Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is adapted from Homer’s epic. But how do the book and film differ? Where did the film go wrong, versus what did it improve? Mon brings her knowledge of Greek myths as she analyses the film adaptation. Spoilers ahead.

There’s been so much discourse surrounding The Odyssey, that I was sure I wouldn’t be able to immerse myself in the film. I’ve also been knee-deep in reading Greek myths recontextualized from the points of view of the women in the myths, so I have a skewed vision of these ‘heroes’, and I was concerned about watching an adaptation of a book that was written without the women in the forefront. 

Per the credits in The Odyssey, the film is based on Homer’s story. Now, myths are often open to interpretations, even more so when there are a number of translations running about. From the looks of it, however, Nolan might actually have pilfered from a few different translations and retellings of Odysseus’s (Matt Damon) story, not just Homer’s. 

I’m not an expert in Greek mythology, but Ron and I have grown up listening to and reading these stories. As children, our mum told us a vast array of tales: King Arthur’s table, Henry the VIII’s wives, and Greek myths being primary among them. Over the years, my fascination with Greek mythology has continued, and recently, I’ve dived into a fair amount of recontextualized retellings by writers like Natalie Haynes and Madeline Miller, plus the Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby podcast, who give voice to the female characters of the myths. 

I say all this to lay our cards on the table–I’ve read one, not very good, rendition of The Odyssey, which was the Samuel Butler translation. The rest of my knowledge comes from elsewhere. So, this comparison of the film and the book will be limited.

Like the book, the story begins by following Odysseus’s son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), who is sick and tired of an uncouth band of suitors who’ve taken up residence in his home. The suitors are all hoping that Odysseus’s long-suffering wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), will declare Odysseus dead, choose one of them, and make them king of Ithaca. And they want her to do it fast, because Telemachus is coming of age and will soon be crowned the new ruler.

And like the book, the story is not linearly told. We weave in and out of the present and the past, snaking through Telemachus’s narrative and Odysseus’. The order of the film narrative doesn’t exactly follow that of the book’s, mostly because a few interesting chunks are left out. 

The first big adventure of the story is Odysseus and his men encountering the cyclops. Someone needs to explain to me why Odysseus’ wisdom falls by the wayside in the film. The point of his encounter with the cyclops isn’t about his tactical genius, which is how the film posits the entire affair. Odysseus is wickedly clever; that’s his raison d’etre. Who else could have thought of the trojan horse, which won the war? It could only be Odysseus! 

In the book, when Odysseus and his men encounter the cyclops Polyphemus and are trapped by him, Odysseus uses his smarts to blind the creature and then get them out of the situation. It’s a weird, almost comedic scene in the book, where Odysseus claims his name is Nobody, so when the cyclops cries out nobody has blinded him, he gets no help or sympathy from his comrades. Which is to say, the cyclops has like two or three buddies in the book, but we do not meet these people in the film. 

I was really surprised that the entire section with the Phaeacians was missing in the film. It is probably the most apt parallel to what’s happening in Ithaca. The story emphasizes Xenia, referred to as the ‘Rule of Zeus’ in the film. Xenia is an essential rule of hospitality where good hosts treat all guests with great respect, and vice versa.

This rule is the cornerstone of the film, so leaving it out doesn’t make any sense. When Odysseus is treated extremely kindly by the Phaeacians, he reciprocates by being a good guest. Unlike the suitors in Ithaca, who take full advantage of this rule and Penelope and Telemachus’s hospitality.

To that point, the film’s reinterpretation of Xenia as the ‘Rule of Zeus’ undermines its own message. The Odyssey defines the rule as hosts should respect all guests because you never know when one of the guests is a god. First of all, there are no gods in the film. Next, this rule puts the onus of hospitality completely on the hosts. The guests aren’t accountable so they can do whatever they want. Which the horrible suitors are doing. Nolan seemingly misunderstood this key aspect of Homer’s story.

The biggest difference in the film and the myths (rather than specifically Homer’s tale) is that the characters are all flattened. Nolan divides the Greeks into the good–Odysseus and his men–and the bad, the suitors. There’s no real in between. 

