Warning: This is a LONG one, and it is absolutely stuffed with spoilers for Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ from about four paragraphs down. If you haven’t seen it yet, bookmark this and come back to me and my Big Ass Feelings. I’ll wait. (Twenty years for Odysseus, I can manage a fortnight for you.)
TLDR: Adaptations are always fan fiction. Fidelity was never the metric. Resonance is — and for me personally, Nolan’s adaptation has got it.
Hey Everyone,
I have had big thinky thoughts since I watched ‘The Odyssey’ a week ago, and they have been rattling around in my skull now like coins in a tumble dryer, so we are doing this.
First, let me say what this post is not.
This is not a hate rant. There are already so many of those, and they are all free, available, and extremely easy to find. There are rants about the costuming and armor. Rants about the cast being too diverse. Rants about the cast not being Greek enough, and the filming not being Greek enough, and the whole thing being one more act of cultural appropriation. There are rants going the other way, defending it, equally furious. It is a minefield out there, and everybody has a strong opinion and a comment section.
If you have a beef with this adaptation, I promise you can find someone online who will scratch that itch beautifully. Go with the gods. This just isn’t that kind of blog.
What I want to talk about is resonance — that chest-punch feeling when a myth retelling lands. Because some adaptations have it and some don’t, and it has almost nothing to do with accuracy.
Adaptations are always fan fiction
Every single one of them. No exceptions. Films and TV, especially, are AO3 in high def.
‘The Odyssey’ was an oral tradition for centuries before anybody wrote it down, which means it was already being rewritten every night by every bard who performed it, adjusting for the room, the mood, the person paying for the wine. There is no pure original text sitting in a vault somewhere that we’ve all been drifting away from. There is only the endless relay of people passing the story along and leaving their thumbprint in the clay.
So “but that’s not what happens in the book” was never the right question. The right question is: did it hit you where the original hits? Did it make you think or feel something?
And to explain what I mean by that, I need to talk about Joseph Campbell for a minute, so buckle up, the armchair mythographer is in charge.
The Odyssey is a goddess story (and Campbell knew it)
I’ve been rereading Campbell’s ‘Goddesses’ — chapter six, on ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ — and as it did the first time I read it, it reorganized my brain.
His argument, roughly: ‘The Iliad’ is the male-oriented Indo-European world. It’s Zeus and Apollo and the Olympians, war and glory and achievement psychology. Then you turn the page to ‘The Odyssey’ and the goddesses come back. The whole mode and mood shifts. It stops being about winning and becomes about learning how to live — and every teacher in it is female. Campbell notes Samuel Butler’s 1897 theory that a woman wrote it. I’d add that whether or not you buy that, the poem’s values are unmistakably female-centred, and you don’t need to prove authorship to see it. Side note: Emily Wilson also speaks about this in depth and much better than anyone I’ve ever heard. Her translation of the Odyssey is my go-to and the best out there. I can, and will, talk about how awesome it is with the slightest provocation so I’ve put links down the bottom to her work, and excellent an You Tube clip of her doing live readings.
Back on point – Look at the shape of the thing. The first stretch of Odysseus’s journey is human beings on the surface of the earth. Then he lands with the Lotus Eaters and he is in the world of myth, and from that moment on, everyone who transforms him is a woman. Circe. Calypso. Little Nausicaa. The temptress, the wife, the virgin — and behind them, the three goddesses whose beauty contest started the entire war in the first place. Aphrodite, Hera, Athena. Paris judged them and got it wrong, and now their forms come back around to finish the job on the man who built the horse.
And the weaving. This is the bit that always makes me put the book down and stare at the wall for a bit.
Penelope weaves her tapestry by day and unpicks it by night, holding off the suitors with a piece of cloth that never gets finished. Fine. Lovely ruse. Except then you notice Circe is weaving. And Calypso is weaving. And Nausicaa is at the water doing the laundry. The women of this poem are all working the same thread. Campbell reads them as the feminine as Maya — the weaver of the world, the one spinning the illusion you’re walking around inside. Odysseus doesn’t escape any of these women. He can’t out-clever them. He has to meet each one on her own terms, and each one takes something off him before she’ll let him go.
Then there’s the boar.
Odysseus keeps a herd of swine, three hundred and sixty of them, which is a year in the old reckoning. He was gored in the thigh by a boar’s tusk, and it’s that scar the old nurse recognizes when he finally comes home (caught excellently by Nolan). Now: Adonis is killed by a boar. Diarmuid is killed by a boar. Osiris is killed by his brother Set during a boar hunt. The chthonic pig that kills the god who has to come back again. It’s everywhere, and it’s sitting right there in the middle of the Odyssey, wearing a scar.
