Harvard classicists size up Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

In Homer’s “The Odyssey,” the gods have their hands in just about everything. Athena, Poseidon, Zeus, and even Hermes are recurring characters who take turns guiding, thwarting, and capsizing the story’s hero.

Not so in Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film adaptation, where the only Olympian to appear is, arguably, a figment of Odysseus’ traumatized mind.

For Emily Greenwood, James F. Rothenberg Professor of the Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature, omitting the gods makes sense, as it gives Matt Damon’s Odysseus space to wrestle with the consequences of his own actions.

“To me, that’s a decision that Nolan has taken to enable us, or to enable himself, to think about moral responsibility, and the moral responsibility of the protagonists of the civilization within the poem,” Greenwood told an audience packed into Fong Auditorium.

But David F. Elmer, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, wasn’t convinced the change had worked. It results in some scenes feeling contradictory, such as when Calypso (Charlize Theron) tells Odysseus he can’t control his own fate, urging him to “give up the fight, give up control.”

“What are you giving up control to?” Elmer asked. “In a world where there are no real gods, shouldn’t the actual response be, in a more existentialist way, ‘take control,’ ‘own your agency,’ ‘define what your values are’?”

At an October 13 event, Elmer and Greenwood discussed Nolan’s July IMAX release with Jie Li, Ford Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies. The literature professors took turns assessing how the film adapts the ancient epic, with notable omissions and additions. Robin Kelsey, interim director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, moderated the conversation, which was co-sponsored by the Department of the Classics and Center for Hellenic Studies.

Nolan’s version cuts other prominent features of Homer’s poem, including Odysseus’ more violent nature, as well as memorable scenes like his visit to the Phaeacians. But this is to be expected, the panelists agreed.

“You simply can’t condense the entire poem into even a three-hour film,” Elmer said.

All three seemed perplexed that the verbal dexterity for which Odysseus is renowned wasn’t on display, with Damon’s character embodying the strong, silent type. Even in the cyclops scene, which, as Elmer pointed out, traditionally hinges on clever wordplay, Odysseus was given no lines.

Greenwood found this change “mind-boggling,” especially given all the contemporary adaptations featuring an eloquent Odysseus, including Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” (2004), Uberto Pasolini’s “The Return” (2024), and even Madeline Miller’s novel “Circe” (2018).

“It seems like a deliberate choice, but I don’t know what the gain is,” Greenwood said.

However, Greenwood suggested some of what appears to be “missing” from the film has been presented with subtlety. The film may not show Odysseus in the land of the Phaeacians, where he weeps when a bard’s song causes him to remember the Trojan War. But, Greenwood continued, the film conveys Odysseus’ feelings of trauma and guilt in other ways, including his visions of Athena, who bears the face of a Trojan woman killed in the war.

“There are lots of mergers like that, where I think Nolan has been quite inventive and is thinking diffusely about his affective response to the whole of the poem, when he’s subtitling different scenes and putting material in different places,” Greenwood said.

Elmer said that the interpretation of Odysseus as a traumatized war vet is emphasized in the film far more than in Homer’s text. But, he said, this interpretation is still accurate. Certain moments in the poem, like in Book 24 when Athena has to restrain Odysseus from killing the fathers of suitors he has already killed in Ithaca, hint at the character’s inability to leave war in the past.

“I don’t think Greeks of the period in which this text was formed had a real vocabulary to be thinking about traumatic memories and post-traumatic stress,” Elmer said. “But it is true that the poem is very deeply interested in how to process difficult memories, how to adjust to or re-enter an environment in the aftermath of a difficult experience. I think it’s reasonable and true to the text to find these meanings there.”

Greenwood noted that Robert Fagles used the word “veteran” to describe Odysseus in his 1996 translation, as did Emily Wilson in 2017. She said it’s a common interpretation of the ancient poem among contemporary Americans.

“‘The Odyssey’ has become a key text for thinking about the homecoming experience of the veteran community, particularly in this country after the Korean wars, after America’s war in Vietnam, after the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan wars, and continuing in the present day,” Greenwood said.

Li observed that the film frames Odysseus as a perpetrator through scenes like the one where his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), realizes that he and his men are the mysterious “people from the sea,” marauders she had feared would arrive to raid Ithaca.

Li also said she found the cinematic treatment of this scene moving.

“The recognition is not of someone innocent, but of someone guilty,” Li said. “Usually we weep for the innocent, but this is the moment of the recognition of Odysseus’ guilt, a sense of complicity. I found that equally — if not more — moving than the recognition of someone innocent.”

Greenwood said regardless of viewers’ feelings about the faithfulness of the adaptation, the film offers an opportunity for increased engagement and dialogue with antiquity.

“I think it’s very important for us as classicists to take a work like Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ as a work of adaptation that is aiming to produce new relations with antiquity and not to think about it in overly deferential terms, or in terms of fidelity or accuracy,” Greenwood said.