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With so many people ready to tear it down, the journey towards the release of The Odyssey, like the tale it tells, felt like an unbelievable, never ending and spirit sapping battle against misguided religiosity, random storms, stupid distractions, voices from a different age, poorly sighted monsters and men who have turned into pigs. How great then that it has been widely celebrated since it came out and that it is making a truly epic amount of money. 

There are still some who are wary of this gift from the Greeks though and it must have been a disappointment for Nolan when Emily Wilson, the woman whose translation he said he was most inspired by, totally slammed it. Mind you, I have long thought that the professionals who are most precious about their area being represented on screen are not doctors, police, teachers or soldiers but classists and Wilson is not changing my mind about this. Her objections seem to be around the lack of sex, which is a change from the source material but also an essential modification, and the absence of emotional depth and characterisation which is a frankly ridiculous criticism. This is not Wilson’s interpretation of The Odyssey though (even though the acknowledgment has sent her sales through the roof) it is Nolan’s and he is telling it in a very different medium and it is the one that he is a master of. This is a film of The Odyssey and it uses the tools of this format to tell this story magnificently. I have read a few of the objections of the movie, both from before it came out and after, and frankly I’ve not come across one that hasn’t made the author look a bit silly. 

To be fair Nolan has made some significant changes which both genuine purists and those that think pretending to be one will make them look clever, were bound to be vocal about. I thought these were all great choices though and what he has done is explicitly make a three thousand year old book totally relevant to a 2026 audience. Before Homer jotted it down this would have been a tale told to entertain the masses and embellishments would I’m sure have been made to suit those listening, Homer was certainly doing the same thing as indeed to some extent was Wilson, so he is just doing with this what has always been done with it.

One of the things Nolan does is make The Odyssey a genuine love story. This was always about a king returning to his queen but on the page this theme it is somewhat undermined by the amount of other women Odysseus sleeps with on the way. Wilson may think this is an important part of the story but leaving it in would have destroyed this element and crucially it would have weakened and undermined the status and characterisation of Penelope. It may not have mattered to the Ancient Greeks but for us to stay on side with this guy, he needs to be faithful to his wife (although some infidelity with Calypso is gently implied). There has been some criticism of the way the women are generally depicted in the movie but Penelope here is a brave, smart and determined person with incredible fortitude. Homer makes it clear that she is Odysseus equal in wiliness and intelligence but with a greater focus on him as a deep and respectful kind of hero then her characterisation has to change to match it and are still the great Ionian power couple. It seems that Nolan’s female characters, as they have long been, are still for some reason best when played by Anne Hathaway. 

Calypso herself is no longer a horny witch but a kind of sage and ultimately selfless woman fighting with her own loneliness and Circe, also originally very keen to get in the sack with this guy, is similarly not an enchanted femme fatale who enjoys making fools of men for her own ends but someone who is scared of male violence, presumably due to experience, and is quick to use her powers to keep herself safe. It is fair to suggest that Athena has become quite passive under Nolan’s interpretation but she plays a particular role here that would have been undermined had she still been the armour clad warrior god, inserting herself into key events. In this context the power and existence of the gods is a little more ambiguous as well so this has affected the portrayal of Athendaya too.

It was always going to be interesting to see how Christopher Nolan dealt with gods and monsters as a director who has typically sought to make any fantastical or outlandish elements in his narratives more grounded. True to form much of these parts are handled in quite a matter of fact way and he is always more interested in showing the strain and loss of each supernatural encounter than the spookiness. This version of The Odyssey is more focused on the tragic than the magic. None of this makes the film any less compelling though, quite the opposite as we are drawn in by what drives the famous protagonist as much as his iconic journey, and similarly none of this steals the story of its set pieces. The best sequence, and the one that takes the greatest significance, is the fall of Troy and this is all about the reality rather than fantasy. 

It might appear that making this is a departure for Christopher Nolan but Greek myths have long informed his work from Ariadne in Inception to the father’s delayed trip home in Interstellar and Oppenheimer’s Promethean endeavours, and finally taking this on directly Nolan has quite simply created another masterpiece of cinema. If you are interested in the craft of film making and care about high-resolution motion picture formats and celluloid over digital recording then this might all get you more excited than the giants and the explosions too.

I accept that Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey might not be for everyone, a friend of mine reported that in his cinema when the cyclops grunted and walked in then one guy tutted and walked out, but once again this director has taken every element of this art form that I adore; performance, editing, music, spectacle, tension, effects, framing, atmosphere and writing, and put it together with almost unfathomable genius. That’s what I care about and I loved it. 

Btw Elon Musk, Lupita Nyong’o is brilliant in this film.