Anyone who directs and completes a film on the scale of The Odyssey deserves respect. Bringing such an undertaking—logistically, technically, financially, artistically—to the screen is an extraordinary achievement; critics like me have an easy job. In the immortal words of the most fearsome and magnificently lugubrious Monsieur Anton Ego: “We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.” But respect for such an achievement does not require consent with the result. A film can be monumental, disciplined, technically immaculate, and still get its central operation wrong. My objection is not that Nolan has failed to reproduce Homer faithfully. It is that he has made Homer too familiar: he turns the strange, duplicitous, violent, and politically awkward Odysseus into a contemporary American hero of trauma, responsibility, moral recovery, and deserved homecoming.  

Where to begin?

Perhaps with Nolan’s decision to embrace the most successful aesthetic style in human history: realism. Or, more precisely, with his idea of what “realistic” means.
The opening scene makes that idea perfectly clear. Odysseus and his men are crammed into the belly of the Trojan Horse, waiting to be hauled into the city. They are shown floating in their own excrement, immersed in a broth of seawater and urine. Fair enough: neither Homer’s epic nor Virgil’s version in the Aeneid presents the horse as a metaphor. But that is precisely the point. One thing is a literary invention. Another is what happens when that invention is translated into film.

Nolan’s commitment to gritty realism is not a minor stylistic choice or an opening provocation. It is the problem that shadows the film from beginning to end—indeed, the principle that defines it. To deprive the material of the reality peculiar to myth, a reality in which gods intervene, appearances change, objects remember, identities are concealed and disclosed, and recognition is not a matter of facial resemblance but of ritual, of risk, and knowledge. A mythic film does not need polished marble, spotless tunics, or the theatrical innocence of old sword-and-sandal epics. But it does need a world in which things are never merely things. Odysseus’ bow is not just a weapon. The marriage bed is not just furniture. The scar is not merely a bodily mark of identification. An island is not a scenic location. These things contain memory, lineage, sovereignty, marriage, loss, and the possibility of return. Nolan tends to muddy that richness. Literally! Everything becomes earthen, windblown, sweat-darkened, granular, wounded, and laboriously grave. That physical density has its place. In Dunkirk, for example, salt water, sand, fuel, metal, panic, and exposed flesh belong inseparably to the historical predicament. But Homer is not a dispatch from the Aegean front. The world of The Odyssey is mobile and porous. Making all of this “believable” by coating it in grime is to mistake dirt for truth. In this sense,  the Trojan Rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail has more gravitas—more truth—than Nolan’s version of Homer’s invention.

And here is the film’s central absurdity, produced by this realism: why does no one recognise Odysseus?! Why do the son, the wife, the servants, and everyone else fail to recognise the man who looks very much like the man who left for Troy twenty years earlier—and who has now returned with the same face, plus some dirt, and a more haunted way of staring into the middle distance? The Homeric answer is not that everyone in Ithaca is implausibly inattentive. Non-recognition belongs to an elaborate economy of concealment and disclosure. Athena changes Odysseus’ appearance. Knowledge is withheld, distributed, tested, and granted. The return has to happen in stages because premature recognition would be politically disastrous. Ithaca is occupied. The suitors are consuming the king’s wealth, courting his wife, and endangering his son. Telemachus must become a son. Penelope must become a judge and tester. Odysseus must become, again, the rightful head of his house. Recognition therefore arrives through signs, not through the crude visual proof of a close-up. Eurycleia knows him by the scar on his leg. Telemachus receives the revelation in a scene structured by Athena’s intervention. Penelope tests him through the secret of the bed built around the living trunk of an olive tree. The bow confirms not only physical ability, but origin, authority, possession, and the restoration of the household. Drain away the divine, ritual, formal, and poetic logic of these scenes while retaining their narrative skeleton, and the skeleton starts to rattle. The audience no longer asks what kind of truth is being ceremonially disclosed, to whom, and at what cost. It asks why Anne Hathaway does not recognise Matt Damon. 

Which brings us to the actors. Oh, the actors. No—strike that: the superstars!

