1.
Not Homer’s immortal work: what we see in Nolan’s Odyssey (2026) is a version full of “errors”, “gaps”, “distortions”, “anachronisms”. A mortal, even deadly work. A film that would have murdered the original. At least that is what most quick-fire critics, and even some good specialists in Ancient Greece, are saying –not to mention, of course, the customary noise of prejudiced conservative reaction.
Now, we should not view the film as an attempt to reproduce the work of a Homer petrified by a long tradition of interpretation. On the contrary, the temporal setting of the fictional narrative is that of Odysseus’s living, present reality, centuries before the composition of the epic poem, which changes everything, as we shall see. As though this were not enough, Nolan’s Odyssey became an object of the culture wars even before most of the public had had the opportunity to see the film. Some, including a respected Homeric scholar, maintain that despite a cast chosen with sensitivity to questions of race and gender, the moral universe of the film remains surprisingly traditional: the emotional core of the narrative continues to be the return of the exceptional man, the restoration of the household, and the reconstitution of political order after catastrophe. As though nothing in the original structure had been shaken. Others, with the air of experts, have complained that there is too much “Christian” guilt and almost none of the cunning and “comedy” of Homer’s turns of phrase – for instance, the pun Oútis/oú tís (“Nobody”), whose irony and supposed “joke”, already ambiguous in the original, would be difficult to reconcile with the meaning sought by the film. For conservatives, by contrast, the most superficial departures from the images inherited from tradition, and from the supposed ethnic homogeneity of Homeric Greece, are enough to prove ideological distortion.
Homer himself offers little comfort to either side. The original Odyssey, to begin with, is far from an unambiguous celebration of war and masculine heroism. Time and again, Odysseus survives because women correct him, restrain him, or outwit him. Athena guides him from beginning to end; Circe instructs him; Nausicaa (unfortunately absent from the film) saves him through hospitality, not force; Penelope, finally, subjects him to the poem’s most demanding test of intelligence (an episode likewise excluded from the feature). Whether Nolan preserves this balance or not is a question for criticism, and something quite different from the insipid discussion around “representation”.
The same misconception structures the debate over the portraying of the Greek warriors in the film. Some commentators object that the director paints the victors of Troy as plunderers and sexual predators, as though this image constituted a kind of postmodern deconstruction of the epic’s masculinity. The criticism takes the Homeric version to be a far simpler and more idealized poem than it actually is. And one that continues to offer itself to interpretation in its concrete material details. One of the most remarkable features of Homer’s Odyssey consists precisely in its refusal to allow military victory to appear as its own moral justification. The poem begins when glory has already been exhausted. Troy has fallen; what remains is its aftermath, life exposed before the unknown. The returning armies carry with them not only triumph, but also the spoils of piracy, brutality, devastated homes, broken loyalties, and men already incapable of inhabiting ordinary civic life. Odysseus’s companions repeatedly prove incapable of discipline. They plunder indiscriminately, ignore explicit orders, slaughter Helios’s cattle despite the most solemn prohibitions, threaten and rape women, and sacrifice long-term survival, again and again, to immediate appetite. The suitors who parasitize Ithaca do nothing more than reproduce this same logic within Odysseus’s own household. Violence, as we can see, is the red thread running through the original narrative.
And it is precisely in this context that Circe’s celebrated transformation of the sailors into pigs acquires all its force. The episode is frequently read as a magical interruption of the narrative. Would it not be more fruitful to understand it, as Nolan does, as a diagnosis? Let us begin there. The metamorphosis, the film suggests, reveals what unrestrained appetites had already made more or less visible to the poem’s interpreter. The enchantment does not invent bestiality; it merely unveils it. What emerges from this is a stratum of internalized violence rooted in a natural history that dissolves culture and time, and which the film also seems able to give real dimension through its formal choices: in the strict sexual asceticism of the relationship between the sorceress and her visitors, replaced by the suggestion of the oral voracity that carries the entire scene; in the filthy place, crammed with old things and animals, both penned and roaming free, which function as a mirror of these marauding beings, made regressive by civilization in ruins.
2.