The suitors’ unruliness is led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson)–who is the literal worst. He’s cruel, demeaning, and demanding. Much like the book version. There’s also Polybus (Corey Hawkins), who is just as horrendous. But Polybus, from my recollection, wasn’t one of the suitors in the book. There were other people, but I don’t remember their names.  

On the ‘good’ side, Odysseus and his men are written almost completely as kindly, desperate men, wishing to return home. For example, in the film Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), is an exemplary man and Odysseus’s right hand, only turning against his leader when it appears Odysseus is withholding vital information for the men to return home. He’s a little bit more treacherous and selfish in the book. 

Then we have a character like Sinon (Elliot Page), who isn’t even from Homer’s book. He’s such a striking character in this film–a young man, a child really, shoved into the war by a disgusting, selfish young Antinous (Raimy Lang). In the film, Sinon is the epitome of Odysseus’s guilt, but it seems he was more of a Judas-like figure in Virgil’s Aeneid. I haven’t read Aeneid, so I can’t confirm.

Nolan’s decision not to address the nuances and dimensions of human beings is to the detriment of one of The Odyssey’s most poignant scenes. Circe (Samantha Morton), the exiled goddess who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, is outraged at Odysseus because of what men do, especially during their wars. But, when we’re only shown these sad men, then Circe comes across as a harpy, and not rightfully righteous. 

Not to say Circe in the book (or books) isn’t a little unhinged. She’s been alone a long time, unjustly so. We can’t really blame her. She doesn’t let Odysseus go without bedding him, and only then does she turn the men back to humans. No such thing happens in the film. Circe, sort of, gives in without much of a fight.

This is a very Nolan thing to do. He’s almost puritanical in his approach to human intimacy and indecency in his films. Which is why the intimate scenes in Oppenheimer felt so awkward, and out of place. While it makes watching Nolan’s films an often family-friendly affair, it skives off important layers of storytelling, especially in the telling of Greek myths. War is brutal and disgusting, and the worst side of men (specifically men) rises up. Circe says as much in the film, but there’s no context for her outrage. 

Blame the fact that I’ve been reading so many stories by women about women in Greek myths, but it’s hard for me to full-on root for these characters because of the horrors we don’t see, but definitely know, that they have perpetrated. The extent of the atrocities in the film is limited–horrifying, but limited. The suitors are horrendous to Telemachus, and insulting to anyone they think is below them. But Homer’s The Odyssey suggests that these men, who claimed to be interested in marrying Penelope, were chasing and terrorizing the female staff in the palace, turning some of them against their queen. In the film, Antinous is in a consensual relationship with the scheming handmaiden Melantho (Mia Goth). 

In Troy, the Greeks inflict untold damage, and we see them kill with aplomb. Trust me, they did so much worse to the women, during and especially after the war. Nolan didn’t need to show us anything gratuitous, but pretending ‘warriors’ are goodly people whose sins stop at murder, and not rape, is myopic. We need to stop brushing the worst aspects of humanity under the rug. That’s precisely why the world is in the state it’s in now, and it’s upsetting that the film does just that.

Speaking of women. In the edition of The Odyssey I read, Penelope was beyond useless. Every time she showed up, she was sent to sleep by Athena. So the film version’s righteous indignation about her hands being tied by Ithacan rules was fabulous to see. I do wish we’d got to see her unravelling the loom, instead of it being a throwaway line by Antinous. Now, in the book, too, we don’t see her in action, but the film could have deviated from that script.

The rest of the ladies, though, I was disappointed. Another Nolan hallmark is that he doesn’t know how to write women. He rarely gives them their due, because they’re always plot points and not people. Athena (Zendaya) is not only by Odysseus’s side in the book, but she propels the whole story, starting from suggesting (in disguise) to Telemachus that he needs to go search for his father. She is literally driving this ship, but in the film, Athena is little more than Odysseus’s conscience, and part of his guilt. She should have been in almost every scene puppeteering the narrative, but she was hardly there. Nolan wanted to make the film more realistic, hence the lack of gods and goddesses. But it’s a gut punch not having more Athena. 

