An Ancient Historian’s Breakdown of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is perhaps the most highly anticipated new film of the 2020s. It has already received near-universal acclaim from film critics and earned more at the box office in its opening weekend than any of Nolan’s previous films, including The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Oppenheimer (2023). It has only been out for one week and is already fueling a culture-wide resurgence of interest in ancient Greek myth and literature. Although Nolan’s creative decisions for the film raised controversy even before the film was released, I promised myself early on that I would not weigh in on the film until after I had seen it myself. And I will be honest: I went into Nolan’s Odyssey with the expectation, based on my previous experience with big Hollywood adaptations of Greek myths and the images and previews that I had seen beforehand, that it would be unconscionably bad. As I watched it, I found some things I disliked, but, overall, I was pleasantly surprised. By the time I…