Why the Odyssey Endures From Homer to Nolan
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- Christopher Nolan is adapting Homer's Odyssey into a summer blockbuster, with trailers promising the Cyclops Polyphemus, the land of the dead, and storms sent by vengeful gods
- The Odyssey, attributed to Homer and likely written in the 600s or 500s BC, draws on a centuries-long oral tradition — a fact established by American classicist Milman Parry's 1930s studies of Balkan epic singers
- Daniel Mendelsohn, in his recent translation's introduction, lists Dante's Inferno, Star Trek, The Wizard of Oz, Pride and Prejudice, and Game of Thrones among works where the Odyssey's ideas resurface, alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and Derek Walcott's Omeros
- The 12,000-line poem follows Odysseus's tortuous homecoming from Troy — encounters with Calypso, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis — before he returns to Ithaca in disguise as a beggar to test his household's loyalty and reclaim his wife Penelope from violent suitors
- The author reads the poem's homecoming themes through four years of reporting from Ukraine, drawing parallels between ancient soldiers returning as strangers and modern ones whose relationships don't survive the front or must be rebuilt around trauma and disability
- The poem contains scenes of bards telling stories inside the epic itself, making it — in the author's phrase — feel 'more postmodern than ancient' and helping explain why it flexes into new shapes with every rereading
Why it matters: The Odyssey's 12,000-line, self-referential structure — with bards telling stories inside the epic itself — is exactly the quality that has let it seed Joyce's Ulysses, Game of Thrones, and Finding Nemo across radically different eras. Nolan's film will test whether a $200M-scale blockbuster can honor a text the author argues is closer to postmodern metafiction than ancient adventure yarn, and whether audiences still respond to its core question: what happens when a soldier comes home and his family no longer knows him.
