The Odyssey: How Nolan Reshaped Odysseus’s Humanity

Ἄνδρα (Andra, Man)

If the Iliad opens with the word μῆνιν (menin, “rage”), the fierce, uncontrollable anger of Achilles that forces him to abandon his comrades on the battlefield and drops the reader right into the brutal reality of a ten-year war, the Odyssey starts on a very different note.

It begins with the Greek word ἄνδρα (andra), meaning “man.” Right from the start, we are welcomed into the life of a mortal man rather than a realm of extraordinary heroes and superhuman wrath. In Nolan’s cinematic adaptation, I feel this core humanity is never lost. Among the many journeys mapped out by the epic, the film holds onto the fundamental journey of a man moving through life. Ultimately, The Odyssey, both Homer’s and Nolan’s, gives us an honest look at the passage of time.

Critic Daniel Mendelsohn noted that the narrative of Homer’s Odyssey moves through time with the exact same winding pattern Odysseus follows through space. The story starts in Ithaca without him, where his son Telemachus, whose name literally means “he who fights from afar,” sets off to gather news about a father missing for nearly twenty years. This opening section of the poem, the Telemachy, which frames Telemachus’s story and Penelope’s desperate situation, wraps up at the end of Book 4, and Nolan places it right at the beginning of the movie as well.

From there, the poem leaves the son behind to zoom in on the father, whom the gods have finally allowed to head home after his long stay on Calypso’s island. But before he makes it back, he is washed ashore in the land of the hospitable Phaeacians, where he spends four full books recounting everything that happened to him after leaving Troy. In Nolan’s version, the Phaeacians are cut entirely. Odysseus’s long flashback is heard only by Calypso, a creative decision that skips some of the poem’s most moving moments, like the hero breaking down in tears as Demodocus sings about the fall of Troy, or the delicate inner drama of Nausicaa. Yet Nolan doesn’t lose sight of the vulnerability behind those tears. You can see it break through on Matt Damon’s face in other moments, and it comes up in his character’s own words near the end, when Odysseus, still disguised, tells Penelope that hearing the stories of Troy over the years always brought him to tears.

So the story, both in the epic and on screen, circles back to Telemachus, picks Odysseus back up as he finally sets foot on home soil, and brings father and son together to reclaim the island from the suitors. This kind of narrative, which doesn’t follow a straight line but moves in wide, story-rich loops, is complex. Honestly, that’s probably why nobody was uniquely suited to bring it to the big screen quite like Nolan, especially on an IMAX 70mm scale. The associative spirals of this “ring composition” basically mirror how we tell stories in real life, jumping from one event to another just to clarify the point we started from, which happens to be the very place we end up.

Ἀπόλογοι (Apologoi, Tales)

This core section of the poem, where Odysseus looks back on his adventures after the Trojan victory, is known by the Greek term apologoi, or “tales.”

In the epic, the start of these stories marks a crucial moment of revelation. Odysseus discloses to the Phaeacians that he is the exact hero whose deeds the bard Demodocus has just been singing about. Naturally, everyone now wants to hear the story directly from the man who lived it, so Homer hands the storyteller’s mic over to Odysseus, turning him into an incredible storyteller in his own right. As Harvard comparative literature professor Martin Puchner points out, it is remarkable how Homer, the poet (or poets) who led the shift toward written text in epic narrative, still preserved the glory of the ancient oral tradition by celebrating bards and singers. The clearest proof of this is the fact that Odysseus himself gets turned into a master storyteller.

In the movie, Nolan keeps this meta-narrative framework intact, so the encounters with the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the Laestrygonians, and the brutal passage between Scylla and Charybdis are all recalled by Odysseus himself. However, in a clear departure from the poem, his only listener here is Calypso, who after seven years chooses to stop drugging her guest with lotus, finally allowing him to remember his past and his true destination. This version of the nymph doesn’t lose any of her charm, how could she when played by Charlize Theron, even if she comes across as far less possessive than Homer’s version, who did everything in her power to cling to the hero.

Still, I want to take a moment to look at the crucial role of the bard in both Homer and Nolan, who brought in a modern-day singer to play an ancient one. Opening the film with Travis Scott launching into the tale of Odysseus’s heroic deeds, only to be interrupted by an injured Penelope, felt surprisingly fitting.