Matt Damon is miscast not because he lacks the weathered face or the professional competence required of a screen Odysseus, but because he remains, too insistently, Matt Damon: a man to whom one has applied dust, beard, leather, and exhaustion. He does not suggest the Homeric polytropos, the many-turning man—dangerous, ingenious, evasive, seductive, a master of lies as well as survival. He suggests an American specialist returning from an especially long assignment. 

Bernthal and Holland, who have found such alert, unforced chemistry in the new Spider-Man film, are here made to seem like emissaries from two incompatible cinematic republics. There, the contrast between Bernthal’s brutal, battered gravity and Holland’s quick, boyish intelligence has a certain voltage: one is a man who seems to have slept in his clothes for a decade and expects violence to arrive before breakfast; the other has the nervous agility, moral embarrassment, and sudden courage of a youth who has not yet learned how much damage the world can do. In The Odyssey, however, this same pair does not harmonize but protrudes. Holland remains recognizably the bright, anxious young man from Queens, only with more curls, while Bernthal, bald and thick-necked beneath what appears to be a costume version of Bronze Age authority—some combination of dark leather, battered metal, straps, wrist-guards, and the ceremonial debris of a production designer’s nightmare—arrives as the Punisher who has taken a wrong turn at the Mediterranean. One waits for him to produce an assault rifle from behind his shield, or to dispatch the suitors in a voice suggesting that he has reviewed their personnel files and found them wanting. The problem is not that a mythic world cannot contain physical menace; Homer’s world is saturated with it. It is that Bernthal brings with him so complete a modern iconography of punitive urban rage that no amount of bronze, salt, soot, or carefully arranged antiquity can quite absorb it. The result is less an ensemble than a collision of franchises. The actor’s familiar force, which elsewhere gives Holland a useful dramatic opposite, here makes both men seem oddly detached from the poem’s human scale: one playing a young American hero in a dark cloak and antique armour, sword at his hip; the other playing the Punisher after a wardrobe consultation with a museum gift shop.

An Art Deco Trojan Horse looms over Jon Bernthal in The Accountant 2. Did Nolan see this and think, “Menelaus!”—then quietly make a few notes on the horse design as well?

“That, precisely,” wrote one colleague, is what is so utterly marvellous about the film: “it’s an American movie written by an American male, featuring what is essentially a contemporary American hero and this is exactly why the movie is any good. – Who cares if Odysseus is any similar to his three thousand years old original self? What is important is that he resonates with whoever watches the film and what he does.” Well. Perhaps. Fidelity to the source? To hell with it. But then—why Homer? Why Odysseus at all? More troubling, though, is the reviewer’s claim that The Odyssey works precisely because it is “an American movie written by an American male, featuring what is essentially a contemporary American hero.” I would put it exactly the other way round: that is why the film does not work. For me, its Americanness—its specifically US-American quality, to be clear—is not an incidental flaw but the film’s central problem.

Why call the man Odysseus rather than Jack, Ethan, or Jason? 

The reviewer’s objection is reasonable enough at first glance. An adaptation need not cling slavishly to some supposedly authentic original. Fidelity is not, in itself, an aesthetic virtue. Homer is hardly a stable point of origin: he is the retrospective name attached to a long oral tradition, and Odysseus had already accumulated innumerable versions, emphases, and ideological uses long before Hollywood got hold of him. The question, then, is not whether a contemporary adaptation should reconstruct “the Homeric Odysseus” as though he belonged behind museum glass. But it does not follow that every updating is therefore persuasive.

The trouble is partly linguistic. These people do not speak as though they inhabit a world of Bronze Age warfare, divine caprice, hereditary kingship, and oral poetry. They speak as though they have wandered in from a gangster movie, a war drama, or one of those American films where every low-voiced sentence must carry the weight of a threat. You half expect them to be chewing gum as they deliver their lines: that slow, pale movement of the jaw suggesting that, even in Ithaca, beneath the bronze, dust, and sea salt, a man’s deepest claim to authority is his ability to make contempt sound casual. True, Homer has plenty of violence, insult, retaliation, command, and wounded male pride. But he also has ceremonial speech, hospitality, grief, prayer, public storytelling, cunning delay, lyric description, social ritual, and the strange, nearly musical dignity of repeated formulae. In Nolan’s hands, that range contracts into a familiar modern masculinity: men speaking in gravelly fragments while the score announces, well in advance, that matters are grave. One gets, in effect, tactical-vest Homer: Odysseus as a traumatised operative, and every conversation as the prelude to an extraction, an ambush, or a revelation accompanied by bass notes.

