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An Odyssey without the Good Parts

An Odyssey without the Good Parts

Last updated on: August 4, 2026 at 11:59 am by Gene Veith

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An Odyssey without the Good Parts 2026-08-04T11:59:35-04:00 Gene Veith

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Last October, I spent my three-week residency at Luther Classical College teaching the Odyssey, so I know it well. I was looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s film version, but now that I have seen it, I am greatly disappointed. Not so much for the reasons other negative reviewers have given, but because the movie left out the good parts of Homer’s epic.

Literature professor though I am, I don’t expect movies to perfectly reflect the books they are based on. The story in a book, which might take weeks to read, is going to be far longer and more involved than the story in a movie, with its running time of less than three hours. Also, the book can depict far more than a movie can. For example, a book can delve into its characters’ minds, showing us what one or more of them are thinking, something a movie can only suggest with good acting. There are also differences in genres that cannot easily be compensated for in switching, say, from an epic poem where the language is everything to a Hollywood film, which must tell its story visually. So I’m tolerant of film adaptations.

And I’m tolerant of the conventions of contemporary cinema, so I wasn’t bothered by the “inclusive” cast of Nolan’s Odyssey, with its black, Hispanic, Asian, and trans Greeks.

I’m not tolerant of woke revisionism, but that usually takes the form of demonizing the past, which we don’t see much of in the movie, except for Circe thinking that men really are pigs and Penelope complaining that she isn’t allowed to rule as Queen.

The biggest complaint I’ve heard is that Nolan’s version eliminates the heroism of Homer’s epic, reducing Odysseus to a veteran with PTSD, with the Trojan War being just another neverending war, highlighting the atrocities and downplaying the martial virtues. I admit, that did get a little ridiculous, as when Odysseus complained that Agamemnon went to war not so much because his brother’s wife ran off with the Trojan prince but because he wanted to control the “trade routes.”

What Nolan was trying to do was to make these Bronze Age characters less barbaric. He tones down the joy of battle, the casual brutality, the lust for honor. Reading the epic makes us learn something about those ancient times, but Nolan’s version is anachronistic. And yet, Homer is such a good writer that he humanizes these barbarians all the same, leaving room to criticize the war and those who fight it.

Homer’s saga is so compelling that his story and his characters have taken on a life of their own. The Romans believed they were descended from the Trojans who escaped the Greek massacre, so Virgil in the Aeneid does present the Trojan Horse as a foul deception and he condemns the cruelty of the Greeks when they sacked the city. (See his heart-breaking description of Achilles’ son slaughtering King Priam and the royal family). Later, in Dante’s Christian telling of the tale, Odysseus is described as a deceiver for his invention of the Trojan Horse ploy, as well as his constant deceit of his men, and is consigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell where false counselors are punished. And for the ultimate Christian deconstruction of the Trojan War, see Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare, who lampoons everyone’s heroic pretensions as a cover for ego and lust (though he does give Odysseus, a.k.a., Ulysses, the prophetic best lines, in which he anticipates what will happen if we stop believing in the order of the universe, thus anticipating postmodernism by four hundred years). The point is, Nolan is not altogether wrong to be anti-Trojan-war and to present Odysseus as consumed with guilt for fighting it and for ending it the way he did.

Actually, as has been observed, what Nolan does in a rather clumsy way as he seeks to clean up Homer’s epic is to Christianize the Odyssey. For example, in Homer’s story, while Penelope, waiting for her husband over the course of 20 years, is faithful, Odysseus is not, spending a whole year in a sexual relationship with the beautiful Circe (who is not the stereotypical witch of the movie) and seven years in a sexual relationship with the sea-nymph Calypso). Surprisingly in a product from Hollywood, Nolan forebears from giving us any obligatory sex scenes or so much as saying that Odysseus has been unfaithful.

Notice what Nolan does with the “Law of Zeus,” which becomes a recurrent theme throughout the film. The movie describes this law as treating people the way you would want to be treated. Now Zeus never said that! Jesus did! Now the Golden Rule is echoed in other religions and philosophies, but not in Greek paganism. Nolan would know that if he had read Tom Holland–not the Spiderman actor who does a good job of playing Odysseus’ son Telemachus in his movie, but the classical historian of that name, the author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. This book would inform him that the various moral tenets he stresses in his movie, such as the values of compassion, sexual morality, and peace being better than war, come from Christianity and nowhere else. They are certainly not from Greek paganism, whose gods are far from the guardians of morality that Nolan makes them out to be, but are rather notoriously immoral and indifferent to mortals (as Homer shows throughout his stories).