There’s something deeply intriguing about the bard’s power to shape the story. In the prologue of the Odyssey, the poet even asks the Muse to start singing from wherever she likes, picking any random point, which drops us right in medias res, right in the middle of things. And throughout the epic, it’s always the storyteller who pulls us back into the past or leaps forward through time.

In the movie, when Travis Scott, as the first bard, strikes his staff against the ground and kicks off the story with

A face
A fleet
A war
A man
A thought
A trick

I felt a genuine chill, the same shiver, I think, that must have passed through entire audiences across centuries, in those quiet seconds right before the story begins and the emotion takes over again.

As for the actual content of the apologoi, Nolan unleashes all the visual flair we’ve come to expect from him, using breathtaking overhead shots and sharp character close-ups set against vast, blurred backgrounds.

Nolan’s version of the Cyclops episode highlights one of the most significant shifts in the whole movie. Setting aside for a second the heavily criticized decision to cut the famous “Nobody” trick, what stands out most is Odysseus’s total refusal to communicate with Polyphemus, even though he clearly understands him. One of his crewmates actually notices that the one-eyed giant speaks a comprehensible language and suggests trying a diplomatic approach to keep more men from getting eaten, but Odysseus just looks at him and asks, “Would you talk to ants?”

He then blinds the Cyclops, clearing a path for his crew and himself to escape, but he doesn’t leave the island without firing one last arrow at Polyphemus. It comes across as an arrogant taunt right before leaving the cave.

Even in the epic, without a doubt, Odysseus shows plenty of hubris. In his account to the Phaeacians, before getting into the story itself, he gives a bit of context on the Cyclopes, framing them as primitive monsters who live without laws, isolated from one another, with no basic understanding of farming or herding. But once he describes entering Polyphemus’s cave, we learn that the “monster” actually cares deeply for his flock of sheep, makes his own cheese, and after Odysseus escapes, the other Cyclopes come to his aid, showing there’s actually a real sense of solidarity among them.

Still, even if the way Odysseus introduces the Cyclops to the Phaeacians reveals his own prejudice, we can see there is at least some interaction between them. In the film, Polyphemus speaks the same language as Odysseus and his crew, yet there is no dialogue whatsoever. In the poem, they don’t speak the exact same Greek, but communication isn’t entirely absent, even though Odysseus frames it to make himself look like the superior, civilized Greek trying to reason with a barbarian, making the whole story feel rather self-aggrandizing.

Plus, Odysseus gives the Phaeacians a good reason to buy into his story of superiority. He managed to escape thanks to a clever wordplay that’s especially fascinating when you read Homer’s text in Greek. When Polyphemus asks, “Is anyone (μη τις, metis) killing me?”, the answer comes back “No one (οὔτις, outis) is killing you.” But at this point in the epic, Odysseus really is both someone and no one at the same time. He is someone because he is alive. He is no one because the rest of the world doesn’t know it yet. He’s a man who has to reclaim his identity. On top of that, me tis in Greek sounded just like the noun metis, which means “cunning intelligence.” So for the listener, the double meaning was layered: Odysseus is no one, but he is also someone through trickery. This is one of the most brilliant parts of the poem, even linguistically, because the trick lives not just in the meaning of the words, but in their very sound.

With this element removed from the movie, our perception of Odysseus can’t be the same as when we read the poem, where we sit spellbound by his story as if we were the Phaeacians ourselves. Which was Odysseus’s goal all along, shaping his tale to make a stellar impression on the very people who have the means to finally send him home.

Watching the movie, though, Nolan’s Odysseus struck me as just as arrogant as the one I knew, but less clever and downright cruel. In the poem, Odysseus only reveals his name once he’s safely out of reach, driven by vanity to make sure he gets credit. In the film, he inflicts extra pain on Polyphemus by firing an unnecessary arrow that nearly costs him his life. Maybe Nolan was aiming for the same idea, an overdose of hubris? Could be.

On the other hand, I found the Siren scene extraordinary. Odysseus, knowing he will be weak yet desperately drawn to their song, asks his crew to bind him to the mast so he can hear it without giving in to the urge to chase it. Yet Nolan doesn’t let us hear a single note of their song. We barely catch a glimpse of the Sirens on the rocks. It’s almost frustrating to realize we can’t hear anything, but that’s exactly the point. Backed only by Ludwig Göransson’s score, Matt Damon captures on his face every shadow of a man who knows he is vulnerable, but accepts it. Recognizing his own humanity is what saves Odysseus. Andra.

