Notes on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

August 01, 2026

Warning: contains spoilers.

• Overall pretty good. I had high hopes, if not expectations, given that I read abridged version of this book many times as a kid, and then have read the unabridged several times as an adult, as well as studying it in college.
• Cinematically, the fight and action scenes were kind of hard to follow at points especially the final one, camera moving too fast, too dark, this maybe was because I was in the 2nd row and the screen was very big, 70mm at Alamo.
• It hit most of the scenes you want and did a reasonably good job of them, the monsters, recognition by argos and the old slavewoman (which I think they refer to as “servant” but I’m pretty sure she was a slave).
• Zendaya was okay as Athena, I recall Athena being a bit more terrifying and commanding, here she was kind of just mysterious, her language came off more as stilted than godlike.
• The dialog in many places was like that, Nolan seemingly trying to avoid it sounding overly old timey or high flown which I mostly appreciated (partly because I just don’t think Damon, much as I love him, could pull it off). No English accents which I think was a good choice, saying fuck a few times, sometime it felt right, but overall it kind of felt out of place. I think Nolan failed to establish a consistent register/tone for the dialog.
• Odysseus is a tricky character, we are sort of supposed to admire him but he also does a bunch of dumb/selfish things. He can’t really be fit into the “hero” mould we want from a modern American blockbuster action movie. I am glad Nolan did not try harder to fit him into this mould.
• The arc of the odyssey is basically he wants to come home, he does, and gets revenge. Nolan adds in a layer about Zeus’ hospitality being violated (which is def a theme in the book) but makes it a civilizational arc. It struck me as odd when O refers to his own age as the Bronze Age which I think is anachronistic, but does chime with the thought of later writers, e.g. Hesiod.
• I think the original has no mention of the sea people. I think Nolan was trying to make the point “We are the sea people,” ie our badness and destruction of Troy, violation of Zeus’ law is that very destruction we fear, a sort of nice Hegelian point. To make a modern movie of this story you kind of need an arc like that, the original itself lacks any moral (iirc) of the sort we have come to expect, as audiences.
• The bit about Circe was overdone, maybe there were undertones of O’s men being pigs in the original but they take it too far, when says something like “put on your disguises again” or mentions their true selves. This judgement is not in the book, and is alien to its worldview.
• The Polyphemus episode was pretty good, he was strange and monstrous. I sort of missed him speaking, the wine drunkenness, the “no man” and interaction with other giants.
• Missing Nausicaa and Aeolus entirely. Doesn’t O relate his story to them, not to Calypso? And I thought the lotus eaters were a separate episode. Regardless, mashing them together like this isn’t terrible in theory, except you don’t believe their (Calypso+Odysseus) relationship at all, IIRC the book has a better depiction of O’s homesickness and Calypso’s fondness even obsession with Odysseus.
• Telemachus was pretty good, captures boy not quite yet man fairly well, though I do sometimes wonder why someone in his prime of youth and strength who has apparently been training with a sword for years is sometimes so easily bested by the presumably weak/lazy/older suitors.
• Penelope also good, hamstrung by script in a few places. The feminist undertones are not in the original but also plausible I think, and didn’t feel out of place to me.
• I did not find myself emotional really at any points that I recall, which is surprising given that a) I have a lot of fondness for this story and its characters, and b) I have become fairly sentimental since becoming a father, and am generally prone to tears when it comes to parent/child dynamics involving loss/regret/death on the screen.