Again, noone is asking Nolan to excavate Homer or recreate hexameter. Still, that does not settle the question of transformation. If it is completely irrelevant what remains of Odysseus—as long as he “resonates” with a contemporary audience—then why use Homer at all? Why call the man Odysseus rather than Jack, Ethan, Jason, or any other traumatised elite fighter with a family, a guilty conscience, a war behind him, and a mission only he can complete? At that point, Homer becomes a brand. You take the title, the prestige, a few monsters, a suitably ancient atmosphere, and the license to appear culturally serious. Then you tell the story Hollywood wanted to tell anyway.

Of course, Homer’s Odysseus wants to go home. He wants Penelope, Telemachus, Ithaca, rule, and property restored to him. But his return is not therapeutic self-discovery, nor is it a clean story of moral redemption. Odysseus is not simply a suffering father who must pass through hell to get back to his family. He is a man who lies, tests, disguises himself, calculates, instrumentalises others, and finally returns home to stage a massacre. His intelligence is not merely sympathetic competence. It is mētis: cunning, flexibility, tactical evasiveness, a way of dealing with the world through indirection and deceit. He suffers, but he also causes suffering. He is a husband and a readily available lover; a king and a beggar; a storyteller and a liar; a survivor whose homecoming means death for many other people. He does not triumph because his moral integrity is beyond doubt. He triumphs because he survives, because he can calculate, because he can perform another identity, and because the poem grants him the return.

Turn Odysseus into a contemporary American hero and you do not merely misplace a few Homeric details. You press him flat into a moral template Hollywood knows by heart. The cunning, cruel, vulnerable, socially and politically dangerous Odysseus becomes the sovereign protagonist of a familiar tale: a man tested by suffering, purified by endurance, and entitled at last to come home. Every now and then, the film leaves a faint trace of the stranger, harsher figure Homer gave us. You pause briefly over one of Matt Damon’s odd commands—his sudden coldness, his willingness to expend other men, the faintly alarming certainty with which he treats everyone else as material for his own return. For a moment, this is not quite a hero. It is someone more unsettling: an operator, a survivor, perhaps even a menace. But the film quickly covers that disturbance over with the usual apparatus of “realism”: splintering beams, mud-caked faces, ragged breathing, blood on stone, wet rope, flickering firelight, exhausted bodies pressed into darkness. The physical detail does not deepen the character. It sanitises him. It converts moral and political danger into atmospheric grit. What remains is not Homer’s Odysseus, but Matt Damon in a very expensive ordeal: battered, burdened. The question “How are homecoming, sovereignty, violence, and identity entangled?” becomes the much easier question: “Can a fundamentally good man get back to his family?”

The film provides what the contemporary cinema has  ceased to offer: size, seriousness, expense – and a name from the schoolroom that gives the whole exercise a faint odor of the library

The problem, then, is not adaptation as such. It is the invisibility of the adaptation’s own selection process. The film does not present its American form as one interpretation among others. It treats that form as universal. Odysseus appears to be, at bottom, an American hero waiting to be uncovered. But Odysseus is not the ancient prototype of the contemporary American redemption hero. He is stranger, less reliable, less morally reassuring, and more dangerous than that. A successful appropriation would not need to preserve Homer in amber. It would need to preserve something that resists easy contemporary identification: some irritation, some opacity, some difference.

Resonance alone is a weak criterion. Almost any successful popular story produces resonance by letting audiences recognise themselves in familiar forms. Art does not remain alive only by confirming us. It can remain alive by confronting us with figures that refuse to fit our national, moral, or psychological expectations. And if we already know him, the question remains: why does the film still need to be called The Odyssey?

