Translated by Marta Laino
There is something curious about the way Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey reached cinemas. The film was hailed as a classic even before it became one: not only because of the director's reputation or the scale of the production, but also because of the cultural weight of the work on which it is based. Even before it reaches audiences, every significant adaptation must overcome an invisible obstacle: the idea that viewers have already formed of the original text. In the case of The Odyssey, this challenge is even greater, as there is no definitive version of the myth, but rather a long tradition of retellings, variations, and reinterpretations.
In Homer, this mechanism reaches its fullest expression. The Odyssey is probably one of the most frequently adapted stories in Western culture. Its influence extends from Greek tragedy to Renaissance painting, from Dante to Joyce, and from peplum films to the Coen brothers. Every era has found its own Odysseus, and almost never Homer's. The Odyssey survives precisely because it is one of those texts that can be continually reimagined.
Perhaps this is the first misunderstanding surrounding Nolan's film. Much of the debate surrounding the production seems to rest on the assumption that there is an authentic Odyssey, a definitive version waiting to be transferred to the screen. But that has never been the case. The poem we read today is itself the product of centuries of transcription, translation, and interpretation. Rosa Calzecchi Onesti, Emily Wilson, Luciano De Crescenzo: each has, in the end, written their own Odyssey. Nolan is simply doing what every translator has always done: making choices.
It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the most debated aspects of the film has been its casting. Lupita Nyong'o will play both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, two figures who never share the stage in the Odyssey but who occupy a central place in the imagination of the return from Troy. On social media, the decision has been interpreted as a production shortcut, an auteur's indulgence, or simply an attempt to surprise audiences. More interesting, however, was the reaction of Emily Wilson, the classicist and first woman to produce a complete English translation of the Odyssey, who openly defended the choice.
According to Wilson, Helen, Clytemnestra, and Penelope form a kind of symbolic triangle: three different ways of representing marriage, desire, power, and return. Penelope waits. Clytemnestra kills. Helen returns to Sparta after setting a war in motion. Entrusting at least two of these figures to the same actress does not mean compressing the text but rather making visible a relationship that is primarily conceptual in Homeric poetry. It is a deeply theatrical, almost Shakespearean operation, before it is a cinematic one.
It is curious to observe how a choice of this kind has generated more debate than the existence of a ten-metre-tall Cyclops or a goddess capable of transforming men into animals. This is one of the paradoxes of contemporary culture: we are perfectly willing to suspend our disbelief in the face of the fantastic, yet we demand almost notarial precision when it comes to costumes, armour, or mythological genealogies.
The same happened with the first images released from the set. Some fans questioned the accuracy of Matt Damon's armour, which they considered inconsistent with the Mycenaean period. Others criticised the language used in the trailers, arguing that it sounded too contemporary. As if the main problem with a poem populated by sirens, immortal nymphs, and quarrelsome gods were the shape of a helmet or a line of dialogue that sounded too modern.
These controversies reveal more about our relationship with the classics than about Nolan's film. For some years now, we have been living through a cultural moment obsessed with fidelity. We expect remakes to replicate their originals, series adapted from novels not to change a single word, and biopics to reconstruct every historical detail. It is an almost museum-like conception of art, as if the value of a work depended on its preservation rather than on its ability to be reinterpreted.
The Odyssey, however, has always worked in the opposite way. One need only think of the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which transformed Odysseus into a fugitive prisoner in 1930s Mississippi without losing any of the poem’s narrative structure. Or of Uberto Pasolini’s recent The Return, which chose to focus only on the final stage of the journey, turning the myth into an intimate drama. With Ulysses, Joyce had already shown a century ago that the best way to remain faithful to Homer was to move away from him.
Christopher Nolan appears to be taking a different path. He does not update the myth for the present, as the Coen brothers did, nor does he reduce it to psychological intimacy. Instead, he does something that belongs very much to his own cinema: he transforms an ancient story into a spectacular experience. The exclusive use of IMAX cameras, the shoots across Greece, Sicily, Iceland, and Morocco, and the choice of a star-studded cast all convey an idea of cinema that seems almost timeless. In an era dominated by home screens and streaming algorithms, Nolan continues to defend the movie theatre as a space for a collective experience.
It is significant that he chose the Odyssey for this battle. After all, Homer's poem was also born as a shared experience. It was not a book to be read in silence, but a story meant to be heard collectively. Cinema, at least in its most traditional form, works in the same way: it gathers strangers in the same room to experience the same story. Nolan seems to want to remind us that the blockbuster, before becoming a genre, was above all a ritual.
Perhaps this is also why his Odysseus feels consistent with the gallery of protagonists that populate his entire filmography. Leonard from Memento, Cobb from Inception, Cooper from Interstellar, Oppenheimer: they are all men searching for a path through a labyrinth. Odysseus is the first great character in Western literature to live through this experience. He crosses the world, but above all he crosses himself. Every encounter changes the way he tells his own story.
And here another affinity between Nolan and Homer emerges. Both seem less interested in the action itself than in the telling of that action. In the Odyssey, the most famous episodes — Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens — are narrated by Odysseus many years after they occurred. We do not simply witness the adventures: we listen to someone reconstructing them, selecting them, and perhaps even altering them. It is a surprisingly modern narrative device, almost cinematic in nature, which Nolan has explored since the beginning of his career.
This is why The Odyssey is already a cultural phenomenon before it is a cinematic one. Not because it promises the blockbuster of the year or because it brings together some of Hollywood's biggest stars, but because it brings an ancient question back to the centre: what does it mean to adapt a classic? The answer probably does not lie in faithfully reproducing every detail of the text, but in proving that the text is still alive enough to be told differently.
Whether or not the film will succeed in this endeavour, we will discover only at the cinema. The fact remains, however, that a poem composed almost three thousand years ago can still divide audiences over a casting choice, a translation, or an armour says perhaps more about the Odyssey than about Christopher Nolan. Some stories remain contemporary not because they remain unchanged, but because they force each generation to rewrite them. And, inevitably, to change them.
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