Why The Odyssey Still Calls Us Home - On Christopher Nolan, Homer, and the oldest road movie in Western literature

Torso of a Warrior -Samos (Greece), sanctuary of Hera, around 530 BC, Altes Museum, Berlin

Christopher Nolans The Odyssey apparently broke its first record before the film's offical 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 more of 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, in the wake of the Trojan War, enduring unimaginable trials along the way." 

Homer’s epic has always returned. 

It has crossed centuries, languages, and media, reinventing itself whenever a culture felt ready to listen again. Epic cinematic productions may be 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. As 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 is the product of a long oral tradition, shaped by performance, repetition, and collective memory. Its language—formulaic, rhythmic, and highly conventionalized—reflects not literary naïveté but compositional necessity within an oral culture.

This background has significant interpretive consequences. Repetition, type-scenes, and fixed epithets are not aesthetic redundancies but structural features that stabilize meaning for a listening audience. 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.

From heroic violence to human endurance

At the narrative center of the story stands Odysseus, king of Ithaca, whose ten-year journey home following the Trojan War constitutes the poem’s main plot. 

In contrast to the Iliad - the story about the Trojan War -, whose thematic core is martial excellence, strength and heroic rage, 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 Ilias 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 Retruns?

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 Odyssee 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 Odyssee 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 Odyssee 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. 

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 Binocheis 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 Odyssee, 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 centruy, who was "made weak by time and fate, but strong in will // To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." In fact, Odysseus Victorian alter ego is so unyielding that he declares that there is little point in his staying at home "by his still hearth". He "cannot rest from travel" and feels compelled to live life to the fullest, explore new shores. His travels have exposed him to different experiences, peoples, and ways of living which shaped or re-shaped his identity: "I am part of all that I have met." Thus, instead of staying taking on responsibility for his people, he delegates: "This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle."

An Ancient Ideal off the Battlefield?

Beyond its narrative and thematic richness, the Odyssee 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 Aeneis—and leaving a lasting imprint on medieval, early modern, and modern literature.

In its enduring appeal, the Odyssee 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 Odyssee 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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More about Anient Greek Literature:

• The Birth of Literature: When Stories Were Still Made of Air—And Why Homer Probably Never Existed