Some of the objections made here have, to be fair, been raised before, if only in passing and usually as reservations within otherwise admiring notices: David Lloyd Dusenbury, writing in Engelsberg Ideas, has objected to the film’s grimly unvaried realism, its uneasy traffic between Homeric enchantment and modern plausibility, and its orchestral displacement of the poem’s own world of singers and song; Daniel W. Drezner has noticed the jolt of its Americanized dialogue, in particular Telemachus’s persistent “Dad.” Yet the criticisms have tended to lie about like loose bits of bronze after a battle, insufficiently gathered into the larger question: whether Nolan’s determination to make Homer grave, immediate, and monumental has not stripped the poem of precisely those formal oddities—disguise, ritual, divine intervention, delayed recognition, the eloquence of things—that make it Homeric.

So where, by Zeus, does the applause come from?

Not, one suspects, because five hundred critics have suddenly become better readers of Homer than the generations before them, or because the public, emerging from the air-conditioned dark, has experienced a collective revival of oral epic. It comes from a conjunction of hungers—commercial, cultural, and perhaps spiritual—which Nolan has learned, more expertly than almost any living director, to satisfy.
The film provides what the contemporary cinema, with its nervous franchises and endlessly replenished universes, has almost ceased to offer: size, seriousness, expense that can be admired without embarrassment, famous faces arranged in an old story, the sea on a scale equal to weather, and a name from the schoolroom that gives the whole exercise a faint odor of the library. One goes to see an enormous picture and comes away with the agreeable impression that one has done something cultural. The multiplex, for an evening, becomes a temple; the popcorn bucket remains in one’s lap, but Homer is on the screen.
That is not a negligible service. The ordinary run of commercial films has taught us to expect less: to settle for the obedient sequel, the tremulous superhero, the digital city being demolished in the background while a familiar property explains itself. Against such shabby abundance, a three-hour spectacle with ships, storms, fathers, sons, wives, swords, islands, gods, and a properly antique title naturally acquires the lustre of a public benefaction. One is grateful before one has decided whether one is moved.

Nolan has become, by now, a kind of assurance policy. His name on a poster tells the public that the spectacle has been inspected for intelligence (Dead End Follies: “a Hollywood director … who never compromises on his artistic vision and dominates box office anyway”). It promises that the money was not entirely foolishly spent, that the machinery is complicated for a reason, and that if some passage is obscure, protracted, or emotionally stiff, this may not be a defect at all but a demand being made upon the spectator. This is the agreeable tyranny of the auteur. A Nolan film enters the world already accompanied by an interpretation. The spectator knows, before the lights go down, that he is in the presence of an important work. If the story is difficult to follow, the difficulty becomes structure. If the characters speak as if their sentences had been machined out of dark metal, the severity becomes mythic. If the film is long, its length is thought of as patience. If the score does not stop, that may be taken for an unremitting seriousness of purpose.
The familiar critical phrases do their quiet work here. One hears of “majestic sweep,” “unprecedented scale,” “a colossal ensemble,” “a trailblazing machine.” These are not false descriptions, exactly. The thing is large; it has a great many people in it; it has been constructed with immense mechanical confidence. But the language of scale has a way of relieving the critic from smaller and more troublesome questions. Do these people speak like people, even mythic people? Does a scene ever find its own temperature? Is the story coherent in the terms the film itself has established? Does Homer’s peculiar mixture of violence, ceremony, comedy, desire, fraud, grief, divinity, and domestic knowledge survive the transfer.

To film the Odyssey is not merely to enter the canon; it is to demand an interview with one of the foundational presences of Western literature