That said, what the original Odyssey already presents is not the corruption of a few unfortunate men, but the decomposition of an entire aristocratic order organized around conquest. The palace economies of the Late Bronze Age depended not only on the agrarian-pastoral oikos, but on warfare, tribute, enslavement, and the circulation of prestige through plunder. (As scholars such as Moses Finley have shown, the Greeks of the period waged wars to obtain resources, above all bronze and iron, so that they could make more weapons and wage more wars, not wishing, moreover, to be confused with mere seafaring trading peoples.) Victory enriched the dominant households even as it corroded the social conditions indispensable to ordinary political life. The nostos, therefore, is more than a private journey home: it dramatizes the attempt to reconstruct domestic and political order within a society whose ruling stratum had been shaped, from beginning to end, by the violence of civilization.
3.
The movie is not a filming of the original work’s twelve thousand verses. From the very first scene of the feature (as well as in the final sequences), the opening verses of the Odyssey appear in a quite different version, as a simple sketch in the voice of a rhapsode (played by the rapper Travis Scott). This is a narrative technique used in Book VIII of the poem, in which Odysseus weeps upon hearing an aoidos recount his own story at the court of King Alcinous –indeed, precisely the episode of the Trojan Horse. Thus, by employing the same technique as Homer’s text, Nolan is telling both the (supposed) historical reality of Odysseus’s present and the story of the construction of the epic itself. A privileged interpretive key, which seems capable of explaining what follows, all the way to an ending completely opposed to the original, in which the king goes into self-imposed exile in the West, fulfilling Tiresias’s words (in Homer, with the purpose of calming Poseidon’s wrath and achieving reconciliation with his fate).
From this perspective, the film reverses the positions of “historical reality” and “epic text” in order to produce a critique of epic form, that is, a critique of the Odyssey as the heroic epic of a devastating war and, already in its own time, as the terrible destiny of a war that led to social collapse. More than this, according to the dialogue of the higher-ranking characters brought into action, it is an irrational and excessive war, in the sense of being contrary to social and religious laws, which Nolan condenses into the laws of hospitality (xenia). In a word, the film takes the materials of its own construction from the Homeric text itself. Within this key, however untimely, a certain notion of guilt and expiation in the archaic mythical sense can indeed enter: only here it is viewed from the interiority of a melancholy or lamenting consciousness before the calamities of Troy’s destruction – which Homer obviously did not “depict” in all their fullness. (Or only indicated through isolated words and numerous implications, brought to the surface through the “epic naivety” of concentrating on the particular and concrete detail, following Adorno’s reading.) An anti-mythical version of war, then. In this way, too, Odysseus’s “education”, and his final self-correction, was not merely his own, as an isolated individual or as a proto-modern “guilty” subjectivity, but also that of his own men, who, in Hades, in an unexpected scene, are resurrected and revolt against him and against the disastrous effects of war as an imagined conscious mass.
The film’s key question, therefore, is not whether to reproduce the original, but whether to break with its original mythical-poetic context and propose a critique of war, a critique of myths (which therefore appear more or less disfigured), a critique of the logic of sacrifice (of animals, men, women, children, the elderly, and the enslaved), a critique of Odysseus’s own cunning. Such cunning, described by Adorno as a “compass of the lesser evil”, collapses in the figure of Athena, killed as an “incarnate child” at the moment of the battles in Troy – a terrible image that stages a veritable “dialectic of enlightenment” in the midst of the Bronze Age, in which strategic intelligence itself (métis) ends up devoured by the instrumental violence and barbarism it helped to bring into being. For only in this way can cunning prevail as an internal moment of reason within this new, ruinous Odysseus.
Hence the peculiar direction of the cast, which many found strange: the restrained acting, without the pathos of superiority and immortal glory (as Slavoj Žižek also noted in his review of the film); the emptying-out of the magical world before the brutal “materialism” of commercial interest, war, and plunder. In an almost Benjaminian gesture, Nolan’s version does not restore Homer’s work; it “mortifies” it. It tears it away from the status of cultural monument, in order to save it and make it appear as historical ruin through a fundamentally allegorical intention.
4.
