Nolan's Odyssey (2026): Horror-Epic for the Boys

It’s not an easy thing to do, adapting an epic story from Antiquity for the modern day cinema. There’s always a balance to be struck between faithfulness to the original and some kind of relatability (odious word, I know) to a contemporary audience. There have been some pretty bad Homeric epic films in the last quarter century, including of course Troy (2004), as well as bad Hellenic epic films like The 300 (2006). There have also been some dodgy Beowulf (2007) adaptations as well. Usually, filmmakers will maintain the costuming, what they imagine to be battle styles, and some degree of stilted engagement among characters. But equally usually, they will import all kinds of inappropriate concepts and interactions, things that seem hopelessly hokey and cheesy, into the storyline, so viewers don’t start feeling like they’re just in history class.

So, ok. How do you make an antiquated heroic culture, full of monsters, marvels, warriors, and royals, feel like something contemporary Americans can relate to, without totally sacrificing the original work itself?

Christopher Nolan’s new The Odyssey (2026) tries very, very hard to figure that out, and to do it resonantly and powerfully. And I have to say, despite the huge skeptical biases I had going in, and despite the fact that there are things about this film that made me want to bang my head into the seat in front of me, he more or less sticks the landing.

Yes, that’s right: I really appreciated The Odyssey. I think it works. To be clear, I didn’t love it; but it also isn’t a film made primarily for me—that is, it’s not made for people who teach the Homeric epics every year of their lives to very smart students, and who have very definite opinions about what the Homeric epics mean. Just who I think Nolan’s target audience is, I’ll get to shortly. First, let me talk through the movie, and what I think works about it.

1. Nolan’s The Odyssey is a horror film. No, I’m not just saying that because I study horror. It really is. At every possible juncture, he amps up the fear factor, tosses in a jump scare, or increases the monstrosity of the major players. I’ll give three examples. First, Polyphemus is pretty scary in Homer’s poem, but he’s downright petrifying in Nolan’s movie: not just a cyclops but a badly deformed cyclops—with his one eye running vertically in his forehead, and his nose twisted around at a horrific angle—he’s more or less nonverbal, only speaking a little bit once he’s been blinded, in an almost sing-songy and hard-to-parse way. He is a creature drawn from far deeper in the uncanny valley than Homer’s original monster: the uncanny valley, remember, is the place of terror between something human-like, and something non-human. Without a clear voice, without a readily legible face, Nolan’s Polyphemus is The Uncanny. Second, Circe, who is very scary in Homer, is a full-on horror-movie witch in Nolan’s film: she doesn’t just magic Odysseus’s sailors into pigs, she uses their faces and bodies like play-doh and forms them into pigs with her bare hands. It is very punk rock, and very horror. She doesn’t spend like a year hooking up with Odysseus to take the edge off her scariness, either: she’s mean, she’s sadistic, she’s someone who can physically mold your body into that of a porcine prisoner. Third, when Odysseus goes to the land of the dead to speak with the deceased prophet Teiresias, the scene culminates with a zombie horde—I kid you not—chasing Odysseus’s people back to their boat. So, that’s three separate and distinct monster modalities that Nolan is leaning into very, very hard. And he’s smart to do that, for two reasons. First, like I suggested, the original epic has quite a lot of horror energy in it already, so it’s a “strong reading” of the poem to put this stuff in there. Second, Nolan is reading the room in the American imagination: we like horror right now. A lot. More than maybe any other genre. It makes us park our attention-frayed asses in chairs for three hours in this case and watch a single, continuous narrative. Good call, Chris.

2. Nolan decided to have the entire cast speak with a recognizably American accent. If you didn’t notice that, it’s probably because you are an American. But if you think about it, the norm in Hollywood, when entering into almost any kind of epic discourse, is to have the major players speak with British accents. Why? Because we Americans still have a hangover from British colonial times, in the sense that we associate Britishness with fanciness and antiquity. But of course, when you hear someone speaking in a British accent, it also helps nudge you out of feeling like you are part of the film and into a greater awareness that you are witnessing a film. By making everyone conform to an American accent, Nolan makes the film seem more real, more immediate. At the same time, he also makes a very subtle claim that maybe ancient Greek imperialism—which is Homeric’s central narrative preoccupation in both The Iliad and The Odyssey—is best understood through the framework of American imperialism. Or, put otherwise, Nolan’s choice here makes us aware that contemporary America has something in common with the Ancient Hellenes: and it’s not good stuff. It’s that we, like the Greeks, have a nasty habit of waging brutal wars on innocent people for perceived slights to our honor. (Final note: if you doubt that this was a deliberate choice, ask yourself this: why does Tom Holland, an Englishman, who plays Telemachus not have his usual British accent? You know, the one he uses in all his interviews, because it’s how he actually talks? The answer is that someone told him to talk American. To sound more like Spidey than like Tom. This is a conspicuously American film.

