I’m not sure it’s possible to “spoil” the Odyssey which was written almost 3000 years ago, but if you haven’t yet seen the Nolan film and have somehow missed the “culture war” controversies led by conservative critics, you might want to skip this post until you’ve seen the film. Is it a good movie? Yes. Is it as good as Homer’s Odyssey? No. Are Nolan’s choices a reflection of thoughtfulness, scholarship, and making ancient themes relevant to a modern audience? It’s a mixed bag. Are conservative critiques of the movie extremely dumb? Yes–mostly they are very, very dumb and also racist. But these are not old arguments, and there is always a tension present in theater and literature between the original context of the work and how a modern audience reacts to it or updates it to make new points.

First, let’s unbox the critiques that the film is “woke.” The evidence for this critique:

  • A diverse cast
  • Modern psychological themes
  • Altered moral framework
  • Ideological messaging

Diverse Casting

The most basic outrage has been pointed at the casting of Lupita (who is black) as Helen of Troy. This seems to be saying that the “most beautiful woman in the world” can’t possibly have dark skin. The Odyssey does refer to Helen as “white-armed” meaning she was high born and did not work outdoors. Later poets like Sappho describe her as golden-haired. However, she is a demi-goddess, daughter of Zeus (in the form of a swan) and human Leda. She is not a real person. Likewise, Sinon (portrayed by Elliot Page) is not a historical figure, and he also doesn’t appear in Homer’s Odyssey. He appears in Virgil’s Aeneid and performs the role portrays for him in the Odyssey. The outrage about Page is that he is trans. Nolan likes to work with the same actos over and over, and the multi-award-nominated Page has worked with Nolan before. I haven’t heard any criticism of the fact that one of Matt Damon’s main stunt doubles is a woman, nor the fact that Damon is from Boston and not Greece.

Theater frequently uses a more diverse cast than would have been portrayed in the original context, and this allows an audience to see themselves in the characters, but it also points to the text as standing on its own merit, not needing to be “literal.” Last summer I saw a fantastic portrayal of Julius Caesar at Oregon Shakespeare with an all female and non-binary cast. Some wore togas and Marc Anthony was literally in a track suit. The words of the text were still the focus. And of course, we all know that in Shakespeare’s day only men were allowed to perform on stage, so boys were cast in the female roles. I heard a similar (and unfathomable) critique of Hamilton–that it wasn’t “accurate” to have a diverse cast. If that’s your view, I guess go see 1776, another great musical about the founding fathers. I’ve blogged about diverse casting choices in theater in 2024.

I also coincidentally went to see Hadestown the Musical this weekend, and it would be silly to critique it on the basis that ancient Greeks didn’t go around singing blues music, or that Hermes wasn’t a black man. Actors are acting. They don’t have to be type-cast for the story to be relevant. I consider the critiques about diverse casting to be mostly fueled by racism and ignorance, but if people feel that way, I guess enjoy your limited entertainment choices. I understand Kid Rock concerts are apparently all the rage in some circles.

Modern Psychological Themes

Nolan’s version of the Odyssey shows a main character who is wracked by guilt and trauma and who would agree with Hawkeye Pierce that “war is hell.” That’s not Homer’s Odyssey. Does it add to the character, making him a richer more complex man, or does it flatten him into a modern trope? Personally, I think it’s too convenient to portray him in this way. Homer’s character is much more complex than Nolan’s. Nolan’s Odysseus could be one of the Avengers. I’m fine with modernizing a character to understand themes better, but I’m not as impressed when that modern version is less interesting than the original.

I didn’t hear anyone really making this complaint, but it was one of my own. In Nolan’s Odyssey, the Gods are not literal gods. They are mostly psychological phenomenon–hallucinations born from guilt, puffs of wind, the warmth of sun, etc. Nolan gives us something that feels uniquely modern; a world in which the monsters are real, but the gods are figments of our imagination. Odysseus refers to the gods as being real, but Nolan leaves plenty of room for doubt.

Even the powerful Circe is reduced to a bitter feminist, fighting the patriarchy by literally turning men into the pigs they always were. Homer’s Circe is dangerous, beautiful and powerful, starting as a threat, but eventually deciding to aid Odysseus after a year-long consensual affair and thanks to the intervention of god Hermes. Nolan’s Circe is tricked by his heroic Odysseus who doesn’t need any gods to help him because he’s just that good. Of course, we are supposed to believe that a powerful goddess is going to cave to the demands of a mere mortal just because he’s threatened the sister that she already turned into a raven. Whatever you say, Nolan. (And I do think her “feminist rant” was actually played as a trick to deceive the men into thinking she was not a threat, so it wasn’t straightforward, but she later seems like a beleaguered menopausal woman reduced to bartering with a man).

Changed Moral Framework

Nolan’s Odyssey is also portrayed as faithful to his wife who is also faithful to him. Modern audiences like this trope, and it’s very familiar, but it’s not true to the text. While it’s hinted that he’s in a sexual relationship with Calypso, he’s exonerated by being under the influence of the lotus flowers she’s giving him. In Homer’s text, Calypso is a goddess who has enslaved him for seven years, and they have a sexual relationship. She is livid when Zeus demands she release her boy toy because the male gods are allowed to have sex slaves. The lotus eaters are from a different part of the Odyssey and have nothing to do with his time with Calypso.