One need not deny Nolan seriousness, ambition, or technical intelligence. He has made large subjects seem commercially viable, and his control of cinematic architecture remains formidable. But there is now something conspicuously self-consecrating in this seriousness. Oppenheimer was already more than a film about a physicist, atomic warfare, and the moral and political entanglements of scientific modernity. It was also a bid for admission to the upper gallery of cinema: Nolan’s argument that he was no longer merely the ingenious maker of time-puzzles, prestige thrillers, and unusually intelligent blockbusters, but an artist capable of taking on History with a capital letter.
His command of flashback, foreflash, and intercut chronology is real. Nolan knows how to string different moments together as wires under tension. A later consequence can alter our understanding of an earlier choice; a recollection can retroactively tilt an entire scene; parallel actions can make causality feel less like a sequence than like a pressure system. In Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer, time is rarely just a line along which events are arranged. It is a device of postponement, revelation, revision, and dread.
But virtuosity has the uncomfortable habit of becoming a mannerism. If each narrative must be broken apart, resequenced, accelerated, cross-cut, and musically swollen before it can be allowed to count as serious, form begins to resemble self-quotation. Oppenheimer occasionally suffered from precisely this ailment. A biographical and political tragedy was subjected to an almost uninterrupted regime of urgency, as if no conversation, thought, committee hearing, or scientific argument could be permitted to occupy its own modest temperature. Nolan does not merely edit in order to tell the story; he edits in order to certify, continuously, the historical importance of telling it.
With Homer, this craving for recognition reaches its most tempting and dangerous expression. To film the Odyssey is not merely to enter the canon; it is to demand an interview with one of the foundational presences of Western literature. The project risks becoming less an adaptation than a ceremony of self-coronation. Nolan appears to want more than to be a successful, technically accomplished, widely admired director. He wants entry into the company of the immortal artists, those whose names cease to belong simply to films and begin to belong to civilization.
The laurel wreath in question is the wreath of the canonical world artist: the filmmaker who has supposedly brought Homer, at last, into the age of IMAX and made him fully adequate to modern grandeur. The arrogance lies not in touching Homer—Homer has been translated, rewritten, travestied, staged, filmed, and remade for millennia—but in supposing that the poem needs Nolan’s weight, technology, and prestige machinery in order to achieve contemporary seriousness. As though the work had been waiting all these centuries for a seventy-millimeter camera before it could become truly large: “Make Odysseus Great Again!”

There is also the simple fact that people are lonely for a public object. So much of contemporary viewing is scattered across rooms, phones, planes, hotel beds, and the small private gulfs between one recommendation and the next. A Nolan release restores, temporarily, an older sort of appointment. One has seen it, or must see it; one has an opinion about the projection, the sound, the casting, the length, the gods, the ending, the degree to which Homer has been respected or modernized. It gives people something to discuss with the mildly inflated earnestness once reserved for a new novel, a presidential debate, or the weather after a hurricane.
The critics are not immune to this pleasure. Indeed, they require it. A large film of apparent consequence creates an occasion for language of consequence. It brings back the old pleasures of judgment: superlatives, comparisons, predictions of endurance, declarations that cinema is alive after all. The film is praised partly because it permits the praise to feel grand.
One reviewer remembers the childish elation of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. The memory is revealing. It is not merely the monsters or the sails or the violent old gods that one wants returned; it is the early sensation that the screen could become a world, huge and shared, and that everyone in the theatre might, for two hours, be looking toward the same impossible horizon. Nolan supplies that sensation in a package sufficiently expensive and solemn to make nostalgia seem like judgment.
The reviews are not necessarily dishonest. A large number of people evidently find the picture vivid, forceful, and emotionally persuasive; others, more cautiously, admire its momentum and visual authority while finding it remote, monochromatic, or oddly undernourished. The professional consensus remains strikingly strong—94 percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and a Metacritic score of 88 based on 63 critics—though Metacritic’s user score is substantially more divided, at 5.6 from more than 3,000 ratings.
What these numbers may finally measure is not simply agreement about the film. They measure the degree to which the film has met a need. Nolan gives the public spectacle without the shame of spectacle; canon without the labor of the canon; ancient grandeur without too much ancient foreignness; feeling without the uneasy vacancy that silence might introduce. He gives us an event, and then supplies the music that tells us, from the first darkened frame to the last, how grateful we ought to be.

