By Dr Ben Brown

So armed we can begin to examine Nolan’s The Odyssey. What are the film’s priorities? The first thing to note is they are not, nor should they be confused with, the priorities of the epic poem of the same name. What hides in plain sight here is that the film is not THE Odyssey, even though it claims to be. We can start with a simple proposition about motive: perhaps, for example, it could be taken as an act of commercial braggadocio in the context of contemporary filmmaking. The artisanal aspects of the film are conspicuously on display — such as 70-millimetre analogue filmmaking, the use of very little CGI and so on. Could Nolan simply be staking a claim to be the master filmmaker of his generation? Such an explanation can only take us so far.

On a first viewing one feels as though Nolan is claiming to have translated the priorities of the epic poem into the epic film. If so, then the claim is as unnecessary as it is dangerous. It’s unnecessary because no piece of literature resists definitive representation like this epic poem. A film version can only be an interpretation and, to be truly Odyssean, ought to embrace it by displaying some ironic self-awareness of the claims of film to be a successor to epic poetry. Nolan does not do this. It is dangerous because when an interpretation forgets that it is such and insists on its superlative fidelity, it risks banality by becoming inflexible and dogmatic.

In short, the priorities of a film made in 2026 are the priorities which animate 2026, not those which animated an oral epic that transitioned to text around 700 BCE. To elide those priorities is to engage in ideological mystification. Is this what has happened in Nolan’s The Odyssey?

What gets omitted and why?

Let’s consider two omissions. These are Odysseus’s sojourn in the city of Phaeacia on the island of Scheria (books 6-8) and the full account of his escape from the cave of Polyphemus the Cyclops (book 9). For each omission the question of motive will be uppermost in our minds: how do the concerns of our present leach into the way Nolan has chosen what to omit from the film? I’m not striving to discern whether Nolan got it right or wrong in relation to an original text, much less whether the film is “historically accurate” (there’s no shortage of these criticisms online).

Rather, I want to ask how a film encodes contemporary concerns and priorities even when sincerely claiming to be a faithful presentation of an ancient text. I’m asking how choices made by the translator tell us something about how The Odyssey film functions as ideology in our current moment.

Both omissions at first glance appear simply the result of cinematic compression, but they are as integral to the thematics of the epic poem as they are awkward for Nolan’s restructuring of heroic identity in his film. These episodes are crucial not only for Odysseus’s return, but for understanding the poet’s own intervention on the question of heroic identity against the backdrop of the archaic function of epic poetry. Their omission, by extension, also helps us understand Nolan’s intervention.

The strategy of having no name

In Homeric epic every aspect of heroic identity is shadowed by its opposite. In the Iliad the template is expressed in Achilles’s choice of destiny: either to die in battle and win immortal fame, or to go home, fade into old age and be forgotten. In the first, death catalyses the immortal memory of the hero, whose name becomes a metonym for the totality of his fame in song. With the second choice, returning home negates memory and, being mortal, one’s name is lost forever upon death. The suffering in the Iliad, which is again encoded in the hero’s name (Akhi-laos means “one who brings pain to the warrior-band”), has much to do with the way the Iliad’s hero resists the only one of these destinies truly possible for him in the tradition. The Iliad thereby offers us a hero whose defiance of destiny ironically propels him toward it.

What marks out the Odyssey as an epic is that it self-consciously challenges this “Iliadic” logic. It poses a heroic paradox: what kind of man can win the immortal memory of his name by going home? The paradox lies in the fact that such a man must exit the stage of heroic action by turning away from a warrior’s destiny and leave the field of glory. So, what is the Odyssean solution? The warrior must become the poet and seize the means of his own representation. Only in this way can the old terms of heroic identity be evacuated and redefined.

But going home is no simple matter either — it is to cross from one distinct terrain of social being over a threshold into another. Each is governed by different laws, different forces and different priorities: one is the world of men, outside, movement, consumption, death; the other the world of women, inside, fixity of household, production, life. In wresting mastery of his own self-narrative from the poet, Odysseus finds the means to forge a new heroic destiny from this crossing of the threshold separating warrior society from the domestic world. But first the heroic slate must be wiped clean.

In the poem Odysseus finds this anonymity when he is washed up on the beach at Scheria. When Nausicaä sees him, the hero is naked and sunburnt, spattered with salt and seaweed, a wild man, almost a caricature. To define “a man” one must first be reduced to degree zero of humanity. It is not without significance that he is then inducted back into the social world by a teenage girl, with the promise of a new wife and household. Her father and mother give him sanctuary and the hero, still nameless, is the guest of honour at a feast. Moved to tears by the local singer’s tale of the Trojan Horse, the host asks him why he is upset.

It is at this point Odysseus himself takes up the song and the hero’s cunning strategy becomes apparent. He refuses to let anyone else tell his story. The recuperation of his heroic identity is not imposed on him by another’s tale, or by the demands of the epic tradition which had dominated Achilles, but rather by taking the reins of narrative himself, he will steer a ship of song toward his own destiny, his song, the Odysseia, the song named for him.