Τὸ θεῖον (To Theion, The Divine)

The divine element in Nolan’s The Odyssey is clearly transformed compared to ancient tradition, and honestly, it’s a really refreshing change.

In classical epic poetry, the gods are by no means a minor presence. They live just a few feet above mortals, but they share pretty much the same emotions and behaviors, constantly arguing and giving in to their own flaws. The conflict between Trojans and Greeks is mirrored by a similar rift among the gods, which is why Athena protects a Greek while Aphrodite backs a Trojan. Sure, the gods know more and can do more, but in a lot of ways, they are fairly human. In the poem, they step in now and then to push the plot forward, hand Odysseus a piece of gear he needs, or drop crucial info for his next adventure, serving almost like narrative machinery. Odysseus is a master diplomat when dealing with gods and semi-divine figures like nymphs or Cyclopes, never shying away from a verbal confrontation (or a physical one, in Calypso’s case).

In the film, this contact with the divine is far more sparse. We don’t feel that pressure from above coming from anthropomorphic deities. Instead, we learn that before the war, there was a kind of golden age of balance, where people lived under shared laws and traded peacefully while respecting common gods, a peace that war shattered. But men are the ones who wage war, so it is entirely their fault. The punishment, which I wouldn’t even call divine anymore, but rather natural, is devastating: endless death, fallen walls, abandoned women and children, decapitated statues.

A scene near the end of the movie, where Odysseus looks back on the horrors of war with Penelope (who hasn’t recognized him yet) after the success of the Trojan Horse trick, shows the decapitation of the Palladium. That’s the statue of Athena that legend says stood as a fortress for Troy’s integrity until the city fell. Right as it breaks, the marble face morphs into that of a living woman, perhaps the goddess Athena herself in the flesh, played by Zendaya, who has been following Odysseus throughout the entire film. Athena is the only deity given form and voice, yet only Odysseus can see and hear her. She acts like a hallucination, a projection of his own inner thoughts, maybe his guilt, flaring up at key moments to guide him back to who he was before the war corrupted both him and his world.

The divine pantheon, even if we feel its lingering presence (Telemachus keeps reminding people to respect hospitality laws because a guest might be a god in disguise), is stripped of its mythical fantasy. It’s deconsecrated. The relationship between humanity and the gods shifts into a dynamic between humans and Nature, which unleashes all the wrath of a deity without ever taking physical shape, striking back whenever arrogant, reckless mortals harm it. So when Odysseus faces the violent sea, it isn’t just Poseidon throwing a fit, but Nature itself being offended by men consumed by brutal warfare. The massive punishment inflicted on Odysseus and his doomed crew, after he engineered the Trojan Horse trick (which is visually stunning in the film, leading to the ruin of an innocent world that knew no dishonor), is ultimately Nature revolting against them. By the end of this grueling journey of shipwrecks, loss, and grief, Odysseus comes to understand his true fragility against the power of Nature, a lesson that feels pretty relevant for the modern world too.

Fabula and Syuzhet

There’s certainly no shortage of critics calling out the movie because it isn’t an exact scene-for-scene reproduction of the poem, but I think there’s something important to keep in mind here.

Decades ago, Russian formalists introduced the distinction between fabula and syuzhet: fabula is the raw, chronological sequence of events as they happened in time, while syuzhet is what the storyteller actually does with them. Long before cinema, whoever composed the Odyssey (keeping in mind it might not have been a single author, or even Homer himself) took events from the fabula and reshuffled them. They inverted the timeline to hit specific emotional beats, turning Odysseus into the bard of his own story. That way, the wildly fantastical elements were framed through his own perspective, serving a practical purpose: making him look legendary to the Phaeacians so they would praise him and help him get home.

Ever since the written text was locked in place, we’ve had fixed authorial variations that took over from the countless oral versions passed down through generations. But we shouldn’t forget that the Odyssey is fundamentally a human story for human beings, born from our endless need to connect and tell stories. That’s why Nolan’s version, beyond being strikingly modern, is just as legitimate as any ancient oral performance that adapted the material to speak directly to the world around it.

Nolan simply pulled the facts from the fabula and crafted a film, a cinematic syuzhet that won’t be easily forgotten. And if his inspiration for this work was an epic born nearly three thousand years ago, it really proves that a true classic never grows old.