Why The Odyssey Still Calls Us Home - On Christopher Nolan, Homer, and the oldest road movie in Western literature
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| Torso of a Warrior -Samos (Greece), sanctuary of Hera, around 530 BC, Altes Museum, Berlin |
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey apparently broke its first record before the film's official release, with the trailer viewed 121 million times (and counting). Although Empire described the project as the epic to end all epics, it feels less like an announcement and more like a recurrence:
"For his 13th feature film as writer-director, Nolan is going back to where it all began – Homer’s epic Greek poem, one of the earliest stories in human history, a sprawling tale that sees Odysseus (here played by Matt Damon) make a decade-spanning journey home to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), in the wake of the Trojan War, enduring unimaginable trials along the way."
Homer’s epic is one of the most influential stories ever told. It has crossed centuries, languages, and media, reinventing itself whenever a culture felt ready to listen again. Nolan's epic cinematic production may simply be the latest shore on which it lands.
Authorship, orality, and the nature of the epic
The Odyssey is conventionally attributed to Homer - as we've already discussed, a somewhat difficult attribution to begin with. The so-called author figure embodies more of a problem than a solution. These days, ancient biography, modern philology, and oral-poetry studies converge on one point. The epic we know today is the product of a long oral tradition, shaped by performance, repetition, and collective memory.
"Initially, these were sung poems", as classicist Dr. Emily Hauser puts it on The Ancients. And those were "composed in performance". Bards, or as the ancient Greeks called them, aoidoi, would have recited the epic tales, stitching them together every time they performed for an audience.
This background has significant consequences. Even as the poem was written down - between the 8th and the 6th century BCE -, its language remains formulaic, rhythmic, and highly conventionalized. As such, the written version still reflects the compositional necessity within an oral culture. Here, repetition, type-scenes, and fixed epithets are not aesthetic redundancies but structural features that stabilize meaning for a listening audience.
From heroic violence to human endurance
The poem presupposes familiarity: its listeners already know the Trojan War, the heroes, and the gods. Innovation lies not in inventing new material, but in reorganizing inherited myth into a coherent and compelling narrative that centres around the cunning Odysseus, king of Ithaca. His grueling ten-year journey home following the Trojan War constitutes the poem’s main plot. However, unlike the Iliad (the story about the Trojan War), whose thematic core is martial excellence, strength, and heroic rage, the Odyssey is oriented toward survival, adaptability, and return.
This already becomes clear in the first lines of the epic as The Odyssey focuses on a "man of twists and turns". Odysseus is not defined primarily by physical prowess, but by intelligence (mētis), verbal dexterity, and psychological resilience - which is also demonstrated, for example, in Book 21. The hero of the epic knows he is unable to overpower Polyphemus, and even if he were able to do so, he would not be able to move the boulder from the door. Thus, he schemes around his disadvantage in physical strength.
The epic thus marks a significant shift within early Greek epic poetry: from the public values of the battlefield to the more ambiguous terrain of individual experience. Where Achilles in the Iliad embodies martial excellence and heroic rage, Odysseus survives by negotiation, deception, and self-restraint - a different heroic ideal, one better suited to a world beyond the battlefield.
Epic Returns?
Formally, the poem consists of twenty-four books composed in dactylic hexameter, the traditional meter of Greek epic. Its narrative structure is strikingly complex. Rather than recounting events chronologically, the Odyssey begins in medias res, with Odysseus already stranded on the island of Calypso. Earlier adventures—such as the encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus or the descent into the underworld—are recounted retrospectively in Odysseus’ own voice. This technique not only heightens suspense but also foregrounds storytelling itself as a central theme. Odysseus is not merely a hero; he is also a narrator, capable of shaping his own past through language. Such narrative self-consciousness is exceptional for so early a work and testifies to the maturity of the epic tradition from which it emerges.
One of the central thematic concerns of the Odyssey is nostos, the return home. Home, however, is not a static or guaranteed state. Ithaca, during Odysseus’ absence, is threatened from within by the suitors who consume his wealth and court his wife Penelope. Penelope’s famous strategy of delaying remarriage through the endless weaving and unweaving of a shroud mirrors Odysseus’ own reliance on intelligence rather than force.
Meanwhile, their son Telemachus embarks on a journey of his own, seeking knowledge of his father and his place within the social order. The Odyssey thus intertwines multiple narratives of maturation, recognition, and continuity across generations. The hero's homecoming, however, becomes not a triumphant conclusion but a complex process of recognition, testing, and reintegration - an aspect of the epic poem that Umberto Pasolini's The Return (2024) focused on.
Instead of dramatising Odysseus' encounters with Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, and the gods, the film begins with the arrival of the main character at home. Instead of the triumphant warrior and ingenious adventurer, Fines plays Odysseus as a physically scarred, isolated, and psychologically paralysed veteran. He does not immediately announce his identity because returning to Ithaca requires him to confront both the violence he committed and the family he abandoned.
