Post #200: The Original Odyssey, and Ours

16 July 2026

     I have my reasons for not seeing a newly released movie in several years. The zeitgeist, as refracted through the prisms of Hollywood especially, does not agree with me, nor I with it. So when I could not resist catching Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey on its opening night here in Bangkok (a day before its release in America), I knew better than to expect too much. And I got what I was asking for.

     I do not begrudge a filmmaker his creative license, and the screen need not always come at the expense of the page, even if it will usually do so. In my own case, seeing Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy for my birthday in 2004 left me so ashamed before the unread Homer volumes on my shelf (when I was already in my thirties) that I felt the only way to redeem myself was by reading them both in three different translations each.

     Alas, those days before the great digital deluge via the smartphone seem so far away now as to belong to another epoch. Today, if I could find a single imitator among the many millions of viewers this movie is likely to attract, I would be surprised and delighted. Sad to say, my sense of where we are headed, and how far we have come already, leaves me more ready to believe in dinosaurs still roaming the earth somewhere (birds don’t count). In saying so I mean neither to idealize the past, nor to boast on my own behalf; I am mourning what we have lost, that is all.

     Mr. Nolan’s film concludes, a little sheepishly and belatedly, by admitting that it is merely based on the ancient epic, with no pretense of faithfully retelling the original tale apart from appropriating its title. I would not object too much if the film did not also conclude with a moral of sorts: to burn the walls of Troy, we are told, was to burn the world entire, Odysseus’s own included, and with the destruction of so great a center of civilization, doom descended all around to shroud the world in darkness.

     I do not wish to quibble here with questions surrounding the destruction of historical Troy, the end of the Bronze Age, the demise of Mycenaean Greece, or the ensuing lapse into illiteracy. What I would like to pick up on are the echoes I detect about adjacent worries in our own age. I quite agree that the loss of historical memory dooms us, not exactly to repeating the errors of the past, but at least to not learning from them what we might. The warning loses much of its power, however, when it is itself embedded in a renovated narrative that takes egregious liberties with a subject that is as well-established as it is foundational to the Western literary tradition.

     We do not need to be much detained, I think, by the absurdities of how a contemporary audience might be misled into thinking that the Bronze Age Greeks were far ahead of their times in maintaining such admirably close ties to Africa. Granted, trade routes were already connecting the regions and races of the world across remarkable distances, and there was much displacement of peoples around the Mediterranean owing to rampant wars and slavery. In sober truth, however, Homer introduces the Ethiopians (on the first page of the Odyssey) as very remarkable for their dark skin, and so strange and remote a tribe that they inhabit the very edges of the world, though on friendly terms with Poseidon.

     One might object, with reason, that while Helen looked very striking by all accounts, the darkness of her skin had nothing to do with it. Granted, not many Bronze Age Greeks would have had Matt Damon’s complexion either, but the Indo-European connection runs pretty deep, and the physical side is anyway the least dubious aspect of how Odysseus is presented in the film. What might excuse Mr. Nolan’s casting decision, even if verisimilitude had little to do with it, is that unlike the mere mortals surrounding her, Helen was said to be a lesser goddess, and some liberties might be taken with how to interpret her great beauty provided it be evident to all.

     The supposed disfigurement of Helen’s face presents bigger problems, since her looks and status gave her virtual immunity according to Homer. When she shows herself to the elders of Troy, looking down from the walls at the plains where the invaders are assembled, even the old men, with the ardor of their loins cooled, look at her and sigh that with such a woman at stake, who could wonder at the war? (Other historical traditions, discussed by Herodotus, held that the Trojans could not give her up, as they would have done, because she was long gone.) No one would have dared disfigure her, in other words, save the ravages of time—a crucial detail because, in human terms at least, she is around fifty when Telemachus comes visiting, and thus, like returning Odysseus, on the cusp of old age.

     (The film misses completely how crucial the subtext of maturing and ageing is for the main characters: thus for Odysseus, who tears himself away from his roving ways and turns home only at the last minute; for Penelope’s position in Ithaca at a time when, being much younger than her husband, she can still barely hope to have children—hence the suitors’ interest in a woman at least a decade older than most of them; and also for Telemachus, because he comes of age in the course of the events described.)

