ON JULY 17, THE BRITISH DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN will see his most ambitious and expensive film yet hitting theatres worldwide—a $250 million adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Odyssey (written somewhere between the late 8th and late 7th century BC). The film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca, as he embarks on an arduous ten-year journey back home after the conclusion of the Trojan War, which itself took a decade. On his way, Odysseus is obstructed repeatedly by enraged gods and goddesses, mythical creatures (like witches, giants and sirens) and a wide range of extreme-weather phenomena. Back home in Ithaca, meanwhile, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) uses increasingly artful ways to ward off a host of gluttonous suitors while her son Telemachus (Tom Holland), an infant when Odysseus left home, wonders when he will meet his fabled father.
Nolan is easily the most popular filmmaker in the world today among young men in particular, thanks to his array of comic book blockbusters (The Dark Knight, Batman Begins) and high-concept science fiction thrillers (Tenet, Inception, Interstellar). Like the Homeric heroes before them, Nolan’s protagonists are men tested by impossible circumstances, asked to endure more than to explain themselves. His films offer a language of purpose, sacrifice and competence that has long defined the appeal of heroic epics.
Since the trailer for The Odyssey was released, however, he has received a significant amount of backlash from male conservative commentators, not least Elon Musk who remains a hero in the eyes of a lot of young men worldwide. The points of contention include the casting of actresses Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya as Helen of Troy and goddess Athena, respectively. There has been criticism, also, of the actors deploying contemporary American accents in the trailer.
Nolan has explained during several interviews that the linguistic and casting choices were both informed by a 2018 translation of The Odyssey by the British-American classicist Emily Wilson. The first woman to have translated The Odyssey into English, her edition has been widely praised by literary critics, academics and lay readers alike.
Wilson’s linguistic choices alone make her rendition of The Odyssey a modern classic. Her translation of the opening invocation—“ Tell me about a complicated man”— has been analysed at length in literary pages around the world. The original line calls Odysseus “polytropos”, literally a ‘man of many turns’. While earlier translations favoured phrases like “a many-sided man” or “a man of many ways”, Wilson's choice of “complicated” is more than a metrical decision; it reframes the hero for a modern audience who associate the word with a multitude, a mixture of good and bad qualities, in line with Homer’s characterisation of Odysseus. Nolan has said in interviews that he wanted to emphasise Odysseus’ cunning, inventiveness and capacity for improvisation. Wilson’s opening complements that vision, inviting readers to see Odysseus not as an untouchable legend, but as fallible, human hero.
Mind you, The Odyssey is not merely Odysseus’ journey back home, it is also young Telemachus’ road to becoming a man, and a dominant Greek man of his time, too. Homer gives both characters a lot of traditional male-hero action, not least in the third act when they unite to mercilessly slaughter Penelope’s suitors. But there are also moments of unexpected tenderness, such as Telemachus and Odysseus weeping upon their reunion. Wilson’s rendition of this scene is simple yet powerful, the duo lamenting what they have lost in the intervening twenty years.
“With that, he sat back down. Telemachus
hurled his arms round his father, and he wept.
They both felt deep desire for lamentation,
and wailed with cries as shrill as birds, like eagles
or vultures, when the hunters have deprived them
of fledglings who have not yet learned to fly.
That was how bitterly they wept (...)”
Wilson makes equally sound translation choices when it comes to the goddess Athena (“bright-eyed Athena” as her epithet goes). She suggests, in her introductory essay, that by the standards of the Homeric era the Athena-Odysseus equation was quite subversive. Firstly, it’s the female character who dominates the archetypal male warrior-hero, as she uses her powers to aid Odysseus. Secondly, there is an edge of flirtatiousness between them which Wilson brings out in moments of levity, like the time she disguises herself and calls him “Mr Foreigner” with a jaunty manner. There are other feminist interventions that Wilson executes across the text—like pointedly describing Penelope’s hands (shaped by all those hours of weaving) with the masculine-coded descriptor “muscular”, or using “slave woman” instead of defensive options like “maid” or “servant”.
Wilson herself has said that a poem like The Odyssey, invested in female fidelity and male dominance, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman. Wilson’s edition strips away some of the marble and restores Odysseus’s humanity. If Nolan’s adaptation follows that lead, it may not be making The Odyssey “woke” so much as reminding us why these stories have endured. Mythology’s greatest heroes were never flawless icons, but complicated men trying, against extraordinary odds, to find their way home.