And his guide through all of it is not Ares. Not Apollo. Not Zeus. It’s Hermes — the messenger, the psychopomp, the one who walks souls between worlds. Which tells you exactly what kind of story you’re in. Nobody sends the god of the dead as your travel companion unless the trip is a death and a rebirth.
That’s the spine of the poem. Odysseus has to be stripped. The feral animal thing that made him survive ten years at Troy has to come off him, layer by layer, administered by goddesses, before he’s fit to walk back into his own house.
Because otherwise you bring the war home with you.
Ask Agamemnon how that went for him.
What Nolan actually got right
Reader, I went in with LOW expectations. I like Nolan, I do, but I was braced for three hours of Huzzah For Men, The Patriarchy, Woo — a big shiny swords-and-sandals war movie with a triumphant brass score.
And I cried at least four times for various reasons.
He kept the mythic structure, which immediately had my respect. He starts in Ithaca with the bard opening that immediately sets the scene and made the hair on the back of my neck go up. It starts with the state of Ithaca, with Penelope and Telemachus, and the rot setting in, which is exactly where the poem starts, and which a lot of versions cannot bypass fast enough. He made the Trojan Horse genuinely revolting: men crammed in the dark in their own filth, terrified, waiting. Not a glamour shot. Not a triumph. A box of frightened animals and the blood of the person offering it who Troy immediately killed for the honor of standing guard.
And then the women. God, the women. They need their own blog but all of the women in this are *chef’s kiss*, and Nolan kept the things that usually get cut: the moment with the nurse mentioned above is just one example.
My personal fave? Circe turning the pigs back into men and telling them to put your disguises back on — that’s the whole Campbell argument in one line of dialogue. Her fury at Odysseus, demanding to know what exactly he thought would happen when he let a crew who’d raped and burned their way across the sea come ashore unguided. That’s not a monster scene. That’s an accounting. She’s justified in what she does and isn’t apologetic about it.
And Calypso — telling him she healed his body but he was the one who wouldn’t leave. That he stayed lotus-drunk because he didn’t want to face himself. He didn’t want to heal his mind, or reconcile what he had done with what he’d become.
The Athena choice absolutely destroyed me. Making her the priestess he watched beheaded in Troy, who keeps coming back to him wearing that face — and then threading it through Telemachus saying all the way through, you have wise eyes, you could be Athena in disguise. That’s not a change to the source. That’s someone who understood what the source was doing and found a new way to do it.
And there’s a beautiful line in there about sacrifice — that offerings are never about the object, but it’s what the object costs the person giving it up. Which is the whole difference between Odysseus and Agamemnon in one breath. One of them learns what things cost, the price of his clever idea as an offering to Athena. The other one puts his daughter on an altar for a favourable wind and then acts surprised when his wife is waiting for him with a knife.
And fuck me, the dog.
Everyone leaves out the dog. EVERYONE. And Nolan put him in, and it gutted me in every shot. Because Argos isn’t a sad animal moment, he’s a major point — he is the last true loyalty left in that house. All of his loyal men left behind have forgotten Odysseus, sold him out, moved into his hall, started eating his food, plotting and abusing his family. The dog didn’t. The dog waited twenty years to see him one more time and then died. This is why dogs are better than people.
Odysseus is the original John Wick, and I will not be elaborating.
The bit that broke my brain: they knew they were ending the world
Here’s the thing about Nolan’s ending, and this is where I got properly emotional in a way I could not explain to my poor husband, who was like, ” Oh, God, she doesn’t cry, why is she crying so much?” SO many reasons.
But something I really loved was Odysseus talking about the Sea Peoples. Realizing they are the ones the warnings were about. That they broke Zeus’s law — they had trade with Troy, they had a sacred bond, and they used Helen as an excuse and broke it with a gift. Xenia, guest-friendship, the one law that made the ancient world function at all, and they used it as a weapon.
If you want to know how seriously the Greeks took that law, look at what Zeus does to people who break it.
There’s a story in Ovid — Zeus and Hermes walking through Phrygia in disguise, knocking on doors. A thousand houses turn them away. One elderly couple, Baucis and Philemon, dirt poor with a single goose to their name, take them in and offer everything they have. So the gods walk that couple up the mountain and drown the entire valley behind them. Everyone who refused a stranger a meal, under the water. The old pair get to spend eternity as two trees grown out of one trunk, because the only thing they asked for was to die at the same moment so neither one would have to bury the other. (I’m fine. I’m normal about this.)