Now violations of the sacred law of hospitality, which is Nolan’s example of the Law of Zeus and was, in fact, seen as a sacred obligation, is an important theme in both the epic and the movie. This is a case where we can learn something from ancient cultures. Hospitality is violated when the guest runs off with the wife of his host (Paris and Helen), when the host eats his guests (the Cyclops), when the host won’t let her guest leave (Calypso and Odysseus), and when the guests refuse to leave (Penelope’s suitors).

All of this would be clarified if Nolan had just done justice to the Cyclops episode. In Homer, the one-eyed giant is described as someone who recognizes neither the laws of the gods nor of man, part of a tribe that holds no councils (that is, lacking any kind of collective government), in which each individual lives isolated in his own cave. This is to say, the Cyclops lives in a state of anarchy, which, for the social and political minded Greeks, is what makes him a monster.

When Odysseus in the poem invokes the law of hospitality, the Cyclops replies that he doesn’t care about the gods and instead of feeding the men proceeds to eat some of them. The dialogue between Odysseus and the Cyclops as Homer presents it is brilliant, culminating in Odysseus claiming that his name is “Nobody.” After Odysseus pokes his eyes out, the Cyclops calls to his neighbors in the surrounding caves for help, saying “Nobody put my eye out,” whereupon the other Cyclops think there is nothing wrong with him. In this episode, we learn about the law of hospitality and its connection to the gods, and, more than that, we realize that Odysseus wins because he is so smart and the Cyclops is so stupid. The notion that intelligence is more powerful than brute strength is the key to Odysseus’ prowess, and it points to a major value of the Greeks–the life of the mind–that became their greatest legacy to our civilization.

Nolan just presents the Cyclops as a big, scary, inarticulate monster. In leaving out his conversations, he misses out on the opportunity to develop his own themes!

He does this again and again. Odysseus doesn’t save his men from the Lotus Eaters–we would call them blissed-out drug addicts–underscoring the importance of not succumbing to inner pleasures that make you forget that you are a human being with a purpose in life and a home to get to. Rather, Odysseus himself eats the lotus on the island of Calypso, who tries to get him to quit so that he will remember to go home to his family.

And Nolan leaves out the whole point of the Calypso episode, which is crucial both for the story’s character development and its theme: namely, Odysseus’s choice. Calypso, herself a minor deity, gives her captive lover a choice: If you stay with me, she promises, he can be immortal, like her, living in a state of perpetual luxury, sexual pleasure, and the happiness of never having to experience pain, growing old, or death. Or, he could go back home to the ordinary life of a mortal, with his aging wife, day-to-day problems, the decline of old age, and eventual death. Odysseus chooses ordinary human life, preferring his home, his family, and growing old together with Penelope, despite the suffering and death that await them! This is Odysseus at his most heroic. This is true courage and strength. Now we see the depths of his love for his wife, despite everything. Now we see Homer’s thematic depth. But Nolan leaves it all on the cutting-room floor.

He keeps doing this! In the Descent to Hades scene, Nolan presents the dead as just a bunch of zombies, leaving out Homer’s priceless moments: when Odysseus sees his mother but cannot embrace her; when he sees his fellow hero Ajax who is still mad at Odysseus for having been awarded Achilles’ armor instead of himself, still holding on to a petty grudge even though he’s dead; and Achilles himself, who had traded glory for an early death, now saying that he would rather be an unknown farmer than lord it over all the dead.

Nolan turns the retribution against the suitors into just another big fight scene, with Odysseus taking on the whole crowd and almost getting killed. As opposed to showing his son Telemachus fighting by his father’s side, thus showing him attaining manhood, with the loyal swineherd and Athena herself (his patron as the goddess of wisdom) also joining the battle.

Nolan also leaves out the recognition scene, when Penelope tests this stranger who slaughtered the suitors by seeing if he can describe their marriage bed, that intimate knowledge that only her husband could know.

Nor is there anything about Odysseus’ reunion with his elderly father, or the Phacians who exemplify how hospitality is supposed to be carried out, or a blind bard (Homer?) showing up to sing about Trojan war (the same poem that we are reading?).

And Nolan completely changes the ending, having Telemachus be king while Odysseus and Penelope sail off into the sunset to avoid the vengeance of the suitors’ families , as opposed to Homer’s resolution of the revenge codes with the intervention of the Goddess of Wisdom.

I could keep giving examples. And I’ll spare you my complaints about the writing, with its casual American vernacular, as when Telemachus talks about his “Dad” and “Mom,” as opposed to Homer’s beautiful and elevated language.

In short, the main problem with the movie is that Nolan leaves out the very details that make Homer’s epic so human, so meaningful, and so thought-provoking.

Illustration: Head of Odysseus from a sculptural group representing Odysseus blinding Polyphemus (1st century A.D.), photo by Jastrow – own work, from the Iliade exhibition at the Colosseum, September 2006–February 2007, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1288487

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