The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan Sends Homer’s Hero To a Therapist... But It’s Hard to Ruin a Great Story

July 2026

 

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey did not start strong...

 

The opening scene featured the Trojan Horse lying on its side on the beach...

Looking like a great big beached plastic parade float...

That had been spit out by a 3D printer...

 

Guarded by Elliot Page as a Greek soldier...

 

Which was a strange casting choice...

 

And probably made by the same people who decided Helen of Troy should be black...

And that there should be an Asian in Odysseus’s army...

 

I mean seriously... it took Odysseus 10 years to travel the 500 miles from Troy to Ithaca...

So when did this Asian leave for Greece...

 

A century before the Trojan War?

 

So not only is it highly unlikely that Helen ...

Who is described over and over again in the Iliad as “white armed Helen”...

Would have been black...

 

Or that one of the Penelope’s suitors would be also be black...

And Odysseus’s right hand man South Asian ...

 

Which is all an indication that Nolan hasn’t read much Greek history...

 

Because the ancient Greeks invented racism...

 

Now their prejudice was not based on skin color... but rather culture...

But everyone who wasn’t Greek was called a “barbarian”...

And considered inferior...

 

So they had a pretty robust sense of ethnocentric supremacy...

 

Which means there is no way that so many important characters in Homer’s story would have...

Looked like they came out of one of those old United Colors of Benneton ads...

 

So it looks like the only Gods who needed to be appeased in this film...

 

Which is based on a story in which the Greek gods drive the plot...

But Christopher Nolan has decided should be largely absent in his movie...

 

Were the DEI Gods of Hollywood casting...

 

And these are not the only casting problems with The Odyssey...

 

Tom Holland plays Telemachus...

As a Beta Boy King in the making...

And certainly not someone who would hang all the palace maids after daddy comes home...

 

Which, of course, Nolan leaves out of this story...

 

Anne Hathaway is too one note an actress to play a complicated character like Penelope...

And Charlize Theron as Calypso is so cold and detached...

That she comes across as more Odysseus’s wise therapist....

Than the fetching female who managed to lure him into hanging out with her ...

 

For seven years...

When he supposed to be heading home...

 

Now Jon Bernthal played a nicely menacing but charismatic Menelaus...

John Leguizamo was surprisingly good as Eumaeus...

 

And Robert Pattinson makes a great villain...

As we saw when he played the Dauphin in The King...

But it was a bit of stretch to believe he could slay anyone with a weapon..

Poison maybe... but not a blunt instrument...

 

And I have to admit when I read that Matt Damon had been cast as Odysseus..

I had my doubts...

 

Because I thought Damon was too old and too puffy to play this warrior...

But that gluten free diet and some adept photoshopping...

Because no 55 year old has those abs...

 

And Damon’s considerable skills as an actor...

Allowed him to carry this movie...

 

Especially since Nolan...

Chose to adapt his film from Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey...

Which begins by calling Odysseus a “complicated man”...

 

Not “Clever Odysseus” or “Cunning Odysseus”...

Which is how he has been traditionally described in other translations of Homer’s epic poems...

And understood for centuries..

As the man who came up with the idea for the Trojan horse...

And figured his way out of a myriad of problems...

Including what to do when a tree starts growing into your bedroom...

 

There is nothing clever about the Odysseus in Nolan’s movie..

He makes massive mistakes..

And spends most of the film working on his recovered memory...

And reflecting on the ten years of built up blood lust..

That fueled the sack of Troy...

 

As if his real journey was not the one that brought him home

But the realization that war is hell ...

 

And Athena comes across as a figment of his imagination...

 

So this is a very modern retelling of this ancient story...

 

Which is why the gods are largely absent...

So when Athena does show up.. she is portrayed as a vision...

Who just looks like an excuse to cast Zendaya...

Rather than as an agent who drives the plot...

 

Along with the other gods... who we never see...

 

And men are pigs in this story...

Which is why Circe turns them into that specific animal...

After a speech about how they come to rape and pillage...

And generally abuse women...

 

And Penelope complains that she is doing all the work...

And getting none of the credit...

Which always goes to the men...

 

So at this point The Odyssey started to sound like it had taken inspiration from all those women complaining about men on my Instagram feed...

 

Now I don’t have a problem with a director taking a bit of literary license...

And Nolan takes a lot... and leaves out a lot of the original story...

 

And the fact that the Greek ships looked like they were borrowed from the Vikings...

Agamemnon was decked out to look like Darth Vader...

Which I suspect was because Nolan had to hide Benny Safdie...

Who for some reason he decided to cast in this role...

 

(And what was with that strange shiny gold spine that looked like human vertebrae attached to Agamemnon’s helmet?)

 

Telemachus keeps talking about  “dad” coming home....

While sounding, along with everyone else, like the Greeks were from Des Moines...

 

And then we hear that the Trojan War wasn’t about Helen...

It was really a trade war...

Because I guess that sort of thing is on everyone’s mind these days...

 

Didn’t really bother me...

 

And I could look past some of the unusual production design decisions...

That have the Cyclops looking like he was designed by Lucien Freud...

And the fact that the Laestrygonians resembled giant medieval knights...

Who had wandered over from a video game....

 

And unlike Emily Wilson...

Whose translation of The Odyssey inspired this film...

And Nolan’s version of a modernized Odysseus.....

 

I was not bothered by the fact...

 

That the director decided to film his movie...

“In the occupied territory of the Western Sahara, thus normalizing the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahwari people”

 

Proving that no matter how hard you try...

And how many inclusive casting decisions you make...

You can never be woke enough...

 

But none of this mattered...

Because along with many others...

 

I actually enjoyed this movie...

 

Not because it is great... which it isn’t...

But because we have been starved for decent filmmaking...

And Nolan is a skilled filmmaker...

 

The three hours fly by...

It is well edited, well scored...

The scene with the Shades coming up from the ground was clever...

 

And Homer’s Odyssey is just a great story...

Which gives a filmmaker a lot to work with...

 

Whirlpools in the ocean about to swallow a ship...

Monsters picking up men and eating them like breadsticks....

 

And since the Super hero genre is now running on fumes...

And Tom Cruise can only be his own stuntman so often...

 

And epic film like The Odyssey...

Which is a well made male coded movie...

Is there to fill that vacuum...

 

Even if Nolan’s film lacks suspense....

 

Which did make me wish Mel Gibson...

Had made this movie....

Because he knows how to make an audience sit on the edge of their seat...

Far better than Nolan...

 

Because The Odyssey suffers from a certain inertness...

 

And misses one of the larger points of Homer’s epic poems....

Which is that while the Greeks ...

Thought of women as possessions and treated them as such...

Women were also considered dangerous...

Because men were often unable to resist them...

 

And the original Odyssey is a story about women distracting men...

Leading them to lose their way ...

Or drawing them into danger...

But Nolan’s sexless version of Homer’s story misses this point...

 

Yet there is one important way in which this film has a message that resonates...

 

And is very timely...

 

For it warns about what happens when norms are abandoned...

And institutions that hold a society together fray...

 

For then societies can collapse...

 

And so like the Mycenean Greeks in this story...

 

If we aren’t careful...

 

Our own Dark Ages may come upon us...

 

And that should be the key take away from this film....

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