     I would not balk at a mixed-race Athena (provided African ancestry does not become a new prerequisite for divinity on screen) if this one were not such an anodyne, teary-eyed spouter of yoga-studio platitudes. On the rare occasions when I could make out what she was saying, that is—the Hollywood Way requiring, apparently, that the senses be assailed without cease, while nothing is done to make the dialogue more intelligible. An apt formula for blockbusters, perhaps, where the words can be safely disregarded; but when there is a great literary classic behind the screenplay, even if its influence does not reach very far, one would wish for a few more elocution classes, or better sound-mixing, or whatever makes the lines so very hard to follow even for viewers who know what to expect and have a reasonable grasp of the English language. (Calypso too comes across as rather Malibu, but in a nymph the California vibes are less jarring than in so fierce a goddess of war and wisdom as Athena. Lotus-eating, it might be added for the record, was the drug of choice for Odysseus’s men on a certain island; the captain wisely refrained and wrangled them back to the ships with great difficulty.)

     Much missed opportunity here, and surprising in an age so given to proclaiming female strength until nobody wants to hear about it anymore. But also a problem for keeping the storyline believable, since Athena is not only Odysseus’s lone match in wits, but also the reason why he stands a chance in the final combat with the suitors, which the film brings to a happy conclusion only by a veritable orgy of implausibility that Homer would have been ashamed to present before an audience that knew something of war. Everything depended, at a minimum, on keeping the suitors at bay with the bow, crowded into a tight space, and faced not only with Odysseus alone, but with his newly formidable son alongside, as well as decisive support from on high. It strains credulity in Homer too, but in Nolan it is plainly ridiculous.

     Infidelities in details are one thing, but one must really wonder what the storyteller is thinking when he moves the supporting walls of the story and makes Agamemnon into precisely the kind of towering hero that he was not. Yes, he showed a desperate determination when he sacrificed his daughter for favorable winds at Aulis (and this did indeed come to haunt him, perhaps inwardly as well, but definitely in the outward form of a vengeful wife who butchers him in his welcoming bath, albeit with a new lover in the background, not just the ghost of a slain child). But commitment alone does not a backbone make, nor strength; that depends on the spirit flowing through the spine, not merely its spooky golden semblance dangling incongruously at the end of a helmet’s horsehair plume. And what flowed in Agamemnon’s case was neither good nor sensible, but merely the hardened nerve of a foolish, ambitious, and irascible man who, by the time described in the opening scene of the Iliad, had lost nearly all his authority with the Greek army, save a last remnant of grudging deference to his rank.

     The great warrior’s warrior on the Greek side was never Agamemnon, but always his nemesis Achilles, about whom I did not catch a word (though I may have missed it along with much else in the dialogue, as mentioned). Indeed the main pivot of the Iliad is precisely the clash between the two: in the opening scene Achilles has already drawn his mighty sword and is ready to expiate Agamemnon’s insults in blood when Athena grasps him by his fair hair and prevents the outrage. (Petersen did far better with all of this. It might also be noted that the campaign was unpopular from the first and took a full decade to organize after Helen’s elopement. Achilles dressed up as a girl to evade service, Odysseus feigned madness; both were discovered and compelled to join.)

     Menelaus cuts no very impressive figure, either in the original telling or in this one. That said, our times might have been expected to show a little more interest in the fraught but fascinating dynamics between the cuckold and his faithless wife—he racked more than ever by feelings of guilt and inadequacy (since his brother’s ignominious death), she trying (not very convincingly) to play the part of demure wife now that she must live with her weakling husband again, perhaps for all eternity, given her divine status. That the relationship is steeped in regrets on both sides, the film conveys, but viewers might have been intrigued to see the lady of the house dispensing anti-depressant drugs and other magic tricks she picked up in Egypt. (Homer’s version hints at an old amorous connection between Helen and Odysseus, even if untangling so subtle and complex a thread would be too much to ask from a film. Interested readers are referred to Book 4 of the Odyssey, to my post no. 178 on Epic Grief, or to my article on “Odysseus Concealed” in Interpretation, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 407–32.)