That’s the scale of it. Not a rule of etiquette — a flood. Refuse hospitality and the god who ends the world comes for your whole valley. And Deucalion’s flood, the big one, the proper world-ending Greek deluge, is the same logic scaled up: humanity breaks the sacred bond, humanity gets washed off the map.
So when Odysseus works out what he’s done — took the guest-bond, weaponised it, walked a gift through the gates of a city he had trade with — he already knows exactly what the penalty is. He’s grown up on the story. He just isn’t expecting the flood to take four hundred years and arrive as a dark age.
In the film, he recognizes this with the added bonus of a line about how people will forget how to write.
That actually happened. Let me lay the timeline out properly, because I have had to untangle my own dates on this and the real sequence is better:
- c. 1600 BCE — Thera erupts. Minoan Crete goes into a long decline.
- c. 1450 BCE — the Mycenaeans take Knossos. Greek-speakers are running the show now.
- c. 1200–1150 BCE — the Bronze Age Collapse. And here’s the kicker: the Mycenaean palaces burn too. Everybody goes down. The Sea Peoples show up in Egyptian records under Merneptah and then carved onto the walls at Medinet Habu for Ramesses III around 1177 BCE.
- c. 1100–800 BCE — the Greek Dark Age. Linear B is lost. Literacy is simply gone for roughly three hundred years.
- 8th century BCE — “Homer.” Writing about four hundred years after the world he’s describing ended, in an alphabet the Greeks had only just borrowed off the Phoenicians.
Homer’s Greeks were walking around a landscape absolutely littered with palaces and tombs and colossal walls, built by their own ancestors, and they had no idea who made them. The written records were ash. All they had were oral traditions that had come down through three centuries of nobody being able to write anything down, and a lot of very impressive rubble.
They made it up. They looked at the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns, at stones no group of human beings could possibly lift, and concluded that the Cyclopes must have built them. We still call that stonework Cyclopean masonry. Pausanias was still cheerfully repeating it as fact in the second century AD.
They stood in the ruins of their own grandparents and filled the gap with a monster.
That is what Nolan wove in, and it’s why the ending has that awful weight to it. It isn’t foreshadowing. It’s a civilisation writing its own obituary and not knowing it yet.
My one actual complaint (and one nerdy tangent about Dante)
No Hermes. NO HERMES.
Look, I understand why. In the poem, Hermes hands Odysseus the moly so he’s immune to Circe’s magic before he ever walks through her door — and that would have completely defused the confrontation Nolan built, where Circe gets to look him in the eye and hold him responsible. Same with Calypso: in Homer, Hermes turns up as the divine eviction notice. Take him out and it becomes about what she says to Odysseus instead, which is stronger.
I get it. I understand the choices. I am still going to want my Hermes, because Hermes is Odysseus’s great-grandfather through Autolycus, which is precisely why he’s the man of many ways — the wily one, the trickster who finds the crooked path when there isn’t one. He’s already Hermes-shaped. But fine. FINE.
While I’m on tangents: that shot of him sailing into the west isn’t Homer either, it’s Dante (I have a license to rant about Dante and I’m gonna use it). ‘Inferno’ XXVI, where Ulysses is standing in the eighth circle wrapped in a tongue of flame — punished as a false counsellor — telling Virgil how he talked his crew past the Pillars of Hercules into the open ocean on what Dante calls the folle volo, the mad flight. You were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge. Beautiful. Also fatal. Dante can’t let him go, either — he keeps circling back to Ulysses in ‘Purgatorio’ and ‘Paradiso’, worrying at him like a sore tooth, because how do you put the greatest hero in hell?
(Fun bit for my fellow nerds: Dante couldn’t read Greek and had never read Homer. His Ulysses is assembled entirely out of Latin — Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca. He’s writing fan fiction of fan fiction, bless his heart. And Homer had already given him the loophole, because Tiresias’s prophecy in Book XI is deliberately ambiguous: carry an oar inland until you meet people who’ve never seen the sea, and death will come to you from the sea. Poets have been picking at that phrase for two and a half thousand years.)
And the one I can’t stop thinking about — Plato, the Myth of Er at the end of the ‘Republic’. The souls are lined up choosing their next lives, and Odysseus goes looking for the life of an ordinary private man with no cares in it. He finds it lying in a corner, neglected, because every other soul had walked straight past it.