While the poetic Greek version suggests Odysseus' delay is largely explained through divine hostility and supernatural forces, Parsolini removes the fantastical elements, implying the hero of the Trojan War may partly have avoided returning. His delayed homecoming, therefore, has further psychological and ethical dimensions. Instead of being prevented from reaching Ithaca, he is afraid of what homecoming will expose as the character carries the destructive effects of 10 years spent committing violence with him. He fears showing Penelope what he has become.
As Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian: "The Return is an elementally violent movie about PTSD, survivor guilt, abandonment, Freudian dysfunction and ruined masculinity. Juliette Binoche is the deserted queen Penelope, enigmatically reserving her opinions and dignity, refusing to believe the absent king is dead and declining to remarry as the island descends into lawlessness without a clear successor. Ralph Fiennes is Odysseus, enigmatically washed ashore semi-conscious in a way we associate in fact with late Shakespeare rather than Homer; he is reluctant to reveal himself, maybe through shame at having not returned before, at returning now in chaotic poverty and isolation and overwhelmed with his secret knowledge that the glories of war are a shameful delusion."
Divine agency and human responsibility
The gods in The Odyssey are omnipresent, yet they do not eliminate moral agency. Athena supports Odysseus, Poseidon obstructs him, but neither determines his character. The poem repeatedly stages moments in which divine influence intersects with human choice. Odysseus’ defining trait is not divine favor, but his capacity to navigate uncertainty—often through deception, disguise, and narrative self-fashioning.
Encounters with figures such as Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, and Calypso are therefore best read not merely as episodes of adventure, but as ethical and psychological tests. Each offers an alternative to return: knowledge without responsibility, pleasure without memory, immortality without belonging. Odysseus’ refusals define the poem’s implicit anthropology: a human life gains meaning not through transcendence, but through limits.
Closely connected is the problem of identity. Throughout the poem, Odysseus repeatedly conceals his name, most famously when he identifies himself as “Nobody” to the Cyclops. Names, in the Odyssey, are not mere labels but markers of social existence. To be unnamed is to exist outside the human community; to reclaim one’s name is to reclaim one’s place within society. The climactic recognition scenes—between Odysseus and Penelope, Odysseus and his father Laertes—are therefore not simply emotional moments but acts of social and symbolic restoration.
A far cry from the Ulysses reimagined by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the 19th century - "one of the few Victorian poems to excite almost universal admiration" (Pettigrew, 1963). His hero was "made weak by time and fate, but strong in will // To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." In fact, Odysseus's Victorian alter ego is so unyielding that he declares that there is little point in his staying at home "by his still hearth". After years of travel and war, he finds ordinary kingship empty and unfulfilling. Feeling disconnected from his people, whom he considers primitive and unambitious, he longs to explore the world. As such, the poem "commences just as the inner tension between Ulysses' duty to his country and a higher obligation to himself is being resolved" (Mitchell 1964)
Telemachus is capable of governing through patience and gradual reform. Ulysses believes that he will “make mild / A rugged people” and lead them towards order and obedience. Unlike his father, Telemachus is “centred in the sphere / Of common duties,” which emphasizes his stability, discipline, and acceptance of domestic and political responsibility.
At the same time, Ulysses’ description sounds faintly condescending. The phrase “common duties” distinguishes Telemachus’ quiet, responsible life from Ulysses’ heroic ideal of struggle, travel, and discovery. The final statement, “He works his work, I mine,” clearly separates their identities and values. Telemachus belongs to the settled world of duty and continuity, whereas Ulysses identifies himself with action and exploration.
By leaving “the sceptre and the isle” to Telemachus, Ulysses ensures that Ithaca will be governed, but he also avoids the responsibilities of kingship.
Beyond its narrative and thematic richness, the OG-Odyssey functioned in antiquity as a cultural reference text. It offered models of hospitality (xenia), leadership, family structure, and religious practice. For Greek audiences, it was not merely a story but a form of cultural memory, encoding shared values and social norms. Its influence extended far beyond Greece, shaping Roman epic—most notably Vergil’s Aeneid—and leaving a lasting imprint on medieval, early modern, and modern literature.
The Odyssey's enduring appeal lies in its profoundly human perspective. Odysseus is neither flawless nor purely heroic; he is capable of arrogance, deception, and error. Yet it is precisely this complexity that allows the poem to speak across centuries. The Odyssey is an epic of adventure, but more than that, it's a meditation on survival after catastrophe, on the difficulty of returning to ordinary life after extraordinary experiences, and on the fragile structures that hold human communities together. For these reasons, it remains one of the most influential and resonant works of world literature.
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