Perhaps an adaptation of John Updike’s The Centaur would have been the more logical—and probably the better—project. Updike uses myth to make alienation visible; Nolan, by contrast, seems to use it to dissolve alienation and offer the audience a familiar therapeutic self-description. In The Centaur, Greek mythology is not a reservoir of universally recognisable identities. It does not tell the reader that their ordinary worries have always been the worries of great heroes. Instead, it transforms an ordinary small-town America of the 1940s into something at once elevated and unbearable. Updike’s teacher George Caldwell is not a hero discovering his inner vocation. He is ill, humiliated, financially pressed, ageing, and stuck in a provincial American town. He teaches, suffers, is mocked, and keeps going. Only through the mythic overlay does he become Chiron, the wounded teacher and sacrificial creature of Greek myth. But the mythic overlay does not simply ennoble Caldwell. It sharpens the experience of his damage. Myth does not cancel the everyday; it reveals the full disproportionality of its misery, physicality, and social confinement. The ordinary world does not become consolingly grand. It becomes stranger, harsher, and more difficult to bear.
That is the reverse of the Nolan logic. In Nolan’s film, the strangeness of myth is converted into familiarity. The ancient Odysseus becomes readable as a contemporary man: responsible, traumatised, burdened by guilt, fundamentally decent, and moving toward a morally justified homecoming. American male. Myth no longer says: the present is strange, historically contingent, and perhaps alien even to itself. It says: your contemporary suffering has an ancient, grand, and therefore consoling form. Odysseus is no longer the cunning Homeric hero, but a character into whom he can project himself. Nolan, he says, “understood the assignment”: The Odyssey is a “swashbuckling adventure for people who go to therapy.” The film derives its force from responsibility, impostor syndrome, trauma, sacrifice, and guilt. As a personal description of reception, that is perfectly legitimate. But it describes less an encounter with the Odyssey than a very contemporary American technique of self-reassurance. Myth becomes a mirror. It does not give viewers the experience of a foreign world; it assures them that their own world—with its anxieties about male responsibility, emotional damage, professional overload, and family repair—has always been the real world. A Nolan adaptation of The Centaur could have worked in exactly the opposite direction. The question would not be: how can an ancient myth be made emotionally immediate for a contemporary audience? It would be: what happens when a seemingly banal contemporary life becomes suddenly inaccessible, alien, and monstrous when seen through myth?
Caldwell would be a much more interesting Nolan figure than a therapy-ready Odysseus. He is not a specialist in states of emergency, not a brilliant survivor, not a strategic war hero, and not a man whose lost greatness must be restored at the end. He is a teacher who does not command his own life. He is physically vulnerable, socially exposed, economically dependent, and, in his son’s perception, both larger than life and deeply pathetic.
That could have been a genuine Nolan project. The world of the American small town might have been both realist and mythological without turning mythology into fantasy decoration. The shifts among son, father, memory, and mythic projection could have become an epistemological problem on screen: what exactly are we seeing? An exhausted schoolteacher? Chiron? A son’s memory? A retrospective stylisation of guilt? Nolan’s interest in time, subjective perception, memory, guilt, and nested realities might have found in The Centaur material that required those devices not to inflate spectacle, but to render damaged experience. Myth could have retained its aesthetic function: not as easily consumable cultural capital, but as a disturbance within the present. Put sharply, The Centaur might have been the film in which Nolan could show what myth can still do in cinema when it is not immediately turned into an emotional service industry for contemporary audiences. Alienation here does not simply mean loneliness or a lack of emotional intimacy. It names an experience in which the world no longer seems naturally fitted to us. One’s body, profession, family, town, historical moment, and social expectations all become familiar and strange at once. Updike’s myth creates precisely that double vision. The American small town does not become the home of myth. It becomes uncanny through myth. And, to borrow the language of Dead End Follies, that is why the book is any good.

Nolan’s Odyssey performs the opposite operation. Myth is demythologised through psychologisation. The wandering over the sea becomes a trauma journey. The homecoming becomes the restoration of emotional integrity. Guilt over Troy becomes a burden that opens onto a “righteous path.” The Odyssey is no longer a story about cunning, gods, violence, sovereignty, hospitality, property, desire, identity, and the murderous restoration of order. It becomes an adventure for men who want to recognise themselves somewhere between therapy, family responsibility, and self-doubt.

Image: Kathy and Seedance/Jiameng, using a screenshot from The Odyssey