Thoughts on Emily Wilson’s review:

• “But there is no restraint in Nolan’s version of The Odyssey: every second is jam-packed with incident, lights and noise, and nothing is ever at a human scale.” I didn’t agree with this at all, many scenes are at a human scale, basically all of the ones with O and Calypso, the scenes with just O and Circe, many of the scenes with Telemachus, Penelope, and so on.
• “The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it.” It is fairly obviously progressive; this is a lame claim without Wilson saying what more would have had to be done for it to qualify in her mind as progressive. Personally when I think about who could best have handled the role of Odysseus, I think Idris Elba would have been fantastic, but would have required a quite different script. And then you might have ended up with English accents all over the place. Maybe the film could have worked with actors of various accents?
• Wilson’s points about Calypso I think are well-made, she is a shadow of who her character could and should have been.
• “But the script gives her nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown. The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common.” This seems tone-deaf, “for reasons unknown”? The obvious reason is they are married and love each other deeply, and have a child together. There could have been more chemistry, but Wilson makes a mountain out of a molehill here.
• I think Nolan was wise to leave out depictions of the gods other than Athena, for basically the reasons Wilson suggests. Again her criticism here is unclear, I guess she should just say “I need to see Zeus’ face”? I didn’t need to see Zeus’ face and I’m glad we didn’t.
• “There is no room in this maximalist film for anything as charmingly mundane and small-scale as Nausicaa’s laundry and her girlish fantasies about a husband. Damon’s grizzled Odysseus is neither a master storyteller nor a flirt. More substantially, the inclusion of a friendly, wealthy, culture-rich foreign place would have added more confusion to the film’s already muddled premise: that this Hollywood version of Mycenaean Greece is the only ‘civilisation’ in the world – the only place that still just about remembers that strangers and beggars must be welcomed, according to Zeus’ law.” I did miss the Nausicaa episode, but I think of all the things to cut this did make the most sense, it is fairly boring from a story pov. The point about foreign civilization falls flat, that is hardly a theme of the movie and moreover any claims about their own civilization (to me) seem to clearly come from a place of a) limited knowledge of the world, b) fear of its destruction by a mysterious other at first and then from within.
• I do agree with Wilson’s criticism of the dialog: “The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat. Attempts at vigorous speech – ‘My dad’s coming home’ or ‘Let’s get off this fucking beach’ – sit uncomfortably next to grandiose meditations: ‘Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus’ law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn’t bear to see the ruins of what he’d done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.’”
• I agree with Wilson’s point about the slightly muddled Sinon subplot. Why is he so mad about not knowing the truth? Given this is supposed to be an emotional high point of the movie (in terms of tension/arc) it was very unfortunate that it leaves viewers with such questions.
• “Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad. This is not in itself a problem, but it is a problem if the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together, and if the characters’ motivations don’t make sense on their own terms.” I think this vastly overstates the moral simplicity of the Greek world, and is surprising to hear from a scholar of Ancient Greece. E.g. the pitfalls of being overly concerned with honour are everywhere in ancient Greek literature, including Homer’s work.
• Again, some confused arguments from Wilson here: “In Nolan’s Odyssey, slaughtering people with the help of trickery, technology and weapons is presented as bad when the Greeks are killing the Trojans, who have violated xenia, but good when Odysseus is killing the suitors, who have violated xenia. Taking something ostensibly abandoned by Odysseus and his comrades is natural and forgivable when the Trojans lay claim to the horse, but unnatural and unforgivable when the suitors lay claim to Odysseus’ palace, food, wine and wife… Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, son of Poseidon; it’s stupid and greedy when Eurylochus eats the Cattle of the Sun.” The film goes quite out of its way to show Odysseus has regrets about the sack of Troy, we are certainly not meant to see it as unambiguously good. “Any one of these moral contradictions could make for an interesting and generative theme in a movie, but Nolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling.” Okay she sort of has a point there. But on the other hand, the Odyssey itself is, imo, muddled in this way. It would arguably be a worse, more Hollywood-ified version if it tackled these directly and tried to resolve them, or teach us some kind of pat “lesson.”
• Agamemnon “has failed as an American family man by killing his daughter” again, as if we are supposed to think the Ancient Greeks would have unanimously agreed it was good he did this. Wilson sort of vacillates between wanting Nolan to have made the Greeks stranger and also wanting us to identify/empathize with them more.