The Odyssey: Nolan’s, not Homer’s

…and the issue of colonialism

“Film has nothing to do with literature; the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict.” - Ingmar Bergman(1)

I want to lead off with this because I think one of the issues I’m seeing with some of the critical approaches to Nolan’s The Odyssey is this issue of the text-as-inviolable on the one hand and a lack of understanding about film in general on the other. Mostly, I’m thinking of academics and classical scholars who have turned their attention to the film.

In some cases, I don’t disagree with some of the criticism(s); but I think we bump up against authorial intent when we cling too much to the validity or lack thereof on some points.

Over the years, I’ve argued (in my head, anyway) with Bergman about this assessment. When I first read it, it was as a lightning bolt that pissed me off. Of course, literature and cinema had a lot to do with each other! C’mon, Ingmar, what is this?! And Bergman patiently responded with the emphasis on the second part of that quote that “the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict.”

Bergman goes onto write about how differently we receive literature and film and indeed, how much more easily we surrender our will to the imagination when watching film. It took me years to come around to figuring this out, though it shouldn’t have.

The plastic arts are different. We engage with them directly as phenomena in the world and when, as in film, there’s a narrative component, the tendency is accept the film’s thesis - at least, for as long as the film’s runtime. Words require interpretation and the triggering of images are wholly unique to the individual reading. How could it be otherwise and even though watching a movie is also and individual act, it is one just as likely to be shared with others - maybe just one other on a flat screen TV or with an entire audience in a theater.

Reactions are going to differ according to temperament and this is true as much for film as for literature, but those reactions will be specifically predicated on the source of medium. We process words differently from images. What film and literature might most have in common, is speech, sound. Regarding the film/text at hand, Homer requires reading aloud. 

Recently, I reread both Fagles and Wilson’s translations aloud (mostly to a wonderfully literate cat) and this reminded me what a joy hearing poetry is and how much is gained by reading out loud. This ties into an observation from Bergman’s later observation that “there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music.” Let that resonate for a bit. 

In reading out loud - particularly poetry with its rhythms and music - very often the content of the words is subsumed by the sound. Meaning is subtly divorced from experience and the process of interpretation and understanding of those words comes later (albeit almost immediately, but listen to recitation of Shakespeare and see how much you absorb without critical or analytical “reading” while listening; poetry, like music, requires attention in a different way from prose literature).

What this has to do with Nolan’s latest opus, I hope to make plain. I think it’s worth taking a deeper than usual look at the film because I am rather convinced that this is his masterpiece and it is the first film of his that has hit me at the heart more than the mind primarily.

Taking Bergman’s observation as a point of departure frees us up to see this Odyssey as Nolan’s own creation, though - of course - rooted in Homer’s epic. I don’t want to get bogged down too much in discussions about auteur cinema, but let’s give credit where it’s due: Christopher Nolan’s films are distinctly his own. They are as unique as Hitchcock’s, Kubrick’s, Welles’, or Fellini’s are to each of those greats. Whether Nolan is part of that pantheon, it’s too early for me to say.

What I can say is that he’s created a work that requires a repeated viewing. More than, say, Inception or Memento or some of his more “puzzle box” movies, we have an innately humanistic piece in front of us that refracts a foundational cultural text in such a way that while I feel it is far less Homer than Nolan, it is a testament to his passion and vision that it works as well as it does.

I understand some of the criticisms aimed at the film and Nolan by various academics, not the least of whom is Emily Wilson, the translator of what might well be my favorite version of the epic, but who pretty much savaged the film and Nolan and not necessarily on grounds that I can agree with. I won’t voice detailed opposition to her points here, but I will certainly recommend reading her review.(2) 

Because much of what she brings up is, however, worth considering, I do want to focus on a couple of areas that I do somewhat agree with. She remarked that she found Nolan’s Odyssey psychologically and politically facile and regarding his treatment of the women in the narrative which I want to address further down the line here.

Honestly, I don’t find Nolan’s take on the characters nearly as simple as Wilson (and others) seem to. Damon’s Odysseus is not the sly, crafty, charmer of the epic, but he carries more shades than some are giving him credit for. To be sure, if we are looking for “truthful to the source material” renderings, I’m not sure I don’t find Pattinson’s Anitnous any less reviling than the bard’s nor do I find Holland’s Telemachus really all that lacking. What we are going to run into are issues with elision and combination of elements of elements for the film that deviate from the poem substantially, but here is where Bergman’s observation can help us out.

