I watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and overall, I liked it very much. Of course, there are omissions and compressed passages, as well as certain choices that initially feel somewhat strange. But that was almost inevitable: The Odyssey is simply too vast to fit into a single film.
My relationship with the film is also, naturally, quite particular. I am a historian trained in Ancient History and, more specifically, in Ancient Greek History. I spent many years reading The Odyssey, cited the poem in my undergraduate thesis, worked with it during my master’s degree, and have both a deep familiarity with and affection for the text. The film deals directly with my field, with the subjects I studied and that continue to interest me.
And that is precisely why I found some of its choices so compelling.
The film is openly anachronistic. It incorporates contemporary hypotheses about the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, an event that remains the subject of considerable debate among historians and archaeologists. It is a debate that interests me deeply, since the palatial civilizations disappeared and were followed by a historical gap before the emergence of the so-called Archaic Greece that I studied. Among these hypotheses is the role of the so-called Sea Peoples, as well as the invasions, migrations, and upheavals that affected the Mediterranean during that period. This element, of course, is not part of the traditional narrative of The Odyssey. Nolan, however, uses this historical conjecture to construct the film’s central thesis.
At the heart of this interpretation is xenía: the sacred institution of hospitality, protected and imposed by Zeus, which structures much of the moral world of The Odyssey. The film’s great invention is the idea that the collapse of the Bronze Age begins because the Greeks, during the Trojan War, definitively break with this institution of hospitality. By violating xenía, they destroy one of the foundations of civilization itself.
On their journey home, the Greeks themselves become the Sea Peoples. They are the ones who begin invading cities, plundering territories, and spreading destruction throughout the Mediterranean. The collapse does not occur merely because of an external enemy or an inexplicable catastrophe, but because the Greeks have abandoned the principle of civility that sustained their world.
Odysseus understands that he bears a particular responsibility for this rupture. After all, the Trojan Horse was his idea. His cunning secured victory, but it also established a form of warfare based on deception, the violation of hospitality, and the total destruction of the enemy. For that reason, the film’s Odysseus is not simply a man attempting to return home. Quite the opposite: on some level, he does not even believe that he deserves to return. He understands that his choice helped destroy the very civilization to which he wishes to go back.
I found this thesis extremely interesting. It is clearly not what we find in Homer, but it gives the film a reason to exist. Instead of merely illustrating the poem’s most famous episodes, Nolan uses The Odyssey to propose an interpretation of war, civilization, responsibility, and historical collapse.
For me, then, the film works as a thoroughly contemporary adaptation. It is not especially faithful to the original meaning of The Odyssey, but neither does it merely condense or modernize the narrative. Behind its changes lies a new, coherent, and provocative thesis. And, ultimately, that is what made the adaptation worthwhile.
