Christopher Nolan’s trailer for The Odyssey convinced me of one thing almost immediately: I would rather read Homer.
That is not an insult to Nolan, nor is this a review of a film I have not seen. It is simply a reaction to the version of The Odyssey presented by the trailer: enormous landscapes, war, ships, danger, monsters, and the overwhelming scale of modern blockbuster cinema.
It looks impressive. But the more impressive it looked, the more I found myself thinking about everything I love about The Odyssey that cannot easily be made impressive.
The Monsters Are Not Why I Love The Odyssey
Most people who vaguely remember The Odyssey remember the adventures: the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the journey to the Underworld, the dangerous sea, and the long struggle to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War.
All of that is in Homer’s poem. But Homer does something far more interesting than simply following Odysseus from one adventure to the next.
The poem does not even begin with Odysseus.
Its opening books concentrate largely on Ithaca and on his son, Telemachus. Odysseus has been absent for years. His wife Penelope is surrounded by suitors. His son has grown up without him. His household is slowly being consumed by people who no longer believe its master will return.
Before Homer shows us the hero, he shows us the consequences of the hero’s absence.
That changes the meaning of the entire story. The question is not merely whether Odysseus can survive his journey.
The deeper question is whether a man who has been gone for so long can ever truly return to the life he left behind.
A Journey and a Homecoming Are Not the Same Thing
A journey asks where you are going. A homecoming asks whether the person who returns is still the person who originally left.
Odysseus spends ten years fighting at Troy and another ten years trying to return to Ithaca. By the time he arrives, twenty years have passed since his departure.
Simply reaching the island is therefore not enough. He returns in disguise, observes his own household before revealing himself, and gradually has to recover the relationships that once defined him: husband, father, son, king, master of his household.
Odysseus has physically returned before he has socially returned. That distinction is one of the things that makes the poem feel so psychologically modern.
Nowhere is it more painfully clear than in the episode involving his dog, Argos.
Odysseus enters his home disguised as a beggar. Argos, old and neglected, recognizes his master after all those years. Odysseus cannot openly acknowledge him without risking his disguise, and soon afterward Argos dies.
It is one of the smallest scenes in the poem, but also one of the most devastating.
No monster is required. No army is required.
A dog recognizes a man who has been gone for twenty years.
For me, that contains more of The Odyssey than almost any image of a ship being swallowed by the sea.
Odysseus Is Interesting Because He Is Difficult
We have a tendency to flatten ancient heroes into simple figures of courage and strength. Odysseus does not cooperate with that kind of interpretation.
He is brave, certainly, but his defining quality is intelligence.
He lies, disguises himself, manipulates situations, invents identities, and understands when to conceal information and when to reveal it. His cleverness repeatedly saves him, but his pride also creates disasters.
The encounter with the Cyclops is the most obvious example.
Odysseus escapes partly because he refuses to give the Cyclops his real name. He calls himself Nobody, allowing him to manipulate language as effectively as he manipulates the physical situation.
But after escaping, Odysseus cannot resist revealing who he really is. He wants the Cyclops to know the identity of the man who defeated him, and that moment of pride has consequences.
The same intelligence that makes Odysseus extraordinary exists alongside an equally powerful desire to be known.
He repeatedly survives by hiding his identity, yet he also desperately wants that identity to matter.
He wants a name, a reputation, recognition, and eventually the restoration of the life attached to that name.
Odysseus Also Tells His Own Story
There is another aspect of The Odyssey that fascinates me.
Some of the adventures we associate most strongly with the poem are not narrated directly as they happen. Odysseus himself recounts them to the Phaeacians, including the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, and the Underworld.
That does not mean Homer tells us Odysseus is lying about those adventures. He does not.
But it creates a fascinating literary situation: a man famous for intelligence, persuasion, and deception becomes the narrator of his own extraordinary history.
How much of our identity is created by the stories we tell about ourselves?
That question feels remarkably contemporary.
Human beings do this constantly. We remember our lives selectively. We decide which moments mattered. We explain our failures. We give causes to events that may once have felt chaotic.
We slowly transform experience into narrative.
Memory becomes story, and story becomes identity.
Odysseus is not merely travelling home. He is continually explaining who Odysseus is.