We also see another trope that makes me roll my eyes every time, although the Odyssey includes this one as well. I call this the “must love dogs” trope, when we can shortcut whether a character is good or bad based on how they interact with dogs. If dogs don’t like them, we know we should also dislike them. If they treat dogs well, they are trustworthy. In Homer’s Odyssey, Argus remains loyal to Odysseus despite decades apart, but Odysseus must ignore his dying dog and walk past him without saying goodbye to protect his identity. Nolan knows a modern audience would never forgive this, so he makes sure Matt Damon gets to say goodbye to his beloved dog, revealing himself to his son Telemachus. That dog is given more depth and screen time than Helen of Troy.

One of the most disturbing things Odysseus does in Homer’s poem is slaughter the enslaved women who’ve been raped by his wife’s suitors while he’s been on his voyage. In the poem, he does not dither over how willing they were in their “relationships” with the suitors–they must share the fate of the evil suitors who raped them. He instructs his son Telemachus to hack them to death, but Telemachus instead hangs them in the courtyard, a much more ignominious death. Obviously nobody wants to see our beloved Matt Damon and Tom Holland act in such morally compromised ways right at the end of the film. Instead, Nolan nods to this act by having Penelope (giving her more agency) shut out her serving woman who she has discovered has been actively conspiring against them. Melantho, Penelope’s trusted servant, has been conspiring with the main villainous (scene-chewing) Antinous, who kicks Argos the dog, and she is locked in with the suitors who face their death at the hands of Odysseus and Telemachus. We don’t actually see her fate because as the modern audience we are, we know she didn’t really have a lot of great choices here once Antinous set his sights on her. We also don’t see her kicking the dog, so she’s morally gray.

Ideological Messaging

Conservative commentators often complain that Hollywood uses classics as vehicles for contemporary political or social messages. Interestingly, back to Hadestown the Musical, there were some who complained that it’s a direct critique of Trump. They referred to the banger “Why We Build the Wall,” which refers to Hades’ oversight of the dead souls in the underworld that he has enslaved in industrial projects, telling them that they are free, when they are actually his enslaved workers. It’s an anti-capitalist theme, for sure, but the song was written in 2006, before Trump’s political rise, and before his slogan of “Build the Wall” was in the zeitgeist.

Likewise, one can complain about any modern retelling of a classic story if the retelling does these things:

  • reinterpreting foundational Western texts
  • changing characters to reflect cultural debates
  • judging ancient societies through modern moral frameworks

But of course, any retelling of a work of literature or theater is going to be imbued with the interpretation of the contemporary director or actors.

There were a few who complained about not using “ancient-sounding” language, instead including words like “dad,” but this is such a silly one (IMO) that I almost didn’t mention it. Ancient Greek is not the same thing as KJV or Shakespearean English, but for some reason, modern English speakers sometimes conflate the idea that anything ancient should sound like that. Insert eye-roll here.

These arguments are not unique to the Odyssey. I have at times been a member of JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America), and there are always tradition vs. modernization arguments in that group. Likewise, seeing modern productions of Shakespearean plays often brings up the questionable morality of the past, misogyny, sexual violence, slavery, racism, and other elements that don’t wear well, alienating modern audiences. Homer’s Odyssey was not written to be a black and white hero. He was complicated in his day. In Nolan’s telling, he is less interesting, less complicated, but still entertaining.

A great Homeric scholar, Emily Wilson, had a little fun with this argument, talking about how Nolan’s Odyssey was really a commentary about modern-day LA.

In a more serious vein, Wilson sums up her critique of the film with some very salient points:

It’s a fun action movie….Adaptations can do whatever the creators want with the source material, and in many cases, the more they diverge from or push back against the original, the better. It’s also totally fine to use American actors and a diverse cast. The costumes/ armor/boats are a mess, but who cares? Homer is also a mishmash… It’s less fine to waste your expensive diverse cast by terrible screen-writing, giving them zero convincing characterization or attempt to make us care about the relationships, and tokenism.

Adaptations are often most successful when they make clear, courageous choices about what to leave out – so, for instance, the movie “The Return” seems to me both a much more radical departure from the original source, and also a more successful film. Nolan tries to pack a lot of Incidents and Big Ideas into this film, but they do not seem to me to hang together coherently on the level of his own plot and the movie’s constructed system of values. Instead, it’s foisting a didactic point about Our Times onto the plot without integrating it. The film centers Odysseus’s guilt over his war crimes, but never shows us the POV of his victims, and instead glorifies the perpetrator for feeling bad about himself. I found this unsatisfying ethically and worse, imaginatively, because Damon’s character is given only one mood (Troubled).

Whatever one thinks of the film as a work of art, it’s doing some good in the world, by generating big conversations, bringing new audiences to the cinema, and new readers to ancient literature. I hope it helps save the humanities.

  • What do you think of the Odyssey and modern adaptations in general?
  • Do you enjoy adaptations that are more traditional or that deviate? What types of deviations do you like?
  • Are you irritated by some of these same modern themes applied to classics or do you think they make them more relevant?
  • Do you ever read fan fic as a way to explore a beloved classic?

Discuss.