It’s rare, depressing, and slightly comical to watch a text that helped jumpstart Western literature turn out, in its adapted form, to be less interesting—and much less nuanced—than the same director’s canonical superhero movies. I’m fresh from the movie theater, trying my best to understand Christopher Nolan’s enormously anticipated, critically beloved, three-hour vision of The Odyssey. It doesn’t contain more than one pretty good piece of dialogue. There are some nice phrases about offending the laws of Zeus (and basic decency) at the very end. That’s it.
Everything else that lands is a miracle pulled off by one of the film’s two dozen A-list actors (like Samantha Morton, playing Circe as a serial killer, wistfully telling the pigs “go back to your disguises” when she restores them to human form). Oppenheimer, this movie’s predecessor, was teeming with zingers and eloquent mission statements. Nolan, what happened? Did your Muse desert you?
Matt Damon voices Odysseus with all the bewildered “wtf” affect of someone whose car has been stolen during lunch hour. But that’s because he has to force himself to deliver questionable clunkers like “let’s follow [that sheep].” The film stops so he can explain to less strategic minds around him the concept of—a sheep herd. Dear modern people: meet the complicated, brilliant Odysseus, “follower of sheeps.” That is his new “Nolanic epithet,” apparently and he’s not the only one suffering.
Zendaya, as Athena, has to give the same speech to Odysseus twice. All Nolan changes are her specific nouns. Both times it’s pure apocrypha; Homer’s not to blame. “Is there anyone who doesn’t understand pain, or blood?” Athena asks, rhetorically. First, Goddess of Wisdom, there are such people. And second, Athena, don’t go on. I was sitting there terrified of her continuing thus: “Is there anyone who does not value cheese curds? Can you show me a man or woman who hasn’t been chomped in the finger by some quarrelsome rodent?” Other shocking fumbles: “I’m not the problem,” said by Odysseus, which is hilarious because he is the problem, according to everyone in the film including himself. There’s also “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which most of us remember from third grade, and just isn’t load-bearing advice in a film for adults.
The Golden Rule shows up. It gets shoved into Anne Hathaway’s mouth, like an unwanted appetizer, and then it gets thrown into a blender with the Greek concept of hospitality (xenia, aka “Zeus’s Law”). Nolan’s film makes its categorical imperatives insipid as hell. His characters, after dropping these lame proverbs on each other, move on immediately to bathing in their enemies’ lifeblood. This blasé, grimdark attitude—which is like Nolan turning Homer into “Conan, The Ithacan Barbarian”—starts feeling very tempting. Just consider the other options. There’s hypocrisy, and there’s shaming people. Every hero and heroine in this version of The Odyssey has to do at least one shift as some scene’s tedious, mealy-mouthed scold.
When Nolan doesn’t have anything specific to do with an episode from Homer’s tale, he improvises in an adept way. Circe, who’s pretty taciturn in Homer’s poem, gets her own feminist aria here. Morton delivers it with stunning force. Lupita Nyong’o makes Helen tragic, which is a clever twist. John Leguizamo makes blind Eumaeus into a scene-stealing, IMAX-sized update of the editorializing car mechanic he played in John Wick.
But when Nolan’s facing the biggest, most indispensable episodes in the story’s prologue and action—the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the Trojan War, among others—he comes up with a massively disappointing structure that he steals from a couple of high-risk, non-Homeric modern sources. From Game of Thrones we get a revisionist account of Persian attempts to conquer Greece, which Nolan presents as some kind of fore-ordained divine retribution for the Greeks’ own moral flaws. It’s “winter is coming” meets the fall of Middle-Earth, except that’s not what really happened: in truth, the Persians were just an opportunistic imperial army striking at the Greek world a very long way from Ithaca, which remained safe. On top of that, he borrows his final getaway scene, with Odysseus and Penelope, from his own previous ending to The Dark Knight Rises. He’s audacious enough to use the same actress, in both films, in the same exact role—Anne Hathaway, starring as the male hero’s ticket out of Dodge.
Nolan also has to cut or distort a thicket of original material from Homer, because he’s building a case and can’t let his theme (the death of fellowship and diplomacy) retain the poem’s original, ambiguous, frustrating “realism.” In Homer, contested virtues like hospitality get approached differently by different characters: the Lestrygonians are monstrous cannibals, for instance, but the Phaeacians—to whom Odysseus is a stranger—are flawless people, both hospitable and generous.
I’ve already read dozens of articles, including ones placed in venues like The New York Times, that try to evaluate what it means for The Odyssey to receive this blockbuster update from Nolan. My overwhelming impression has been a creeping sense of horror at the shoddy condition of such journalism in 2026; some writers, like Manohla Dargis at the Times, clearly don’t know the poem very well, or haven’t read it. Others, who are more convincingly credentialed, probably do see exactly what Nolan’s messing with, and choose to celebrate him for what they view, nonetheless, as a sort of charitable resurrection for which Homer (and we) ought to be meekly thankful.
I can’t share their enthusiasm for someone, anyone, “updating” Homer according to the comparatively easy heroic tenets of the Nolan-verse. The critical acclaim Nolan has scooped up at this summer’s incredible speed represents a wasteland of “arts and letters” that brings to mind, for me, Yeats’s famous line from “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Those who know Homer are too indulgent to complain that he’s being misrepresented. Those who don’t know him just go ahead and publish their twee movie reviews and opinion pieces as if they do.
What cuts deepest about this ongoing display of timidity and ignorance is the way it reframes the fundamental question with which Nolan, himself, is trying to grapple: what counts as cultural decline, and what’s the price we pay for it? Nolan, looking rather myopically through a modern lens, decides Odyssey is “pretty good,” but a solid candidate for thorough revisions—revisions he puts into the text’s guts himself with a free hand. Then he turns Homer into a parable about one specific kind of divine mandate that the Greeks let slip.
That’s a politically-charged decision, and having just watched Nolan’s movie, I’d guess his ideas about foreign policy and immigration (for instance) align pretty closely with mine. The problem with making Homer speak to ICE and the Iran War, however, is not that it’s a partisan move. The problem is that nobody, starting with Nolan himself, manages to see the real plague spreading invisibly around us. It’s not a lack of statecraft, or a failure to show strangers a proper welcome; those are symptoms of Trump’s Administration that didn’t even exist—at least, not so glaringly—six years ago. The loss of cultural literacy, on the other hand, that strips the real content of Homer out of the blind poet’s enduring, prestigious, and increasingly empty cultural standing? That’s a rot that’s picked up speed for decades. And it’s not my intention to hold anyone harmless for writing confidently about a book they didn’t read, don’t respect, or want to appropriate for the sake of scoring cultural capital by pointing at transient political divides.
When Odysseus ventures into the hut of Circe, the witch, she hisses at him: “Why do you claim to uphold Zeus’s laws, liar?” It’s a striking question, and Nolan was driven, by laudable instincts, to include it even though it’s (yet another) modern emendation. Unfortunately, neither Nolan nor any of his highly-placed fans seem willing to answer it. They don’t even realize that they, the guardians of culture, are now the villains in this story. We’re using the sound of cumulative applause to bury the one thing about Homer that’s proving most salient, needful, and true: he was, despite everything his age stood for, a man who devoted his entire life to poetry. How many of us, writing and tweeting now, can say the same? Odysseus is right; where you find one sheep, there's usually a herd.