Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is unavoidable these weeks. People were talking about it long before it hit cinemas, and it will haunt conversations with colleagues, friends and family at least until the end of summer. Finding someone who hasn't seen it, doesn't want to, or has no strong opinion on it is nearly impossible.
Among them is a good share of Greek myth enthusiasts, sparkling graduates of classical high schools eager to point a finger at blasphemous Nolan and his imprecise transposition of a myth passed down orally, written by someone who perhaps never existed. How much must it hurt to watch people applaud a film that doesn't perfectly honour a story you studied for years, one you paraded as proof of your cultural worth? There's no option left but to criticise it, to point at Nolan, to affirm your own identity.
None of these problems bother someone who went to catering school instead, and simply enjoys almost three hours of surprisingly fluid, propulsive rhythm. The runtime seemed too short to tell the Odyssey and too long for an audience whose attention span the internet has shredded. A hundred and seventy-two minutes sounded like a kidnapping sentence. In the end, at this pace, they turned out to be just right.
It has to be said that Nolan's decision, in any case, to take at the peak of his career one of the most extraordinary stories in world literature and turn it into a film with a budget of nearly three hundred million, could hardly end too badly.
Two rival camps in Ithaca's stadium
The field split quickly. On one side, Homer's readers, offended by an Odysseus without the wine poured for Polyphemus, without the wordplay on Nobody, without gods speaking face to face with men. On the other, those who walked in never having opened the poem, and walked out swept along by a pace some compared to a war thriller more than an epic.
Some found Matt Damon's protagonist too muted, a melancholy veteran closer to certain American action heroes than to the cunning, shape-shifting man of the Greek text, capable of lying, seducing, deceiving even himself. But that coldness can also be read as a deliberate choice, the transformation of myth into a clinical record of war trauma, with the gods reduced to projections of the conscience of a man who came home changed from the front.
The harshest takedowns weren't lacking either, complete with lists of the film's most cringeworthy moments, from a Circe reduced to a fairy-tale witch to an imaginary Athena mistaken for an invisible friend. But alongside these readings, others emerged, more willing to give Nolan the benefit of the doubt: some saw in the choice to remove almost all of the Olympian gods a gesture more philologically grounded than it seems, tied to recent scholarship on the Bronze Age collapse and the identity of the so-called Sea Peoples, whom some researchers have linked to the very same Achaeans returning from Troy. Destroyers and destroyed, in the same film.
What the poem never actually says
The most interesting part of this whole story, in the end, isn't about Nolan. It's about how little of the tale we think we know by heart actually belongs to Homer. The cyclops with a single eye in the middle of his forehead, for instance, is never described that way in the poem: the single eye is mentioned only because after the blinding Polyphemus goes fully blind, and, oddly, the eyebrows burned by the heated stake stay plural. The sirens don't have fish tails: that image arrives centuries later, in the Middle Ages, when the Greek tradition merges with that of other aquatic creatures. Homer's Scylla has twelve feet and six heads lined with sharp teeth, far from the woman with dogs at her waist we know from paintings. And the Trojan Horse, the most famous trick in Western literature, doesn't even appear in the Iliad: it shows up in the Odyssey, in just two passages, and owes much of its fame to Virgil, long after Homer.
Some have even suggested that behind the horse originally lay a ship with a horse-shaped prow, a fascinating idea that scholars dispute. What remains is that every era builds its own Odyssey, and cinema is no exception: even the Laestrygonians, Polyphemus's less-loved double, almost always disappear from adaptations, and Nolan is among the few who brought them back on screen (in his own way, as a kind of robotic giants).
The maids the film doesn't hang
There's also an omission almost no one noticed, or that everyone quietly agrees with. In the poem, after the slaughter of the suitors, Telemachus hangs the twelve maids with his own hands, the ones who betrayed his father's house. A brutal scene that, in ancient logic, closes the circle of vengeance and marks the son's passage into adulthood. Nolan cuts it entirely. You can read it as one more liberty, a convenient softening for a contemporary audience unlikely to forgive the young heir such cold violence against a group of women. It's probably anachronistic to expect a summer blockbuster to show twelve summary hangings without trial. And probably, in this case, the anachronism deserves to be granted freely.
Trauma in place of the gods
Some have proposed a more ambitious reading, drawing this film closer to Oppenheimer, kinship of theme rather than plot. A brilliant man creates something devastating, wins, and pays for that victory with a guilt no triumph can erase. The wooden horse becomes the ancient world's bomb, and Odysseus a man forced to live with the knowledge that he destroyed an entire civilisation to save another. Seen this way, even the final exile, the main liberty Nolan takes with the text, finds its own logic: it's not an invention without basis, but echoes lesser-known ancient sources, which tell of an Ithaca forced to choose its king's exile to stop the feud among the families of the slain suitors.
Hard to say which of these readers is right. Maybe the only one who is, is whoever simply enjoyed the ride for three hours in the dark, without feeling the need to avenge Homer.