3. Nolan takes out the all-important Phaiakian episode from the original poem. Entirely. So, in the poem, everything we learn about Odysseus’s fantastical exploits—Circe, the cyclopes, the Laestrygonians, the lotus-eaters, Scylla and Charybdis—all of that stuff, we learn from Odysseus’s own mouth, as he recounts his adventures retrospectively to the court of the Phaiakian king Alkinous and his wife Arete. This matters a lot, because it means that we, the audience, don’t actually see the magical stuff happening in real time; we only get it in his recollections. Which means he might, just maybe, be making all of that shit up, whole-cloth, to endear himself to the Phaiakians. See, Homer leaves the door wide open to the possibility (probability) that Odysseus is just an effing con man. This film, Nolan’s film, wants to close that door. So instead, we hear all about Odysseus’s magical adventures because he’s receiving psychotherapy for severe trauma from the beautiful fishernymph Calypso. She’s helping him recover all of his memories, and her role as de facto therapist has the effect of making all his stories, all his magical episodes, seem true, rather than myths that he made up to keep his head off the chopping block in Phaiakia. Nolan wants his Odysseus to be truthful and reliable. Which is, like, super orthogonal to what Homer wants. Homer wants Odysseus to be a trickster, a man-of-many-twists-and-turns (the Greek work for that is polytropos). Nolan wants Odysseus to be a good man. Not a twister of facts or teller of tales, but a stand-up guy. I find this choice, on the one hand, completely appalling. The entire point of Homer’s poem is to get us to think seriously about how much bad behavior, how much lying and tricking, we’ll tolerate from Odysseus before we decide that he’s not such a great hero after all.

4. Relatedly, at literally every possible turn, Nolan deemphasizes Odysseus’s badness, and emphasizes the badness of his opponents. I’ll give a few key examples. First, in the poem, Odysseus is pretty willing to sacrifice his men, if it gets him closer to his own personal goals. In the film, he’s desperate to avoid sacrificing them, and regrets when he fails to preserve them. Second, in the poem, Odysseus takes great pleasure in testing and kind of tormenting his loyal servants, his son, his wife, and even his own father (who doesn’t appear in the film at all) when he returns to Ithaca, because he’s so obsessed with being the Master of Games and Tricks. In the film, when Odysseus conceals his identity from his loved ones, it’s not because of his love of the game, but because he’s been prudently warned to avoid Agamemnon’s “tragic” fate. Nolan’s Odysseus isn’t a sadist, nor a bully—especially to the people he loves. The famous scene where he grabs his nurse’s neck is way, way tamped down in the film, reduced to a knowing smile and a nod, and a gentle hand gesture. Third, in the poem, Odysseus’s revenge rampage at the end is disgusting and dysregulated: he kills all the male suitors who were taking advantage of Penelope, but he also brutally executes all the servant women who had been working at the house while the suitors had been there. Why? Because he believes that many of them—not all, but many—had been sexually seduced by the suitors. Odysseus and his son string up these young women “like birds” and hang them all, after having forced them to clean up all the blood and guts on the floor from the suitors. Sadism. Gender-based violence. Bad. Cruel. Unnecessary. And Nolan trims out all of that. All. Fourth, the suitors in the poem are bad, but the suitors in Nolan’s film are ridiculously bad. They kick dying dogs. They try to murder Telemachus in a temple. So Nolan is taking all the ethical complexity of the poem and decomplexifying it. Odysseus is Good. His enemies are Bad.

So, like, I was watching this film, and I was screaming inside. You can’t just decide that Odysseus is a decent guy, honest and reliable, well-meaning and merciful when he should be. You also can’t add a huge montage at the end where we learn that Odysseus has been eaten alive by guilt, remorse, and unadmitted accountability over the part he played in obliterating Troy. You can’t have Odysseus, whom gifted Homeric translator Emily Wilson calls “the lord of lies,” just be all contrite and humble, all changed and full of regret for having occasioned the death of so many totally innocent Trojans. You can’t just rewrite the whole damn epic like that. The Greeks celebrated the Trojan War! It was a major victory. You can’t just grow Odysseus a fucking conscience like that.

But slowly, as I kept watching, what I realized is that you absolutely and totally can do that.

Maybe you should do that.

And Christopher Nolan did do that.

He decided to make a very solid, very Greek-feeling adaptation of The Odyssey, in which the main character comes seriously to rue his violent past, to pine over his overexercise of cunning in the service of Greek imperial ambitions. He decided to reimagine Odysseus as a hero not because he’s polytropos, the man of many twists and turns, but because he changes into a better kind of man. Kinder. Gentler to his son. Gentler to his wife. Gentler to his nanny. Warmer. More forgiving of his servants. Less vengeful. More accountable for who he is, and what he’s done.

Christopher Nolan took the ultimate alpha bro—violent, powerful, manipulative, greedy, vengeful, narcissistic—and he reimagined him as a real, genuine, three-dimensional person with a conscience and a sense of civic responsibility.

So now at last we come back to the question of audience. I said Nolan didn’t make his film for me, and he definitely did not. Christopher Nolan has made a Homeric film that is designed, I believe, to help silence the manosphere, and to clap back at the unthinking ideas of American masculinity that are surging essentially unchecked in our government. If even conniving, pillaging, murdering, stealing Odysseus can come to understand that there is a better way to be in the world; if he can come to understand that he is, in fact, to blame for much of the violence and horror that exists all around him, and that he must atone for what he’s done, maybe there’s hope for 21^st America yet. Homer’s Odysseus really is a dangerous icon for the manosphere: he’s a powerful man who genuinely believes he owes nothing to anyone, and that he deserves total power and control over other people, especially those who cross him. Nolan’s Odysseus believes he owes everything to everyone.

So Nolan played out Homer’s story for us in a way that, he hopes and frankly I also hope, we can actually take on board: a violent man, the cause of untold deaths, goes on great journey—partially of his own mind, partially of the world around him—during which he comes to grips with himself and with his past, and arrives at a new determination that he will let go of power, and that he will do right by all the people whose lives he’s taken, either directly or indirectly.