But to do this he must embrace namelessness. This is why the encounter with Polyphemus is so important. The strategy of emptying out his heroic identity also becomes the strategy to overcome loss by returning home. When blind Polyphemus feels Odysseus clinging to the sheep, we think the hero is outsmarted. “Aha! Who is this?” the Cyclops asks. “No one” (outis) comes the reply. “Help help, no one is trying to escape …”, Polyphemus cries. What a masterstroke: in denying himself any name, all at once Odysseus recuperates his heroic fame as the master of cunning. He wins a name by becoming no-name, and distinction is achieved through the negation of distinctness. Only Odysseus could pull this off.

The strategy of Outis (“No One”) disrupts the very ground upon which heroic destiny traditionally depends. Our names after all attract us to a social destiny by strait-jacketing the potentially infinite excess of the individual. To escape destiny Odysseus’s strategy is to refuse a name, to refuse to be so contained. Odysseus says to us: what you are called need not be who you are. Embrace the indeterminacy of language. For the traditional epic hero, however, the proper name restrains this excess. To be Achilles means to be the hero of the Iliad, to be destined to death. Thus, he is summoned toward his destiny by another conspicuous name, Patroklos (“the fame of ancestors”). Achilles might resist this destiny, but he cannot step outside it. Revenge will pull him back to being aristos (the “best”) by means of aristeia (“a display of warrior prowess”). To break loose of destiny Odysseus must risk the loss of fame that “no name” forbodes. It is a wager that pays off.

Nolan’s Odysseus is a successor to Freud’s Oedipus, for whom self-exile comes after the realisation of a terrible crime. Needless to say, this is not how the epic poem ends at all. There are indeed gods, but they are in his head, either as figural limits to what’s possible for the individual or else hallucinations of repressed crime (Athena) which vanish with reconciliation. Nolan isn’t really interested in ancient religion (his Odysseus scoffs at his men’s superstition); to do so one would be forced to acknowledge that Athena was his necessary partner in cunning. To cross the threshold from war to home is a religious journey as much as anything else, but in the film all religion becomes internalised cathexis: not real, but a phantom of guilt’s mind tricks. Where possible it is secularised (as in Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film Troy). Thus, for example, Telemachus’ guide Mentor, a disguised Athena in the epic poem, is reduced to a banal function, the young man’s trainer, and so on it goes. “Defy the gods”, the slogan of the film, nowhere signifies a relation between human and immortal, but rather evokes the advice of the psychoanalyst, or better still, of the motivational speaker. It means here “resolve your internal struggle by letting go”.

Calypso, the seductress, who would, as her name suggests, hide away the hero for herself in immortal oblivion, takes on a very different role in the film. Here she is Odysseus’s psychotherapist, offering a cocktail of medication and life-coaching, encouraging him to undergo some cognitive behaviour therapy — long walks on the beach, build a raft, go with the flow, you’ll achieve your dreams by getting over your hang ups. So, suddenly, Calypso becomes the chief agent of Odysseus’s return in the film. One need only consult the epic to see what contortions Nolan must perform to make his hero return like this. And yet it achieves his purpose: Nolan’s contrite monastic Odysseus treads a path of atonement in which the trickster, the manipulator, the liar, the lover — the very attributes for which epic’s Odysseus achieved his fame — are excised.

One can hear clearly Nolan’s declared reliance on Emily Wilson’s modernised translation, which is controversial from its first line: “Tell me about a complicated man”. Complicated? With one word, drawn from the lexicon of the anxious Freudian subject, the complexity and depth of polytropos is “updated”. What ought polytropos to mean? “Many turns”? “Many paths”? “Full of tropes”? “Shifty”? “Many guises”? Perhaps it defies translation since the entire epic poem is a meditation on human “many-ness”, the polyvalent and polysemic nature of human identity, wrought as it is in language and tale. “Tell me muse about a man, a man with many social media profiles …”

Joking aside, it’s clear that Nolan found in Wilson’s “complicated” the programmatic word for his film. Therapy and confession relieve us of toxic complication, help us overcome our “issues”. Redemption, in the end, comes through simplifying our lives by confronting the truth: we were in the wrong; we were the ravaging “sea-peoples”; I was the criminal responsible for the darkening of our age. Again, the contrition of Odysseus paves the way for his rehabilitation — from what? Nolan’s Odysseus achieves redemption by becoming less complicated, less Odyssean.

In Nolan’s film the hero’s name and identity are certain. Any loss of self never happens on this level, which is precisely where the play of uncertainly takes place in the poem. Instead, Nolan’s is a narrative of modern self-awareness, one long session of analysis in which one is finally drawn to admit error. This requires suppression of a very different trajectory in the poem which involves the recognition of Odysseus by others and the recuperation of identity from narrative itself — a passage from the “No One” (outis) to the “Man” (andra) promised in the first line.

The Odysseus Nolan wants is a psychologically modern subject who undergoes a traumatic dissociation, atones for a crime and shoulders the burden of redeeming his family through self-sacrifice. It is no secret that Nolan explores variations on this theme, from Memento to The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer. Nolan’s film gives us an Odysseus wracked by guilt, who comes to accept that he must move on and get over it.

Tradition, as I said earlier, is about letting go of the past at precisely the moment one sincerely believes one is faithfully passing it on. To modernise the epic one must strip out what is ancient by using cinema’s sleight of hand to conceal that central act. Nolan no doubt sincerely believes he is passing on the tradition, but he must abandon the Homeric Odyssey to do it. The result cannot be THE Odyssey, but something else altogether.

Ben Brown is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. He is co-director of the Critical Antiquities Network.

Hero photo credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/AP/AAP.