I don’t believe for a second that Nolan was out to capture Odysseus the “complicated man” in Homer’s telling; he saw aspects of the hero’s character that would suit his telling of the tale and that seems to have guided him throughout, both with the other characters and with many of the events in the poem. Most of these I don’t have a problem with, some I just don’t understand why they’re there, and others I applaud. 

Apparently, a number of critics - not just Wilson - have stronger feelings.

But arguing about the psychological depth of any given character in a film is a worthy argument. A script reflects the concerns of the writer and it could be argued that you’re only going to get the degree of depth out of the material that the author has in him or her. Nolan may not be the deepest of thinkers, though he is certainly not a superficial filmmaker. Yes, he makes entertainment for the masses, but he tends to do so on his terms and very often, those terms are worthy of consideration. 

I don’t look to Nolan’s films for great psychological depth, but that’s not to say that what is there in almost all of his films is a general depth of feeling just beneath the surface, sometimes even right up front. What comes to mind is the sense of longing in many of his movies. The protagonists are often in search of something like wholeness, if not a return to a sense of home.

You see this in just about every film from Memento on. In terms of individual depths of specific characters, I get the feeling that this is where Nolan defers to his actors to fill in what might only be implied in the script. Thus, Damon’s Odysseus or Himesh Patel’s Euryochus are fleshed out in the performances and the interactions of the actors in scene. 

As far as the political or geopolitical ramifications of what the film is going for and what it has going for it, is that it is holding up a mirror to us in a way that the epic cannot or at least, in a more immediate way than is possible for the poem. Here is where I do have to agree with Bergman vehemently. 

Poetry, epic and otherwise, ancient and otherwise, is multivalent in a way that film and even theater cannot be. The performing dramatic arts imbue character and theme with an immediacy not found on a first reading of a work like Homer’s or hell, for that matter, Joyce. You can go back over a passage and it will yield deeper depths up on review; with a film or a play, it might be that most of what is implied thematically will mostly be right there. 

To be sure, on a second (or third or fourth, etc.) viewing, more comes to the surface, but in film and theater, thematic content is generally more immediate and perhaps it is this that has led to criticisms of Nolan’s work being less substantial than Homer. I respectfully disagree - not that Nolan’s work is less substantial in itself or when compared to Homer’s but - because what Nolan is getting at and brings to the fore, in the final act, is more of the moment and more relevant to where we are in this twenty-first century, particularly in this rather dark time when it is we who are “the People from the Sea” plundering and wreaking havoc on ourselves and the rest of the world.

It isn’t a stretch and it might be facile to say that the overrunning of Odysseus’ home by the suitors in all their boorishness is a metaphor for various figures and situations we find ourselves in as a society. I think that however this is addressed and if it is in a crowd-pleasing movie, then so much the better. It is also here where Nolan’s primary strategy pays off.

He had said prior to filming that he would avoid showing the Olympians like Zeus, Poseidon, and the rest. He wanted to leave ambiguity for the characters to engage with the world as they encounter it, and while this is swell, the additional special sauce was substituting the reasons for the assault on Troy and Odysseus’ departure from home for those found in The Iliad. They are less romantic reasons, but these make more sense for those for whom the existence of gods don’t.

It is in this latter camp that Odysseus finds himself. Consequently, the encounters with Calypso, Circe, Polyphemus, and the Laestrygonians read as less marvelous than more as anomalies. Here is where I tend to fall in with some critics who feel that the decision to excise the idea of the gods’ intervention in human affairs bleeds a little more of the wonder out of the film.

While I realize that Nolan might have wanted to suppress or elide the gods’ existence in mortals’ affairs, it hobbles somewhat the sense of awe he might be shooting for when we encounter Polyphemus or that renders the landing on the island of the Laestrygonians an unnecessary part of the plot.

Additionally, the downplaying of Calypso and Circe’s divinity is a huge letdown and not one that I feel could was unavoidable. It is also here where I wish Nolan had trusted Homer’s characterizations more. Both women were funny, charming (if dangerous), but both loved Odysseus and while I also understand that Odysseus and his men staying with Circe for a year might have been more than the film could have borne, it would have been lovely to see her rendered a little more faithfully.

