Editor’s Note: All review content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.
There is a version of this review that begins by calling “The Odyssey” one of the worst adaptations of a classic text put to film in a generation, and that version would not be lying. But a film can be unfaithful to its source and faithful to itself, and Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” does both, often in the same scene, which is far more interesting than picking a single side.
There’s a sleight of hand in that ambiguity that Emily Wilson has named more precisely than anyone. We’re never shown that the war was wrong, only that Odysseus feels wrong about it, and the film treats the second point as proof of the first. Guilt becomes the alibi rather than the verdict. He gets to keep his goodness not despite what he did, but because of how visibly bad he feels about having done it, as if suffering over your own cruelty were the same achievement as not having been cruel.
A filmmaker so committed to having it both ways, absolution and accountability in the same breath, that the film asks you to admire a man for the very feeling that lets him off the hook.
Long before we meet a god, we meet the idea of one. Xenia, or the act of treating a stranger with generosity because the beggar at your door may be a god in disguise, is the film’s one genuinely rigorous idea. Odysseus broke it at Troy, razing a temple in the gods’ name, and the sanctity trails him home as the thing his own moral code can’t survive. The massacre of the suitors reads, if you squint, as that law finally executing itself, except the film never confirms the gods are watching, so what looks like divine justice might just be a man permitting himself to do what he wanted anyway.
This law is stated early, italicized often and violated by nearly everyone who claims to revere it. It is an excellent premise for a film about hypocrisy but a less excellent one for a film that wants its hero exempted from the hypocrisy it just spent three hours diagnosing.
Zendaya’s Athena, on screen for maybe 20 minutes, is the load-bearing wall of the entire film. There are two literal readings of who she was — a priestess or Athena herself in disguise — but the film isn’t interested in making you choose: Nolan match-cuts the beheading of her statue into the beheading of the woman herself, so stone and flesh become the same atrocity told twice. She’s indistinguishable because the stranger and the divine were never actually different categories of person. The film’s real engine is Odysseus’s slow realization that his men’s cruelty isn’t downstream of his own; these men were always exactly who they are, the war simply gave them room to show it.
Circe’s transformation of these soldiers into pigs posits the same line of inquiry as a metaphor: What does it say about men that this is what obedience looks like once it’s given a battlefield?
On the technical merits alone, this is a genuine Oscar film, old-fashioned, expensive, bull-headed filmmaking in an era that’s mostly forgotten what it looks like.
Sinon, borrowed and inverted from Virgil, is the film’s most clever structural addition: A boy talked into someone else’s war is mirrored against Antinous, the aristocrat’s son who talked his way out of fighting, a fairly unsubtle indictment of whose sons go to war and whose don’t.
The film’s American subtext requires no excavation. Casting Matt Damon and having the ensemble deliver Homer in contemporary American speech isn’t an accident of accessibility, but rather the thesis. Once the horse’s belly opens and the city burns, Nolan wants you thinking about scorched-earth resistance and a nation that preaches love-thy-neighbor hospitality while remaining the most consistently warring country on the planet.
That gap — visual sophistication married to thematic sledgehammering — is the whole problem once you look at what got cut to make room for the sledgehammer. There’s no “Nobody” trick with Polyphemus, no scene where Odysseus’s actual, demonstrated cunning saves his men; we’re simply told, by other characters, how clever he is. A trickster who never tricks anyone is a story that has hollowed out its central figure to make him easier to love.
That sympathy-project runs through the film’s whole moral architecture, which is where the most serious critique lives, the one Emily Wilson made with precision in her public response. Homer’s Odysseus is, frankly, kind of an asshole; the poem ends with him ordering the deaths of the household maids who slept with the suitors, a savagery the epic doesn’t flinch away from, but that Nolan simply cuts. That’s the trick. An Odysseus rewritten to be legible as a wounded veteran rather than recognizable as the ruthless, self-mythologizing operator Homer gave us. Sanding down a man’s cruelty to make his guilt more comfortable to sit with isn’t moral seriousness.
I don’t think the film wants to resolve this, and I don’t think one should try. If the entire premise of Xenia is that any stranger might secretly be divine, then a film that refuses to tell you whether the woman Odysseus killed was a goddess or merely a girl has, through that refusal, made the law’s argument better than the law itself makes it.
Yet the same generosity I extend to Athena, I can’t extend to the rest of the pantheon. We’re never shown Zeus, never shown Poseidon, never given a god with any real agency. You cannot have consequences this cosmic but refuse to stage the cosmos handing them down. Ambiguity, deployed once with purpose, is a thesis; deployed everywhere as a habit, it’s an evasion wearing the thesis’s clothes. This is how the film gets to have its violence both ways, wanting credit for moral complexity while still handing you, in the massacre of the suitors, the most satisfying kill sequence in the runtime, entirely unburdened by the horror any serious treatment of violence is supposed to cost.
The women fare worse and better than that sentence alone can hold. Nolan cuts the entire Phaeacian episode, so Queen Arete and Nausicaa — two of the poem’s most vivid, self-possessed female characters — simply don’t exist here; every remaining woman exists largely as a tableau, glimpsed and moved past. And yet every act of male violence routes, eventually, through a woman’s cost: Helen carries the physical evidence of a war fought against her will, Clytemnestra is murdered for seeking justice and Calypso absorbs the labor of repairing broken men who then leave her.
Athena, read all the way through, functions as a proxy for Penelope: Odysseus’s unforgivable sin was defiling the protection his wife had invoked on his behalf. Penelope becomes every woman he failed at Troy, and the ending is his attempt, belated and insufficient, to repay a debt with no clean settlement available. Nolan grants his guilty men absolution more readily than he grants his wronged women resolution, an asymmetry worth naming in a director who has never, across an entire career, centered a film on a woman.
The real question beneath all the online fighting isn’t whether Nolan got the poem right. It’s whether we trust him, as an interpreter of a text that has survived 3,000 years precisely because every generation feels entitled to bend it toward its own urgencies, with something this many people feel they personally own.
“The Odyssey” is not a good adaptation, but it is, on craft alone, a genuinely great piece of American filmmaking. It flattens its hero into someone easier to love and in the process loses the cunningness that made him worth 3,000 years of retelling. It erases women who required no invention while building its entire emotional architecture around what men take from women and rarely finish repaying. That contradiction, held open rather than resolved, is the truest thing the film has to say, whether or not it understands that it’s saying it. We keep going back to Troy because we’ve never actually left it. Every generation gets the war it deserves, and then, if we’re lucky, the guilt to go with it.
Reach Maci Lesh at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @macileshmedia.
