Finding New Words For The Odyssey (2026)

This essay contains spoilers.

Few stories entered my imagination as early, or remained there as vividly, as the Odyssey. I first encountered it at the age of seven through a children’s adaptation. The image of Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, mightily stringing his bow before exacting vengeance on his wife’s suitors left an impression that has never faded. The Odysseus of my childhood enjoys a tearful reunion with Penelope and a happy ending (the understandably angry families of the slain suitors are not invited).

As a teenager, I struggled through Robert Fagles’s beautiful yet dense translation. After college, I returned to the poem with fresh eyes through Emily Wilson’s modern version. It is the West’s answer to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a foundational story whose traces can be found throughout the literature that followed (perhaps only the Jewish story of the Exodus rivals it in shaping the West’s understanding of itself). Yet the Odyssey also emerges from a world governed by cultural assumptions and moral obligations that can feel deeply unfamiliar to a modern audience.

To those who take issue with the moments in which Nolan’s interpretation diverges from the original, I would question their definition of “the original.” The existence of a singular author named Homer who wrote both the Iliad and Odyssey remains a matter of scholarly debate. Even if such an author existed, it is unlikely that he would recognize his original oral poem in the story that has been transmitted, adapted, translated, and reinterpreted throughout history according to the tastes and concerns of each era. Nolan’s contribution is simply another strand in an unbroken thread of interpretation.

I therefore found myself asking what questions Nolan is asking of the Odyssey and what story he tells about us in the modern world through his answers. Many have criticized Nolan for twisting the story of Odysseus around themes that are absent from the source material. Some of these themes bear such a strong resemblance to those of his earlier films that they can feel like tropes. As in Inception (2010), Odysseus is a man who yearns for home but cannot bring himself to return. As in Memento (2000), Odysseus is imprisoned by the relationship between memory, guilt, and the stories he tells about himself. As in The Dark Knight trilogy, he is a misunderstood Byronic hero who finds happiness by leaving the city he sacrificed himself to save. As in Oppenheimer (2023), he must spend the rest of his life in penitence for the Trojan Horse, transformed here into an archaic atom bomb, born of ingenuity but made the progenitor of mass atrocity.

Yet Nolan is taking the fundamental questions he has asked throughout his career and considering whether they might also apply to our civilization’s foundational myth. Each question becomes an exploration with profound implications. I discerned three main themes.

The first is life after PTSD. The goddess Athena, played by Zendaya, advises Odysseus throughout the film before being revealed at the end as a post-traumatic hallucination. The comparison to J. Robert Oppenheimer is obvious. Both men are consumed by guilt over the suffering they have caused, regardless of whether that suffering could be justified by the necessities of war.

The comparison hiding in plain sight, however, is to an earlier Nolan film: The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Nolan’s Odyssey ends with Odysseus and Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, sailing into the sunset, just as Bruce Wayne and Catwoman, also played by Hathaway, do at the end of the Dark Knight trilogy. In both cases, our hero is finally freed from his demons through exile, embracing the freedom and anonymity it affords. He leaves behind a younger successor, Telemachus or Robin, to take up the mantle of one day accumulating the same burden of guilt. Is Nolan’s Odysseus too wracked with guilt to rule as king? If so, exile becomes his only remaining option.

The second theme, and the one most commonly discussed, is xenia: the reciprocal duties between host and guest. The film presents a succession of good hosts and bad hosts, good guests and bad guests. The Cyclops Polyphemus is unambiguously a bad host, though Odysseus is arguably a bad guest as well. Circe is a more complex host. The suitors in Ithaca are terrible guests, though to varying degrees.

Nolan enshrines xenia as a law of Zeus evocative of the Golden Rule of Christendom, which Odysseus invokes quite literally. An individual-centered, universal duty to “do unto others as you would have them do to you” would likely have been unfamiliar to a Greco-Roman audience accustomed to a moral code that distinguished among obligations to family, guest-friends, suppliants, comrades, rulers, and enemies.

This brings me to the third and perhaps most interesting theme in Nolan’s retelling: that of command responsibility. Beyond man’s moral duty to the stranger, what is his duty to those in his charge? What moral invocation does the Odyssey offer us as modern readers?

Homer’s Odysseus might not recognize Nolan’s Odysseus, a man suffering from PTSD because of the atrocities he committed at Troy. This version seems heavily informed by American narratives about the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, I believe there is a textual basis for Nolan’s portrait of an Odysseus tormented by guilt over the men in his charge whom he could neither save nor bring home.

Homer’s Odysseus is ultimately restored as husband to Penelope, father to Telemachus, and king of Ithaca. Yet he reaches the shores of his homeland alone. Every soldier who entrusted their lives to him is now dead. Homer depicts a leader who sometimes saves his men through bravery and intelligence, yet at other times endangers them through pride and deceit. The poem distributes responsibility for their deaths so that the blame does not rest entirely on Odysseus’s shoulders. But it is hard to imagine a world in which Homer’s Odysseus does not wonder whether more of his soldiers should have returned home with him. Nolan imagines the emotional consequences that Homer leaves largely unstated.

Many will criticize Nolan for refashioning the foundational myth of our civilization in terms that are all too familiar to fans of his work. Yet this is what artists have always done with the Odyssey: they have asked the poem to speak to the moral anxieties of their own age. Nolan’s Odysseus is haunted not only by the desire to return home, but by the cost of war, the obligations of hospitality, and the burden of having failed the men entrusted to him. By finding traces of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bruce Wayne, Dom Cobb, and Leonard Shelby in Odysseus, Nolan gives modern viewers a vocabulary for asking fresh questions of Homer. Nolan’s Odyssey is a masterpiece because his earlier films gave him, and us, the right words to ask new questions of an ancient story.

Originally published: 2026-07-19