The greatest hero in the world, given the pick of every possible life, chooses to be Nobody. Yeah, I couldn’t resist adding that side joke IYKYK.
Resonance, and some examples
Right. Back to the actual thesis with a few examples.
I saw ‘Hadestown’ five times. Five different audiences. And it got its own big old share of rants — modern clothes, a brass band, multicultural casting, Hermes played by whoever’s on that night, regardless of gender.
(The Hermes casting and their role in the whole thing is a whole other blog, and I am absolutely going to write it, don’t let me forget.)
Here is what I actually witnessed, five times, from an Australian audience, which is not exactly a crowd famous for its classical education. It explains exactly what I mean by resonance. I saw many reactions, but one I’ll always remember fondly. There’s the big moment. Orpheus turns. He sees her. It ends. And there is that dead, ringing silence in a theatre full of people who have just been hit by a truck they saw coming from thousand of years away —
— and on one of those nights, out of that silence, from somewhere in the stalls, a single, devastated, extremely bogan, “Oh, FARK.”
That is resonance. That man did not care about the costumes. He did not care about the brass band. The myth got him anyway, because it was built to. That’s why myths endure, thats what they are meant to do.
And that’s why the movie ‘Troy’ missed and ‘The Song of Achilles’ landed so hard it reorganized an entire generation’s reading habits. ‘Troy’ was a handsome swords-and-sandals war movie, and it had no chest-punch in it at all. Madeline Miller wasn’t remotely “faithful” either — she just knew what the story was for.
Same with EPIC. Jorge Rivera-Herrans wrote it as his senior thesis at Notre Dame, released it in nine sagas on TikTok, and it is nowhere near a straight retelling — the man cheerfully rearranges the plot to serve themes on monsters and ruthlessness, amongst others. Four billion-plus streams, full chart-topping album. Because it resonates.
Costumes don’t do it. Accuracy doesn’t do it. Casting doesn’t do it. Filming location definitely doesn’t do it.
Myth Resonance does it.
Why any of this survives
There’s a reason these stories are still here after three thousand years, two civilisational collapses, the loss of an entire writing system, and Hollywood.
Myth done properly holds a mirror up to the core of what it is to be human. It shows us what makes us and what breaks us. And the reason ‘The Odyssey’ has outlasted almost everything is that it isn’t a war story at all — it’s a story about the price of coming back from one. About a man who did unforgivable things, was called a hero for them, and had to be taken apart by goddesses and put back together before he was safe to let indoors.
Nolan understood that. He put the cost on screen. He let the women do the stripping. He gave us a man who wins and is broken by winning.
That’s the assignment. Everything else is set dressing.
Anyway. That’s what’s been living in my head rent-free all week instead of my actual WIP. My deadlines send their regards, and I could have made this three times as long. I have put below my personal book recommendations for the Odyssey and everything else.
Thanks, as always, for being here. For reading. For letting me be the person who cries in a cinema over a Bronze Age dog and then writes at least three thousand words about it.
Ames x
Recommendations:
The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, is for anyone who wants a direct translation of the poem (the audio version read by Claire Danes is also a chef’s kiss). Here is the YouTube link to Emily at the International Poetry forum reading parts of it to a live audience. Be warned, she does do the bit with the dog.
The Odyssey, by Stephen Fry, for anyone who wants an excellent retelling of the story itself. I highly recommend his whole Greek Myth series as they are, in my opinion, the very best out there.
Goddesses- Mysteries of the Divine Feminine, by Joseph Campbell, is an excellent primer that traces the evolution of the feminine divine from one Great Goddess to many, from Neolithic Old Europe to the Renaissance. It contains a full breakdown on the Iliad and Odyssey that is excellent.
Helen of Troy – Goddess, Princess, Whore, by Bettany Hughes, my personal favorite, reconstructs the context of life for this elusive prehistoric princess and places her alongside the heroes and heroines of myth and history. Through the eyes of a young Mycenaean woman, Hughes examines the physical, historical, and cultural traces that Helen has left on locations in Greece, North Africa, and Asia Minor. It is an all round excellent book for anyone who wants the history (as we know it so far) on this time period.
Hermes, Guide of Souls, by Karl Kerényi, for anyone who is interested in Odysseus and Hermes and how they connect, roles they play in the Odyssey, etc. (really, I’ll just never shut up about this book).