A Time Neither Wrong nor Right
Nolan’s epic adaptation of the Odyssey missed its chance to learn something from the past by wallowing in despair about the present.
By Mikayla Carlowicz
Most people expect that, as a Classics PhD student, I must hate films set in the ancient world. Actually, I love them. Percy Jackson and Gladiator brought me into the classics classroom, and I’ve twice taught a seminar on these films. So naturally I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey on opening weekend. I expected at best a new favorite, and, at worst, an interesting thought piece. I left unsettled. Disappointed. More than anything, I left sad.
Nolan’s films always include a twist, a third-act revelation that forces viewers to reevaluate everything that came before. Difficult to pull off for a three-thousand-year-old story, but the Odyssey manages it. As the climax approaches, Nolan’s Odysseus (Matt Damon) accepts that he doesn’t really want to make it home. This man, who plucks his bow to warn prey of his presence, regrets breaking “the law of Zeus” by offering the Trojans a gift, then using it to destroy them. Scattered references to raiders whose invasions herald a dark age focalize into Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) pained realization that “you’re the people of the sea.” The Greeks, in destroying Troy, have begun the collapse of civilization. Odysseus would rather face cannibalistic cyclopes and insane witches than see his actions, inevitably, leave his beloved home ruined.
Though it reminded me of an undergraduate showing off that they did the extra readings, the twist made me smile. The thirteenth-century BCE Tawagalawa letter provides historical evidence for Bronze Age Greeks engaging in “hostile” behavior in the area of Troy, and archeological evidence points to whole cities being razed. Still, the exact identify of the “sea peoples,” and how much they contributed to the phenomenon known as the Bronze Age Collapse, remains under scholarly debate. As scholars, we don’t tend to believe that a handful of men can topple civilizations unless there are larger, structural forces at play. As a storyteller, Nolan was not required to offer such nuance or explain what actually happened in 1250 BCE. For him, an academic theory becomes a moral, a cautionary tale about conflict in a globalized age. Odysseus’s trickery might have won the Greeks the war in Troy, but it also destroyed everything he cared about.
Some commentors, including Elon Musk, have complained that Nolan’s film is not historically accurate, but political; yet what we tell ourselves about the past always is. In my course, students learn about the ancient world, but they mostly come to see how the way we tell history says something about the culture we live in. Zack Snyder’s 300 is as much about the War on Terror as it is about the Spartans. Trump is a major reason, after twenty-five years, that Gladiator II got made. The Homeric poems themselves are works of historical fiction, the product of the Archaic Greeks looking at their Mycenean past and wondering where things went wrong. Nolan, looking on our present age, was clearly wondering the same thing, so it was only right he took up the ever-adaptable Odysseus as his muse.
The film’s cinematography was certainly as epic a medium for the story as Homer’s hexameter. As triremes coarse over cerulean seas, I could taste the salty air. The soundtrack (Ludwig Göransson) expertly controls your heartrate over three hours. Nolan and his team have the technical prowess to fully immerse viewers. Of course, it’s worth asking if viewers should want to be so immersed in a world that even Odysseus himself is seeking to flee.
Maybe Nolan really is feeling this hopeless; if so, I pity him.
I give Nolan credit, too, for making me sympathetic to Odysseus, a character I normally find insufferable. Unfortunately, by stripping Odysseus of his insufferableness, Nolan also stripped him of his charm. Putting aside the grotesque violence, the story itself is a tragedy. Odysseus is a broken man surviving in a world he helped break, and neither he nor the film offers any hope for the future. People expect me to complain about how Nolan’s Odyssey didn’t “accurately” reproduce Mycenean armor; my real complaint is that Nolan failed to do anything new. Odysseus’s regret over Troy does nothing to prevent him from once more violating the “law of Zeus” and killing the suitors beside his hearth. Nolan’s Odysseus creates a problem, then abandons the next generation to suffer the consequences as he and Penelope sail towards the setting sun to “honor those who weren’t buried.” Anyone who wants to know that foreign wars lead to suffering for both sides simply needs to open the news.
Of course, Nolan is not the only artist currently struggling with such civilizational dread. 2025 Best Picture Nominee Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) and HBO’s The Last of Us (Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann) suffer from the same malady. Everyone seems to have the sense that “things are getting worse.” Our characters, like Nolan’s Odysseus, regret the horrible things they’ve done, but remain stuck in cycles of violence and are redeemed only by vaguely selfish “love.” Nolan spent $250 million immersing viewers in a grim reflection of our own age, rather than offering answers for how we can be better.
Maybe Nolan really is feeling this hopeless; if so, I pity him. Or maybe he simply had to choose between “three hours of pessimistic cinematic genius” and “slightly less pretty water and a good story.” Still, it didn’t have to be this way. For one, Nolan is not the first person to use the Odyssey to discuss civilizational collapse. The Coen brother’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) set the epic in 1937 Mississippi, right as the TVA is bringing electricity to the south, to make just this point—but where that film is weird and boisterous, Nolan’s is simply depressing. Plenty of movies set in the ancient world are sad without being hopeless. Gladiator, 300, and Pompeii all see their heroes die, but those heroes die for something. Odysseus, instead, lives—for nothing at all. My real frustration, in the end, is that it would have been so easy for Nolan to say, “The world is dark, but the cyclops has to move the boulder eventually, and, if we’re smart and work together, we can escape.”
In the original epic, Telemachus is not just “pining after a daddy he’s never met” when he travels to Sparta, but rather becoming a man. His adventures reinforce his father’s alliance with the other Greek leaders. Through the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes, he learns to trust the law, rather than personal vengeance. When the time comes for the trial of the bow, Telemachus has matured enough to accomplish the task, but he simply chooses not to out of respect for his father. If Nolan was feeling truly bold, he could have had Odysseus face the suitors openly. When they refused to leave peacefully, the audience could have still enjoyed a gruesome fight scene, but one more consistent with the “changed man” who left Calypso’s island. In the epic, Athena forces a magical reconciliation between Odysseus and the suitors’ families. The film could have played with this, having Odysseus instead face up to the parents of those he killed—both the suitors and his comrades from Troy. This would still have allowed him, broken and scarred, to sail west with Penelope. Meanwhile, Telemachus, allowed to come into his own, could reassure his father that, with the other Greeks and the Ithacans by his side, he’ll protect their home in the coming age.
Such a revision (one option only, among many) would be ahistorical, but then, so is everything from Agamemnon’s ridiculous armor to the idea that Odysseus the trickster regrets the destruction of Troy. Nolan wanted to adapt the story to the modern era, as he should. Still, with just a few more changes, his adaptation could have gone from being a pessimistic judgement about our present times to a hopeful, if challenging, call to learn lessons from the past before, we, like the Mycenean Greeks, become only a distant memory.
Mikayla Carlowicz is a Ph.D. student in Classics at Princeton University. In her free time, she enjoys writing fantasy novels inspired by the past and birdwatching with her husband.
The Odyssey was released on July 17, 2026. You can stream it starting November 17, 2026.