     Nobody would guess from how the Circe episode is staged by Mr. Nolan that she and Odysseus enter into a love-pact—initially with a blade at her throat not his—and that this turns out to be so much to their mutual satisfaction that Odysseus’s men have to pry him loose from the witch’s “beautiful bed” after he dallies for over a year and forgets all about home. No man-hating recluse was the real Circe, but a confident and seductive lady in the reveling vampish mode, generous with her favors, but exacting a cruel price if she did not meet her match. (It is indeed she who sends Odysseus to the underworld, well-fortified with her embraces, but the problem there is once again of a very different nature from what we are told in the film. The shades do not demand that Odysseus share their dishonor! They complain, and nobody more bitterly than Achilles, about being honorably dead, but dead all the same—except for Agamemnon, who really does feel disgraced, only not by the war, but by his faithless wife and all womankind, though he makes a gracious exception of Odysseus’s Penelope.)

     The portrait of Calypso has a little more going for it, though it is no more faithful to the text, especially in that Odysseus has not in fact lost his memory at all. The central point missed here is the true crux of the matter, namely whether we can accept Odysseus’s version of events after all his men have died and there is consequently no one left either to back up or to correct his account (except Athena, who lies as freely as her protégé does). Why should we believe, with nothing more than Odysseus’s slippery word to go on, that a man of such unrivaled resourcefulness wasted seven precious years—the decisive ones in Ithaca, as he well knew—pining on a beach without even attempting to escape? What is really going on here casts its long shadows over the whole of Odysseus’s tale. To put it plainly, we are being fed a cover story, contrived by an artful deceiver to disguise what he had really been up to, namely continuing his roving and raiding for as long as he possibly could. (This too get discussed at some length, and with much textual evidence, in my article.)

     Nor would anyone suspect, as per the story we are told by Mr. Nolan, that Odysseus was just as avaricious as he was mendacious—a crucial piece of the puzzle, because it goes a long way towards explaining why it took him so long to make the homeward turn at last. He needed to amass sufficient treasure to return to Ithaca with something to show for his long absence and the loss of all his men! The film dispenses with this crucial complication by also cutting out completely Odysseus’s tall tale about where all the loot came from: the Phaeacians that we never hear about. This has the added advantage of making the delicate question of Odysseus’s womanizing disappear along with the last temptation symbolized by Princess Nausicaa, dream-shade that she may turn out to be.

     The use of the lot, of which Mr. Nolan makes so much, does get mentioned by Homer, but not in any very central place. The Athenians would later rely on it to a remarkable degree in their democracy (as did the Nixon administration with its draft lottery, a likelier point of reference for Nolan’s interpretation), but in Ithaca it was the men of prime fighting age that went to Troy. A vital consideration because it meant that a generation of younger sons and brothers—a little older than Telemachus, and forming the bulk of the suitors—grew up without adequate role models and authority figures that could keep them in check when they reached adulthood. To put it bluntly, Odysseus himself bore much of the responsibility for the disorders that he later set right with so much effusion of blood—not only because he stayed away for so long, but also because there were no survivors to bring home by the time he got done. (The real Antinous does owe Odysseus a special debt: not, however, because he was unduly exempted from service in Troy, but because his father was once hospitably received in Ithaca as a refugee.)

     The Ithacans’ encounter with the savage Laestrygonians gets treated fairly accurately, but there is nothing to it except the sheer violence of these gigantic brutes. It is telling but not very encouraging that the episode, which carries hardly any meaning in the original story, beyond the scant lessons of its sheer destructiveness, would get so much play in Mr. Nolan’s version. We expect, in an action movie (and perhaps in contemporary life more generally), a great deal of sound and fury that signifieth nothing; but Homer’s epic is different in how it brims with significance at every level, if only one looks carefully enough. The Cyclops episode is more nuanced, but so well known that not much of value can be added to it; all the more unfortunate that something crucial gets omitted, namely how a righteously enraged Odysseus bids farewell to the beast not with a parting arrow, but by vaunting and proclaiming his own name, thereby doubly offending Poseidon, who already bears a grudge and whose misbegotten son the creature happens to be. Bad luck. (All these adventure stories told by Odysseus, we might recall, have no living Greek witnesses left to bear them out, and we have no idea what their factual basis may or may not be. Caution is in order.)