As it is, Samantha Morton’s turn is nothing short of brilliant and if we go along with the thesis that this is Nolan’s Odyssey and not Homer’s, her Circe does make sense as a woman mistrustful of men, particularly armed men known for plundering and despoiling wherever they land. When this Circe turns his crew into swine (one of the finest moments of body horror on film - Nolan tapped into his inner Cronenberg!), she calls Odysseus out on his support of them. To her, they are swine, they are dangerous, and Odysseus himself is in violation of Zeus’s Law, bringing a weapon into her home.

Zeus’s Law is framed as the Golden Rule here and that rubs me the wrong way, as well. Zeus’s Law demanded that strangers be welcomed as they might be gods in disguise, but that’s about it. A larger case can be made that the law provided the bedrock for later philosophers in the Graeco-Roman traditions, but when it’s framed as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, this is not necessarily the foundation of archaic Hellenistic society. 

Of course, hospitality was regarded as sacred by just about all peoples in the region and it’s ludicrous to suppose otherwise, but I get where Nolan is going with this. The true breaking of the covenant with the gods was the larger abuse of ambushing the Trojans via the use of the giant horse; a gift for Athena becomes a weapon of slaughter and destruction. This particular deviation is not reflected in Homer’s Odyssey. Nevertheless, it works better than Poseidon’s ire being taken out on Odysseus for blinding his son. 

Regarding that latter, I do miss Homer’s Polyphemus, and it is in instances like these that I miss his Odysseus, as well. Odysseus’ charm and wit is dulled in favor of presenting us a hero suffused with desperate longing to return home to his wife and son, to his queen and the princeling. To be sure, this is a part of the hero’s motivation in the poem, but not the whole of it as Nolan presents us with in the film. 

Does the film suffer for this decision? No, not at all. The film is Nolan’s, not Homer’s, and it has very different aim in sight, and also, the criticism that the film is lacking emotional depth is, well, weird.

If anything, this might be Nolan’s most emotional film. That sense of longing, the theme of return, is foregrounded here and is underscored by superlative performances in Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus. To be clear, every actor in this film brings their A game and delivers performances loaded with emotive expression. 

Everyone has a stake in the future of Ithaca and the return of her king. It hangs over the proceedings as deeply as in the source text, for that matter. When Telemachus ventures forth to sail to Sparta to meet Menelaus, Holland’s take on the son being moved by his father’s exploits and what he means to Menelaus mirrors that of the son in the poem. Jon Bernthal’s take on Agamemnon’s brother is not what I expected but it makes increasing sense when you begin to read him as a military man first and a ruler second. In many ways, Menelaus’ fidelity to Odysseus is the same as any soldier for a brother-in-arms, regardless of era.

I read another takedown of the film by someone else whose work I admire in other areas and who I won’t mention by name, but they also pointed up the inconsistency with which Zeus’s Law was applied. This person was of the mind that the double standard of supplicating a potential host for room and board was contravened by the pillaging of other lands. This person isn’t wrong. It’s actually there in the text; there are plenty of references to what Odysseus and his men did to other inhabitants en route to home, and how at the same time, Odysseus would throw himself at a potential host’s knees and call on Zeus’s Law to be upheld. 

The critique of that very double standard is also in the source poem; so targeting this as a narrative defect seems odd, to say the least, and frankly, wrong. 

Likewise, Nolan has been singled out for his treatment of women, particularly Penelope and Calypso.  As I mentioned above, Nolan’s changes render both Circe and Calypso less engaging. Frightening, perhaps, in the former’s case, and more therapeutic in the latter’s. Because this is a different take, we have to take the characterizations as they stand and I do feel like Charlize Theron’s Calypso gets a little shortchanged and by extension, so does Odysseus. 

I would have preferred to have seen more of the Calypso and Odysseus who fell in love, of the Calypso who could offer Odysseus immortality because she was, in fact, a goddess. Indeed, when he straight up asks her if she is a goddess, she says nothing. I also feel that if Nolan had kept more of this dimension of the characters, it would have enhanced and possibly deepened more of who Odyssey would be by the time he arrived back in Ithaca.

As for Penelope? I don’t know what movie some people are watching when they argue that she’s underwritten or sold short by the script. This is a woman who misses her husband, and who is rightfully and righteously pissed off not only at the suitors, but at the patriarchy that has effectively erased what little agency she as a woman was afforded. Unlike the Penelope in the poem, Hathaway’s doesn’t take kindly to Telemachus assertiveness and there is a dramatic tension here that adds levels of complexity to the mother-son relationship lacking in the source text.

