The Odyssey: The Story

Last time I offered you my initial thoughts on The Odyssey (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2026). This post is going to discuss the plot of the film. But to do that, we need to first survey the original poem. Homer’s Odyssey The Odyssey poem is composed in 24 ‘books’ (we might say chapters), and right away we have to grapple with the poem’s rather odd structure. It falls into 6 4-book sections. At the start of the poem, Odysseus has been absent from Ithaca for about two decades, having left home to fight in the Trojan War. Troy was conquered a decade ago, and Odysseus left for home, but hasn’t been seen since. His son Telemachus, somewhat improbably, isn’t really an adult despite being 20 years old, because he’s been entirely without his father’s influence. So he goes seeking news of his father, and spends the first 4 books visiting Helen and Menelaus at Sparta and talking to them and others about his father. He hears stories about Odysseus, but no one knows what’s become of him, except that…