     But enough with such cavils, and let us move on to the end, where we are surprised and astonished to see Odysseus sent into exile, even though doing so makes nonsense of the epic’s archetypal structure. (At least the viewer is spared what I feared for a terrible moment: that Odysseus would have to die in Penelope’s arms in order to make room for her on the throne somehow.) Where would it leave Penelope’s great devotion if she let him go, alone, a second time, when ancient exiles were never precluded from taking along their families? And where would the story be without boasting the model wife that is Penelope, along with her many other qualities?

     Speaking of the end, the clumsiness of the recognition and reconciliation between Odysseus and Penelope does neither of them any justice and stands in the sharpest contrast to the artful subtlety on both sides that is one of the hallmarks and psychological highlights of the real story. The obligatory 21st-century paternal-pride clichés that Mr. Nolan smuggles in, on behalf of a son who looks a rather callow youth in both tellings, are as out of place in the epic as is the idea of laying a murderous ambush inside a temple, an act of such abominable disregard for the gods, so polluting and hence so very dangerous to the perpetrator, that even the worst ancient minds would have shuddered at it.

     At this stage in the story, and our cultural evolution, nobody can be seriously surprised that the slutty servant girls (for such they are in Homer, no question about it) would escape their heartbreaking fate, strung up like little birds on a line. Homeric justice seems very severe on this point, as commentators have pointed out for centuries, but the softening of the storyline, while abating the horror, also distorts the scales of justice as the old bard and his times conceived of them, and puts Telemachus in a somewhat false light. For in his violent loathing for Melantho, a much prettier and sassier girl than the movie dared depict (adopted by Penelope as a pet when she was very young, thereby giving Odysseus’s only son an older pseudo-sister that he clearly did not welcome), we discover a dark streak in the young man that we had little reason to suspect before. The old Viennese school learned much about the instincts from ancient lore, whether it be about ambivalence (Penelope and the suitors), wish-fulfilling dreams, or the Shadow in its many guises.

     In the end, the most touching and memorable moments in the film are the unexpected ones: the first hoisting of Odysseus’s auburn sail; a view of the soldiers’ grave markers on the dunes of Troy; the fateful horse half sunk in the surf and sand, with men drowning inside and a lone soldier pinned to it with spears. The last image lingers on the mind particularly, and it is painful to recognize just how untenable it is upon reflection, like much else in the film. The horse would either have been left behind unaccompanied, or else a lone Greek would have been seen as an emissary, not a threat. Such messengers were sacrosanct, at least before hearing what they had to say—and all this placed safely distant from the water line, please! These were lifelong sailors we are talking about, with a native dread of drowning. And they would not think to keep their horse away from the waves? However good it looks in a frame, if it stands up so poorly to scrutiny, it loses its power to convince. As for how so sophisticated a city could have fallen to so transparent a ruse, the question has ever been the great Achilles heel of the epic and neither Homer nor Nolan can be made to answer for it.

     But let us return, at last, to the moral that I mentioned in the beginning: the survivor’s guilt that Odysseus supposedly felt over the terrors he had wrought at Troy. One might well agree that the horse was a dirty and impious trick (quite apart from whether it was believable as an explanation for the mighty city’s fall after a ten-year siege), and that when so many ancient cities were taken by fire and the sword, slaying all who resisted (the boys and men), and enslaving everyone else, the whole world was destroyed as surely as it has been said that he who saves one soul saves all. (No girl on the cusp of adolescence, however, would have been beheaded in the way the picture pretends for reasons that are as valid artistically as they are bogus historically. The melancholy truth is that she would have been considered a valuable prize for the victors to take home, and that there were crueler fates than hers. The woeful scenes the morning after were captured unforgettably by Euripides in Trojan Women, but perhaps looking too closely at them would be too confusing for contemporary audiences that have been taught to lay the blame for slavery at the door of modern Europeans and Americans alone.)