Yes, Nolan took liberty with the scheme to assassinate Telemachus; yes, he altered considerably, the showdown with the suitors; yes, Eumaeus is rewritten but John Leguizamo nails his faithfulness to Odysseus. I could go on about each character and actor, but there remains another major theme gone unremarked on.

Nolan makes plain that during the sack of Troy, it becomes clear to him how devastating the results of his strategy are. At one point, he sees a young Trojan woman about to be beheaded, whose visage we have seen throughout the film as Athena, under whose aegis Odysseus was protected. This reveal lends the film its greatest emotional punch; yes, of course, Odysseus knew “war is hell” and surely had seen the ghastly ugliness that invasion, combat, and raping bring. However, just because he had experienced all of this, did not mean he was inured to it or it had no effect on his psyche.

It really is churlish to assume that an Odyssey of today wouldn’t address the issue of PTSD, of battlefield trauma from a ten-year campaign, and the deep longing to get back home. It is this that fills out and fills in Damon’s characterization of this Odysseus and he acquits himself well. No, this is not the great charmer or the teller of tall tales. However, it is a man who has seen the worst of humanity and perhaps the best. 

Because Nolan’s is not Homer’s and because he has taken the liberty of reducing the evidence of the divine or supernatural throughout, it stands to reason his ending would differ, as well. Does it work? Why yes. Yes, it does.

The ending of Homer’s epic is somewhat abrupt, but it does bring closure and does end with Odysseus reuniting with his father and confrontation with the fathers of the suitors and Athena’s intervention to halt Odysseus from further slaughter and making peace. I’ll now write the really inflammatory; I kind of prefer Nolan’s ending.

With Odysseus sailing away into exile with Penelope to travel to the western lands to honor the dead, this is a bit different from Tiresias’ injunction that he will have to “go away and take an oar/to people with no knowledge of the sea,/who do not salt their food” and “make fine sacrifices to Poseidon.” Odysseus is vouchsafed a long life and peaceful death in the epic. Nolan’s ending might be the most romantic of his career and wraps the film perfectly.

I realize this is another critique leveled at the film, and it is one that I do kind of agree with, for the same reason that I find so many superhero movies odd; there is a lack of, for lack (again) of a better word, sex. Or sexiness, or something sensual that isn’t violence or conflict. This ties back to the Odysseus character type in relation to, say, Calypso and Circe, let alone Penelope. I wish Nolan had found some way to keep what was an integral part of the hero’s make-up here. 

I don’t necessarily mean that we’d need to have full-on screwing, but some idea that there was this will to live a full, complicated life with a woman with whom he was in love (in the poem) and later, with a sorceress who was as sly and crafty as he. These were aspects of the poem that could - I think - have been incorporated and rendered a bit more to the many-sided man from the epic.

I haven’t touched on the sheer spectacle of the film, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t chime in with others that Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is rightfully lauded here. Yes, the IMAX technology is miraculous, but it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t have a skilled DP who could frame the story you’re telling so well and have images and words support one another throughout. 

Ludwig Göransson’s score reminded me of what happens when you have a composer who has the ability to render a composition that is as much a part of the sound design of the overall structure as a work in its own right. Badalamenti’s work with Lynch comes to mind.

Jennifer Lame’s editing is, naturally, a critical element here; as critical as Nolan’s direction and it’s to her credit that the film moves as effortlessly as it does. The passage of time or I should say “times” felt almost tactile. I often wonder if Homer’s greatest innovation in The Odyssey was his handling of flashback (and flash-forward), cross-cutting, and all of this handily resting on nested story-telling. If Nolan did take one thing from the poem, it’s that it upped his already considerable game at this kind of layering.

Visually, it’s a remarkable work. My understanding is that Nolan was influenced by Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Kurosawa’s Ran and while I think he has a way to go before he’s mentioned in the same breath as those luminaries, he’s honored their approaches to expansive canvases. 

There are moments that stand out for me more than others. The journey to Hades (the Icelandic expanse where “water and fire meet” might be the most Tarkovskian moment) and the wrenching conversation with Elliot Page’s Sinon - yes, yes, from Virgil’s Aeneid - and the arrival of Agammemnon both got to me. As more and more shades from Odysseus’ past gather, the weight of war begins to grow heavier, lingering as Odysseus and his men sail away.