Homer’s World Is Obsessed With Hospitality
Even the famous monsters become more interesting when we understand the culture surrounding them.
One of the central social ideas running through The Odyssey is hospitality between host and stranger.
Travelling in the ancient Mediterranean could place a person completely at the mercy of strangers. Hospitality was therefore not simply a matter of politeness. It carried serious social and religious significance.
Again and again, the poem shows us households and societies through the way they treat strangers.
The Cyclops violates those expectations violently. But something equally important is happening in Ithaca.
Penelope’s suitors are guests who have themselves abused hospitality. They occupy Odysseus’s home, consume his food and wealth, pressure his wife, and behave as though the absent man’s household already belongs to them.
The poem therefore keeps asking questions about civilization:
- What does a host owe a stranger?
- What does a guest owe a host?
- What happens when those rules collapse?
- Who belongs inside a home?
These questions are thousands of years old, but they do not feel ancient at all.
The Odyssey Comes After War
There is another reason I prefer Homer’s poem to the adventure promised by the trailer.
The Odyssey is, among many other things, a story about what comes after war.
The Trojan War is already over. The great heroic event has happened. Odysseus has survived it.
And now he wants to go home.
That shift matters.
War may create reputation, but reputation cannot replace a family. Victory cannot replace a home. Glory cannot make twenty lost years return.
This is why the idea of homecoming is so central to the poem.
The Greek tradition even has a word closely associated with this idea: nostos, meaning return or homecoming.
Odysseus spends the poem pursuing nostos, but Homer makes the idea increasingly complicated.
Returning to a geographical location turns out to be much easier than returning to a former life.
Ithaca may still exist.
The question is whether the old Odysseus does.
Why the Nolan Trailer Lost Me
The irony is that Christopher Nolan may actually be extremely well suited to this material.
His films frequently deal with time, memory, identity, and complicated structures of storytelling. Those concerns exist throughout The Odyssey.
So I am not claiming that Nolan has misunderstood Homer. I cannot make that claim because I have not seen the film. The finished movie may explore precisely the ideas that interest me.
My reaction is narrower than that.
The version of The Odyssey that can most easily be sold in a trailer is simply not the version of The Odyssey that interests me most.
A trailer can show me the Cyclops. It can show me the sea. It can show me ancient armies, ships, costumes, and enormous landscapes.
But the thing I love about The Odyssey is harder to put into a two minute advertisement.
It is the uncertainty surrounding identity. It is the melancholy of returning. It is a man standing inside a world that once belonged to him and realizing that time continued moving while he was gone.
Cinema Gives Us an Image. Literature Leaves a Space.
This may ultimately be the biggest reason I want to stay with the book.
Cinema has to show me things.
The Cyclops needs a body. Ithaca needs a landscape. Odysseus needs a face. The Sirens must sound like something. The sea must look like something.
Literature works differently.
Homer gives us language, but the final image happens somewhere inside the reader.
My Ithaca remains partly imaginary. My Odysseus does not have one permanent face. My sea is built from Homer, memory, paintings, history, and whatever else my imagination happens to bring to the poem.
There is something intimate about that incompleteness.
A film necessarily completes much of it for me.
For many people, that is the pleasure of adaptation. For me, with The Odyssey, it is precisely what I would rather avoid.
I Would Rather Keep Homer Unfinished
So no, I do not think Christopher Nolan should leave Homer alone. That would be a ridiculous position.
The Odyssey itself comes from an ancient tradition of storytelling and performance. It has survived precisely because generation after generation has translated it, performed it, interpreted it, and transformed it.
Nolan has every right to make his Odyssey.
I simply do not feel any need to replace mine with his.
Because the Odyssey that matters to me is not ultimately about how frightening the Cyclops looks, how enormous the sea appears, or how convincingly ancient Greece can be reconstructed on an IMAX screen.
It is about something much smaller.
A person leaves home. Years pass. The world changes. He changes. Eventually he returns to the place he has spent years dreaming about, only to discover that arriving home and recovering what was lost are not the same thing.
That is the Odyssey I want to keep.
The monsters are memorable. The mythology is magnificent. The adventures have survived for thousands of years.
But beneath all of it is one painfully ordinary human question:
After everything that has happened to us, can we ever truly go home again?
For now, I would rather let Homer answer it.
Leave a comment