It is precisely the non-idealized perspective on war that is concealed by the more common epic reading, which we have grown accustomed to praising merely as a “document of culture”, while concealing it as a “document of barbarism” (drawing on Walter Benjamin). A point of view synchronous with the events and “anachronistic” in relation to the original, certainly, but not entirely so, since in Homer himself, as we have suggested and will examine in greater detail, and in later Greek thought – in Plato (Laws, I and VII), Aristotle (Politics, II), or Euripides (The Trojan Women) – we find critiques of war, of its costs and deleterious effects, as well as of the subordination of political life to preparation for war, exemplified by Sparta. Already in the Iliad (II, 211–278) there is an episode in which a marginal “insolent” soldier – violating the norms of speech and hierarchy governing the assembly of the Argives – questions Agamemnon’s greed and the prolongation of the plundering expedition, even proposing mass desertion, an early return home, leaving the already-wealthy king of kings to his own devices. (The dissident speech of the “agitator”, curiously enough, is not refuted with arguments; on the contrary, the narrator mocks his physical appearance, while none other than Odysseus beats him, literally, putting him back in his place, with the general approval of the Achaean chiefs.) In Homer’s Odyssey, by contrast, the perspective changes; the reproach is articulated by a great hero of the aristocracy. In the episode in which they meet in Hades, Achilles expresses his lament and disillusionment with martial glory: “‘Do not try to reconcile me to death, glorious Odysseus. / I would rather be on earth, as another man’s / hired laborer, even as a man without inheritance and without much sustenance, / than rule over all the dead who have died.’” (XI, 488–491). From this it can be seen that Nolan’s untimely point of view is not a gratuitous anachronism and has the right address in the present condition of the world, especially coming from a region of the world with a history and ambitions of empire.
If this is so, it is as though we were seeing the “true” Odysseus on screen, captured through his almost pure material content, probed through an examination of his mind. Hence the exuberance of the cinematography without any intention to glorify (there would be much to say about the film’s opacity and absence of vivid colors, which nevertheless convey a beauty without aura, quite distinct from typical Hollywood aesthetics); hence the exceptional soundtrack, devoid of orchestra and practically without melody, with no trace of the customary heroic themes; hence, too, the much-criticized use of colloquial language, without sacrificing the poetry that emerges from a direct vision of things, from the very down-to-earth atmosphere of certain settings, such as the court of Ithaca and its excessively gloomy palace, and everything almost under the silence of gods who remain absent in form.
For this reason, too, Nolan opens, with particular iconoclastic relish, a series of deliberate gaps and hiatuses between his “real” version and Homer’s “idealized” version of the effects of war, seeking to show those costs and effects less imagined by the epic poem. On his return, it is Odysseus himself who compares the “myth” he has been hearing along the way with his own consciousness, torn apart by having lost so many men, so many years, and himself finally. For Odysseus lived like a dog, like his dog Argos, who is said to have escaped sacrifice at the beginning, but did not escape sacrifice along the journey, merely fleeing a nearly sacrificial death in his final destiny of self-exile. If in Homer’s version it is on Calypso’s island that the nostos intensifies, in Nolan’s realist version it is not only homesickness but also a certain unification of self and history that rises to the surface. Especially after the end of his use of the lotus administered by the divinity, which also allows us to read the entire journey up to that point (more or less as it unfolded at the royal palace of the Phaeacians), including all the magical-fantastical events, as hallucinatory projections of Odysseus’s tortured consciousness and memory of suffering.
In this rereading, the film must initially present an Odysseus who is far more cruel and inclined to dissolve the mythical “many-sided” character (polýtropos –which may also be translated as “many-turning”, that is, one who, having learned to distinguish words from things, deftly handles the various tropes of language) and the almost invariably “benevolent” figure of the original (in Homer, one of his laudatory epithets is “sacker of cities”). The hero in the film also becomes impulsive, makes mistakes, and hesitates.
