It may have laid the foundations of Western storytelling, but Homer’s “Odyssey” wasn’t exactly built for the movies. Sprawling across 24 chapters and sending its hero through a decade of shipwrecks, monsters, gods and witches, the roughly 2,700-year-old epic poem was never going to fit neatly into a single sit — even a three-hour IMAX blockbuster — without some serious rethinking.
Christopher Nolan’s solution was to treat Homer less as a blueprint than a starting point. “I wanted to tell it in a fresh and modern way, to make it as accessible for a modern audience as it was for Homer’s,” he told The Times earlier this month. His ancient Greeks certainly don’t talk like they stepped out of a classics seminar: Odysseus complains about spending “10 years on this f— beach” at Troy, while Telemachus refers to Penelope and Odysseus as Mom and Dad. Nolan preserves the broad arc of Odysseus’ struggle to return home while freely reshaping what happens along the way, often shifting the emphasis from the mythological to the psychological.
Homer-heads will notice plenty of other changes too. Gone are Aeolus’ bag of winds, which sends Odysseus back out to sea with Ithaca in tantalizing sight, and the Phaeacians, who help him finally make it home. The cannibalistic Laestrygonians become towering armored warriors, while other episodes are combined or radically re-imagined, with characters and storylines invented from whole cloth.
Obviously with massive spoilers ahoy, here are eight of the biggest ways Nolan’s “Odyssey” departs from Homer’s.
The Trojan horse casts a longer shadow
Homer’s “Odyssey” begins after Troy has already fallen, with the Trojan War recounted in memories and stories rather than unfolding as part of the action. But Nolan puts the anguish of the war at the center of his movie. The director takes us inside the Trojan Horse and into the horrific slaughter that follows, with the Greeks’ desecration of a statue of Athena becoming another image that haunts Matt Damon’s guilt-ridden Odysseus. He comes to see the Trojan Horse itself, his great act of cunning, as a violation of Zeus’ sacred law of hospitality. One of Odysseus’ defining triumphs becomes, in Nolan’s telling, something closer to an original sin.
The gods stay largely out of sight
In Homer’s original poem, the gods hold meetings, argue, play favorites and meddle so routinely in human affairs that Athena is practically a second protagonist. Nolan keeps them at a much greater distance. Zeus never appears (we hear a thundercrack only once) and Poseidon remains unseen even as Odysseus blames him for bad winds and choppy waters at sea. Only Athena (Zendaya) crosses the divide, and even she is a far more inscrutable presence than Homer’s hands-on divine fixer. The gods may still be up there somewhere, but Nolan, unlike Homer, isn’t about to give us a seat at their table.
The Cyclops encounter gets more brutal
One of the most famous episodes in Homer’s poem finds Odysseus and his men facing the Cyclops Polyphemus in his cave, where their struggle becomes a battle of wits: lies, taunts, a drunken ruse. Nolan strips away most of that gamesmanship. Odysseus and his men initially have no idea the Cyclops can speak, leaving them scrambling against a creature they can barely understand. They still blind him with a hot stake and escape by strapping grass to their backs to pass as sheep. But in another alteration, Damon’s Odysseus fires an arrow into the already blinded Cyclops’ eye as he escapes, giving the monster’s father, Poseidon, a new reason to make his journey home miserable.
Circe trades seduction for something darker
When Odysseus’ men encounter Circe in Homer’s poem, the goddess drugs them and turns them into pigs. But after Odysseus resists her magic, she restores his crew, takes him as her lover and invites everyone to stay awhile. They remain for a year, feasting and recovering, before Circe helps them prepare for the journey ahead.
Nolan’s Circe (Samantha Morton) is not someone you would want to spend a year with. She physically twists Odysseus’ men into pigs in a grotesque sequence of body horror, with no romance, yearlong idyll or magical help. It’s part of a broader change in Nolan’s telling: His Odysseus has far fewer sexual entanglements than Homer’s, keeping his devotion to Penelope more firmly in the foreground. The Circe encounter is shorter, scarier and considerably less sexy, turning one of Homer’s strangest extended layovers into something closer to a waking nightmare.
Hades becomes more personal
Homer’s trip to the land of the dead is crowded with ghosts from Odysseus’ past and Greek legend. Nolan gives Odysseus a more personal set of ghosts. Chief among them is someone absent from Homer’s original conception: Sinon (Elliot Page), the Greek soldier who helps trick the Trojans into accepting the wooden horse in Virgil’s “Aeneid.” Nolan reinvents him as a naive young soldier left outside the horse to sell Odysseus’ deception. The Hades sequence gets much of its emotional weight from Page, as Sinon confronts Odysseus with the lie that sent him to his death.
Calypso helps Odysseus forget
In Homer’s poem, the goddess Calypso rescues Odysseus from a shipwreck and keeps him on her island for seven years, even as he longs for Penelope and Ithaca. Nolan recasts Odysseus’ time with Calypso (Charlize Theron) as less of a sexual distraction and more of a therapeutic psychodrama. She gives him lotus flowers to dull his pain, but as he keeps eating them, his memories and sense of identity begin to fade. For a filmmaker fascinated by the slippery workings of memory, the combination is a natural fit: Before Odysseus can resume his journey, he has to remember that he wants to go home.
Father and son get an action-movie reunion
In Homer’s poem, the long-awaited reunion between Odysseus and Telemachus is a quiet, intimate affair. After returning to Ithaca disguised by Athena as an old beggar, Odysseus reveals himself to the son he hasn’t seen since infancy in the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus. Father and son then begin plotting together to take back the palace from the suitors.
Nolan reunites them in full action-movie mode. When Telemachus (Tom Holland) is targeted by assassins, Odysseus arrives to rescue him, though Telemachus has no idea the apparent beggar fighting at his side is his father. Their first meeting becomes an entirely invented action sequence, replacing Homer’s quiet recognition scene with something much more physical and immediate. It also offers a bit of blockbuster fan service unavailable to Homer: Spider-Man and Jason Bourne fighting bad guys side by side.
The ending looks beyond Ithaca
Homer’s “Odyssey” ends by putting Odysseus’ world back together. After slaughtering the suitors, he reunites with Penelope, who finally accepts that he is truly her husband after testing him with a secret only the two of them know about their marriage bed, and Odysseus reclaims his throne.
Nolan complicates that restoration. Instead of ruling, Odysseus goes into self-imposed exile as Telemachus takes his place, while he and Penelope (Anne Hathaway) sail into “the unknown west” to honor the men who didn’t make it home. In a closing monologue, Odysseus looks ahead to the collapse of the Bronze Age, imagining a future in which his world and everything that happened to him will be forgotten. Civilization will eventually rise again, he says, only for humanity to forget its mistakes once more.
It’s Nolan’s final way of connecting Homer’s world to our own. Whereas the poem ends with order restored, the film leaves history caught in an endless cycle of collapse, rebirth and forgetting.