The Sirens episode is less memorable for its visuals than for what they sang to Odysseus: “It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep. And it told me I don’t really want to go home.” No, this is not Homer’s Odysseus; but it’s someone I recognize. 

The Horse! Maybe it’s just me, but seeing that equine form rising out of the sand felt like a call-back to the 1968 Planet of the Apes. It might have been the Trojan Horse, but it signaled an apocalypse of sorts. The interior shots added to the narrative I wasn’t expecting. There is an intimacy there that reminded me of the loaded expectancy of the unknown in the boats before they land at Normandy in Saving Private Ryan.

I’m saving the real-life controversy for last. As with much in today’s world, it is disappointing, saddening, and galling to find a work of art you admire marred by shitty decisions and in this case, I really am disappointed in the enterprise for filming in the Western Sahara where the Sahrawi people are living under Moroccan occupation. I recognize that going back to the 70s, the International Court of Justice had supported the Sahrawi’s right to self-determination and while the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic is partially recognized, and while there has been a cease-fire with Morocco for 35 years, I am aware that accepting funding from the Moroccan government to film in what is still nevertheless occupied territory, more than a simple faux pas. 

The Polisario Front and the Sahara Film Festival organizers called out the decision to film in Western Sahara as whitewashing Morocco’s colonialism. Why this matters is that - as with other instances of colonial oppression - the Sahrawi were subjected to disappearance, torture, harassment, ongoing intimidation by the Moroccan government, and more. To assume that because a cease-fire has been in effect for so long and to say that the Sahrawi are semi-recognized (certainly by the UN, but not by the occupier) is weak sauce.

By the time the Sahrawi’s legal representatives were able to mount any kind of action, filming had been completed and I’m left with a deep confusion about who is responsible for filming there in the first place. For someone whose film dissects the perils of occupation and aggression, it is tragically tone-deaf for Nolan to have filmed there. 

Mind you that the indigenous people of the Western Sahara can’t tell their stories for fear of imprisonment. The irony should be lost on no one that a master (and white) storyteller has used their land as a film set to tell his story. There are, of course, calls to boycott the film, and this sits uneasily on my conscience, as well. I feel I am a betrayer, as well, as I do believe this is a work worth seeing and I am writing about it as such.

My hope is that if you do see this film, you will do so knowing about this part of its development. The issues are many. Not the least of which is that having filmed there, is “a dangerous form of cultural normalization with the occupation, and an unethical exploitation of art and cinema to whitewash the image of a colonial situation still imposed by force and met daily with the steadfast resistance of a people struggling for freedom and dignity.”(3)

It’s this that damages the film for me more than any academic’s ill-considered review. 

“Christopher Nolan has had one year to learn about the land from which my family was forced to flee in 1975 under white phosphorous bombs.”

Sahrawi filmmaker Brahim Chagaf (4)

Sources

1. Bergman, Ingmar. Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. Secker and Warburg. London. 1960. 

1. Wilson, Emily. “An Uncomplicated Man.” London Review of Books. Vol. 48, No. 14. 13 August 2026 issue; retrieved 1 August 2026. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man.

1. Shafer, Ellise. “Christopher Nolan Criticized for Filming “The Odyssey” in Occupied Western Sahara: ‘Contributing to Morocco’s Repression of the Sahrawi People.” Variety. July 29, 2025. Retrieved: August 1, 2026. https://variety.com/2025/film/global/christopher-nolan-the-odyssey-western-sahara-controversy-1236472996/.

1. Prensa FiSahara. “The Odyssey Nightmare: Filmed in an occupied territory, followed by one year of silence from Christopher Nolan.” FiShara. July 3, 2026. Retrieved August 1, 2026.https://festivalsahara.org/en/news/the-odyssey-nightmare-christopher-nolan/.

Additional Reading about the Sahrawi:

Gilmartin, Eoghan. “Filmed in Western Sahara, The Odyssey Endorses Colonialism.” Jacobin. July 15, 2026. https://jacobin.com/2026/07/nolan-odyssey-western-sahara-morocco-colonialism.

Labat, Mohamed Sleiman. “Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey used occupied land as a film set. That feels like a betrayal.” The Guardian. 16 July 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/16/the-odyssey-sahrawi-people-christopher-nolan-western-sahara.

Yerkes, Sarah. “Nolan’s "The Odyssey" Has a Colonialism Problem.” Emissary. July 9, 2026. https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/07/odyssey-movie-western-sahara-morocco-film.