In the scene with the Cyclops Polyphemus, for example, he does not speak to the giant at all. Nolan also cuts the implausible scene of the men escaping while clinging to the bellies of the sheep. At the end, he shoots the giant for no particular reason, awakening his fury and nearly ruining everything in the ensuing pursuit, losing ships and many sailors. In Homer, by contrast, there is dialogue and the famous question of identity and its denial (“Nobody”), which serves as Odysseus’s stratagem for escaping the island, though not before he reveals his true identity in a fit of hubris. In Nolan, the scene is told much more crudely: this “many-sided” being is so much a “nobody” that he enters into neither commerce nor dialogue, does not even introduce himself or attempt to placate the brutal giant, who in turn becomes another mortal nobody – a pure force, the son of Poseidon, enraged by the visitors’ violence and deception. The suppression of the dialogue was a choice to present this brutal severing of relations.
In the scene with the Laestrygonians, there is no heroism or poetry left, only the terror of retreat, returned as a kind of mirror image to the group of hungry marauders (much less terrifying than the original, incidentally). The same could be said of the lowering of the mythical status of Circe, Calypso, and the Sirens. The images in grand but almost deserted spaces, without the aesthetic of beautiful appearances found in other modern versions (see, for instance, the representative setting of Odysseus on Calypso’s island, at the moment when he has stopped taking his daily dose of lotus), respond to this demystifying narrative program. As Adorno foresaw, the culture industry contains the possibility of contradiction within its products, at the very heart of the relations of production that determine the use to which its productive forces will be put.
The massacre of the suitors, finally, is told from a much bloodier perspective, in which Odysseus and his son nearly perish in battle (or survive thanks to Athena?) – after all, we are still following the enchanted script of the Odyssey, and the film must “deliver” the fury and aura of the epic action film within the rules and dramatic expectations of the spectacle of the film industry. Hence its mortal superficiality in the construction of characters, in performances and dialogue, and above all in the speed of the sequences which – in quintessential Nolan fashion – come and go like a puzzle, imagining the fragmentation of the space of events and of Odysseus’s traumatic memory.
By contrast, if the work truly functions through allegory, distortion, ellipsis, anachronism, and the decapitation of myth are formal procedures necessary for speaking to the “time of now”, to the urgency of present conflicts. The film ceases to function precisely when it follows the original literally and begins to unfold more successfully when it deactivates it, generating what Giorgio Agamben would call its “inoperativity” (inoperosità). In a certain sense, this reaches its apex when we are shown that the sovereign king does not return merely to “restore order”, but at the same time to “abdicate the throne” (temporarily?), wandering like a kind of “living ruin” of the war – the embodied allegory of erased historical trauma.
Here, at the same time, ideology perhaps infiltrates through the universalization of a logic of “lassitude” and “let it be”, or “letting oneself be carried along”, constructed in the scene in which the general finally leaves Calypso’s island – a reason external to, not only the Homeric text (Odysseus in the original prays to the gods, but also speaks with himself, assesses the situation, and acts according to what he considers most appropriate for survival, even when this means disobeying a deity’s instruction, the nostos being achieved through the collaboration of intelligence and fortune, not through the abandonment of the former), but also the film’s own intention, which is, as we have seen, to question automatic, unreflective behavior in relation to war. What was specific and even plausible in its inoperativity becomes here a flaw that deactivates what had already been deactivated (as though aristocratic domination were now governed by the didactic value of pacifism and letting oneself be carried along!), causing the epic illusion of a mythical-symbolic world enclosed within itself by divine instruction to return. (At the same time, as we have seen, he nevertheless fulfills, in his own way, Tiresias’s prophecy.)
In the closing sequence, the self-exile in the West functions, within this hybrid engine of inoperativity and a certain ideology of a withdrawn and benevolent empire, as a transfiguration of this new Odysseus/Homer becoming “Nolan”, who has come to tell us the “real” version of events: the war was a disaster that destroyed everything and everyone at the very beginnings of the West, on the shores of its contact with the East at Troy. A pile of rubble that will be repeated throughout History – as a perfect epic or tragic myth, entirely without gaps – just as it exists in the minds of today’s reactionaries, who dream of remaking Homer through Artificial Intelligence in order to recover a supposedly “historically correct” and “politically pure” version of him.
[This piece was co-written
with Cláudio R. Duarte between July 29 and August 4, 2026. It appeared in
Portuguese, with unjustified editorial changes, on A Terra é Redonda.]