     As reasonable as Mr. Nolan’s take on war may sound to our modern ears, such was not Odysseus’s perspective at all, nor that of his listeners, either in his own times (so far as we can tell from the reactions described), nor in any other before our own modern centuries. Even Hector, as upright and decent a soldier as any in Homer, wishes nothing better for his son, on the very eve of his own death, than that he might turn out as great a warrior as his father. Odysseus, meanwhile, was not in the least ashamed of his horse, or of his other cunning deeds, sinister as many of them appear to us. On the contrary, he prided himself especially on his devious exploits. Nay more, as the heir of villainous grandfathers on both sides, he was practically destined to play the rogue’s part.

     Thus there were rumors circulating that he had not always been above smearing his arrows with poison (a grave taboo); thus he played a most unsavory part in the deaths of Astyanax (Hector and Andromache’s baby prince), Palamedes, and Ajax (the most notorious instances only, with others implied); and thus the endless lies that he never scrupled to tell, in every conceivable variety and shade—sometimes with no provocation whatsoever, as before his grieving old father, or in the most intimate and trusting settings, as with a faithful wife after she had welcomed him home despite everything. This congenital shiftiness, wretched as it can make him appear, is what defines Odysseus as a character, whether we like it or not.

     To be sure the man was taken for a hero by his ancient audiences, up until Roman times, when the reception grew more wary; but we should not therefore mistake him for a pleasant character in any context. When Calypso asks him how he could have known something, and Matt Damon answers, like a good boy of the 2020s, “I don’t know, I feel,” our hearts may leap in our breasts for joy; but alas, these words have no business whatever coming from the lips of Odysseus, the man of many twists and turns, of schemes and stratagems without end. (“Give up control and live” is just as egregious. To say nothing of Poseidon, Odysseus does not fully trust even his patron goddess Athena, when she assures him that he has arrived at last in his homeland again!)

     Mr. Nolan’s creative-commercial instincts are surely right in that Odysseus’s treasure trove of fabrications can easily be rearranged, if one is not much concerned with the original story line and its logic, into fitting snugly enough with the demands of the day. As mass entertainment, the latest version may therefore prove a great success, and its creators will have their reward at the box office, and then some. Nor can one protest too strenuously against spinning the ancient tale to suit one’s needs given how Odysseus’s yarn was, from the first, a piece of artful but utterly self-serving manipulation by an unreliable narrator if ever there was one. Why should our filmmakers not help themselves to some of his lies and use them towards their own ends?

     It was perhaps inevitable that a blockbuster retelling in 2026 would go light on the original and heavy on all manner of anachronisms than can be brought in line neither with the letter nor with the spirit of the story. Is there enough left of the old texture to keep up our uneasy continuity with the past? Who can say? But there is something on which we can pronounce more confidently, and it stands both at the entrance and the exit as perhaps the most damning failure of all. Whatever indulgence we may want to show, one thing must be held against the film no matter what: it dumbs Odysseus down.

     It may be understandable and excusable that we would find a less intelligent, less devious, less multi-dimensional hero more to our liking than the original, and who would expect Hollywood to resist the pull? Alas, to give in to the temptation is to turn the story entirely on its head. The man of twists and turns had many faults and failings, moral and otherwise, but the one thing for which he could always be counted on were his wits and his wiles. To make of our hero a brawny, none-too-clever, but suitably sensitivity-trained male of the 2020s is to deprive Odysseus of precisely what made him who he was: his tricks and deceptions, his cleverness, his ever-smooth and split tongue. The real hero of the Odyssey was a much more problematic character than what we get to see, but also a far more interesting one. It was not to be expected that our times would get him right, but it is not to our credit either.