Unlike architectural renovations, literary adaptations leave the originals intact. Hamlet still exists after Hamnet. Christopher Nolan has made a Christopher Nolan film out of Homer, but Homer remains.
A culture war erupted over its casting as revealed through the trailers, notably the choice of Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen of Troy and the diminutive trans actor Elliot Page as a Greek warrior. Homer’s repeated epithets for Helen may include “fair-haired” (eukomos) and “white-armed” (leukolenos), but it’s not Homer’s Helen we see. It is tea-drinker Christopher Nolan’s.
More disconcerting is finding The Odyssey represented by such familiar stars. Although Nolan’s success has allowed him both to cast the biggest names in his films and maintain a sort of repertory company, he has never been much interested in actors as such. So: ever-winning Matt Damon is Ulysses, Anne Hathaway is Penelope, Tom Holland is Telemachus, and Robert Pattinson the devilish suitor Antinous. They all have American accents. And you have questions of plausibility and authenticity?
This Odyssey is a wholly old-fashioned Hollywood enormity, profiting from Nolan’s colossal budget, his impressive efficiency as a director and producer, and his dedication to making the scenes as physically real as possible, all while filming with mighty Imax cameras.
For a Nolan film, the structure is relatively simple. As a gesture to the lyrical origins of the story, we begin with some rapping by a bard (Travis Scott), but, mercifully, this soon stops. You’d never know this yarn was poetry, let alone some kind of Greek.
Then we move on to the horse, a prancing specimen, half-buried on the beach before Troy, just like the boat scenes in Dunkirk. The Greeks’ one-trick pony has never made much sense, in scale or psychology, and, for all Nolan’s efforts to make it epic and claustrophobically real, he doesn’t really pull it off either.
We’re updated on the unfortunate set-up back home: the suitors harassing Penelope, Telemachus feebly asking where’s Dad. There’s some backstory – the boar incident, Argos as a puppy, Odysseus leaving (“I won’t return soon – if at all”). Then we’re off on his post-war adventures, intercut with Telemachus’s own quest.
The structure of the film is Odysseus gradually remembering his past while talking – like a stranded Californian beach bum – to the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron). Homer says that Calypso made Ulysses a reluctant sex slave for seven years. A montage perhaps? Alas, Nolan doesn’t do sex or humour.
First up comes the giant man-eater, Polyphemus, like a huge, sluggish Gollum whose one eye Odysseus puts out before escaping, although at the cost of infuriating the giant’s dad, Poseidon. Storms at sea ensue. For Odysseus’s ship, Nolan hired a 35-metre, 50-oared replica Viking longship, and it was sailed for real around the film’s many locations, providing a truly immersive experience.
Next come the Laestrygonians, cannibal savages in Homer; here, inexplicably, they’re giants in full suits of gleaming medieval plate armour, like Monty Python escapees, rampaging through a pine forest, Culbin in Scotland. Much of the imagery here is surprisingly northern, in homage perhaps to The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. In the fight sequences, there is heavy drumming, Nolan having instructed his composer, Ludwig Göransson (who won Oscars for Black Panther, Oppenheimer and Sinners), to eschew strings for gongs.
Circe (Samantha Morton) is sympathetically interpreted as an abuse survivor, only turning men into pigs because that’s what they really are. For the visit to Hades, the multitudinous dead rise up, zombie-like, from a black beach, filmed in Iceland. Big pictures!
After sailing past the Sirens and between Scylla and Charybdis, the crew land on the sacred island of the sun god Helios and fatally eat the forbidden oxen (“Our provisions ran out”). Although other deities are mentioned, the only god actually to appear is Athena (Zendaya in tasteful hijab), offering Odysseus therapeutic tips, rather than performing magic.
There’s the murderous conquest of Troy in fire-lit flashback and the dispatch of the suitors, but no such nasties as the hanging of the slave-girls or the butchery of Melanthius. For relatability purposes, this Odysseus is more earnest and sorry than sly and proud. You get the full Nolan, for sure, exhaustingly so; antique Homer not so much.
The Odyssey is in cinemas now
[Further reading: Meet the people who handle the King’s billions]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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