My biggest disappointment was Helen and Clytemnestra, both played by Lupita Nyong'o. First of all, they’re not twins in the myths, but they are in the film. Helen, having been returned from Troy and back with her husband Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), is scarred and angry. I don’t remember her being injured in the book, but she is very snarky and snappy there. She has a memorable tete-a-tete with Menelaus in the book; I can’t believe her banter was so subdued in the film. 

And Clytemnestra–tragic Clytemnestra–she hardly gets a line and is just shown in a quick, wordless scene killing her faceless husband Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). Clytemnestra was justified in murdering Agamemnon because he sacrificed their young daughter Iphigenia. Shrinking her entire story to a few lines of dialogue told by men again diminishes women’s experiences, and women themselves as people.

I did wonder how the film would end. Most of it closely follows the book, barring the fact that Antinous is the last of the suitors to be killed, instead of being instantly dispatched like in the book (that’s poor Polybus’s fate in the film). Telemachus is utterly useless in the film, barely able to get rid of one guy, whereas in the book he and Odysseus hatch the entire challenge plot together and they fight side-by-side. 

In the book, Odysseus also reunites with his father, Laertes, before he carefully plots how to escape Ithaca following his massacre of the suitors. Oh, and the hanging of the maids who helped the suitors. They don’t show that in the film, do they?

The denouement is the biggest change from the book. Or, to be precise, the book that I read. The whole point of the myths is to venerate these brave, strong, wise heroes. We can aspire to be great like Odysseus. But the film goes the opposite route. The burden of being a hero is seeing your ideas come to fruition, which leads to the desecration of a city, the murder of innocents, the breaking of the rule of neighbourly behaviour, being away from your loved ones, and of losing so many of your people. 

We’ve always read Odysseus as having faced innumerable obstacles on his desperate journey back home. But Nolan posits that he intentionally took the scenic route, because he couldn’t accept who he had become and didn’t know how he would face his loved ones. I don’t know where Nolan pulled that from, but it’s a more apt ending for our current times. 

Up until the ending, Odysseus had come across as rather stupid. Intentionally attacking the cyclops after he’d blinded it. Really? He caused unnecessary panic and death. But, given the film’s denouement, I wonder if Nolan’s intention was to suggest that Odysseus was on a death wish as well as scared to return home with PTSD.

Despite these story issues, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Odyssey. The story was so immersive, even though I spent the entire film comparing it to the renditions I already knew. I was concerned at the start, because the first 30 minutes of the film was choppily edited. But then things fell into place, and Nolan hit a home run by absorbing us into the story. 

I would be remiss not to mention the diversity in the casting. It’s refreshing to see such a cast in a Nolan film. This is the guy who left the Gurkhas out of Dunkirk. But here, seeing Himesh Patel in a core role, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, and so many others of different races throughout the film was a welcome acknowledgment of the diversity of humanity. And there’s Elliot Page in a key role as well. Nolan could have done even more, though. And if anyone wants to complain, the Aethiopian goddess Andromeda has been depicted as white for centuries. She’s not. So miss me with your racism about the film. 

The performances sold the film for me. I thought Matt Damon was excellent as the lead. He has such great screen presence, and balances the bravado of Odysseus the leader with Odysseus the man. 

Robert Pattinson is brilliantly cast as the horrid Antinous. His scenery-chewing performance fits with the book version. Anne Hathaway brings a ton of depth to Penelope that’s missing from the book. She’s the right amount of restrained for a woman with almost no options.

Having recently seen Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I found his performance very measured. In the MCU, he gets to be much more emotive, but that wouldn’t have fit in The Odyssey. He fits in perfectly with the character–when I learned he had been cast in the film, I immediately knew he was going to be playing Telemachus. The role works for him. 

I’m delighted with this rendition of The Odyssey. It’s effortlessly inclusive, it’s a grand, epic story, and it’s also a heartfelt reckoning of humanity facing our own flaws. Yes, the women deserved better, but the performances are excellent. Watching this film made me wonder why we don’t have more adaptations of Greek myths. Everyone remake The Odyssey on an annual basis, and we’ll learn and grow with it every time.