It’s a fundamentally different reading of the character, one that seems less interested in Odysseus the trickster than Odysseus the survivor. Where Homer weighs violence against honor and the gods, Nolan weighs it against the conscience.
If the film has a central preoccupation, it may well be guilt. In the text, the war ends before The Odyssey begins. Nolan’s version suggests it never really ends at all. The scale and grandeur of The Odyssey ultimately becomes a way to explore guilt, responsibility, the lingering consequences of our actions, and whether greatness inevitably leaves something irreparable in its wake.
Even the film’s monsters seem to get a rewrite in this spirit. The Cyclops feels less like a villain and more like a very large, very unlucky shepherd defending his home from intruders.
What I didn’t expect from Nolan, a director whose women have historically existed mostly to motivate men, is how much weight he gives Penelope, despite her name not being spoken until Odysseus remembers her. Nolan’s Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, isn’t just the woman Odysseus returns to. She’s made to be the anchor holding the film together.
On paper, nobody gave Penelope her due until Margaret Atwood did in The Penelopiad. Atwood hands the narration not only to Penelope herself, but also to the twelve maids Telemachus executes at Odysseus’ return (a storyline Nolan instead portrays through Melantho). It’s a beautiful reimagining, but you don’t need to have read it to enjoy Nolan’s film. If anything, it’s a good reminder that every epic probably has a companion piece, asking entirely different questions, that nobody adapts into a film.
MODERNIZING HOMER
Nolan certainly takes liberties with the story. The wooden horse sequence. Certain characters being interpreted differently. Events from different traditions sitting alongside one another. Whether this adaptation is accurate has already become a major point of contention.
Which raises the obvious question: accurate to what, exactly?
It’s difficult to assess how faithful the adaptation is to the source material because there is no definitive source material. Homer’s version isn’t the original telling of this story. It emerged from generations of oral tradition, itself already many steps removed from whatever conflict may have inspired it. Are we able to argue that there’s only one correct version to adapt?
If not, then we may be asking the wrong question. Beyond debating whether Nolan is faithful to Homer, the more interesting question is what we actually want from an adaptation. What makes a good adaptation? Is it how closely it reproduces the source material? Or is it how well it can reinvent? Or, rather, whether it can stand on its own?
The very definition of adapt is to change or adjust. It’s difficult to know whether Homer’s version itself would have been considered faithful to the oral tradition that came before it. The stories were constantly being retold, reshaped, and embellished.
Perhaps adaptation has always been an integral part of The Odyssey. Nolan may just be the next in line telling his own version of a story that has never really belonged to any one person.
Maybe that’s how a story as old as The Odyssey survived as long as it has.
