Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Juan Cristóbal Cruz Revueltas (13/07/2026)

“Every age has the rebirth of Antiquity it deserves,” maintained Aby Warburg, the historian who devoted his life to studying the transmission of ancient imagery into the modern world. If, by some miracle, Warburg—who died nearly a century ago—could witness Christopher Nolan’s latest work, he would surely be delighted to see how the British-American director, relying on the extraordinary capabilities of 70mm IMAX cameras, returns to that three-thousand-year-old poetic and visual treasure that is Homer’s Odyssey. This return to Antiquity should not surprise us, still less the return to Homer. It has been a recurring gesture throughout the history of Western civilization. Already in Classical Greece, Homer was regarded as the great educator. From childhood, boys were expected to become familiar with his works; Plato himself sought to challenge Homer’s influence over the young; and Alexander, the future king of Macedon, dreamed of emulating Achilles.

In Nolan’s case, one might think this represents a departure from his previous work. It does not. By his own admission, Homer’s influence has been present throughout his entire filmography. Nolan acknowledges, to cite only one example, that Alfred Tennyson’s nineteenth-century poem Ulysses influenced the epilogue of Interstellar. The parallel with his latest film is striking: in both, Anne Hathaway embodies the figure of the promised home. The many echoes of Homeric influence become even clearer when we recall that the Ulysses poem cited by Nolan also refers to the Ulysses who appears in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Those who argue that Western literature is essentially a continuous rewriting of Homeric themes may not be entirely mistaken. Homer himself anticipates this future cultural legacy in the Odyssey, when King Alcinous declares: “The gods devised the Trojan War and wove the destruction of so many men so that future generations would have songs to sing.”

Homer’s epics are often presented as the first great literary works of the West—“the most foundational,” as Nolan puts it. Yet had Nolan wished to avoid the familiar criticism of focusing exclusively on his own cultural tradition, he might well have nodded toward the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose protagonist ruled the city of Uruk around 2750 BCE—that is, an epic composed roughly two thousand years before Homer and probably fifteen hundred years before the Trojan War. The Epic of Gilgamesh opens by describing its hero as “he who saw all the ends of the earth, all that was hidden. He explored everywhere. Endowed with supreme wisdom, he embraced everything in a single glance: he beheld secrets and discovered mysteries” (translated from Jean Bottéro’s French edition). This great poem circulated for centuries in multiple versions throughout Mesopotamia. The comparison is justified because the Epic of Gilgamesh—especially the so-called Nineveh version—not only contains many of the major Homeric themes—the hero’s journey, friendship, descent into the underworld, human mortality, the complex relationship with the gods—but also expresses some of their deepest meanings.

If, for example, we consider the problem of human finitude, we find that in the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu initially seek glory and hope to escape death. Yet, unlike what would later occur in the monotheistic religions, they ultimately accept their mortal condition. Something similar happens to Odysseus, whom Calypso offers immortality and eternal youth, but who likewise chooses to embrace his mortal destiny. In both cases, the meaning of life is immanent: it lies in having lived fully, embracing all its beauty without denying all its horror. The influence and parallelism between Gilgamesh and the Homeric poems are also significant because they remind us that, for thousands of years, the Mediterranean constituted a shared civilization. Homer’s world confirms this by depicting fierce enemies—the Achaeans and the Trojans—who nonetheless converse with one another, worship the same gods, share the same rituals, and even end by weeping together. As readers of the Iliad, we may sympathize equally with Achilles or Hector, because there is no good people opposed to an evil one; there are only individuals confronting their tragic destiny.

Returning to Nolan, the director succeeds in inviting us into the world of Odysseus. In many respects, it is a reality profoundly close to our own. Yet, paradoxically, the Odyssey is also immensely compelling because of everything that separates us from that archaic world. Unlike ours, the world of the ancient Greeks is an ordered whole—a cosmos. Certainly, the Odyssey recounts the anguished struggle of one man to survive and return to Ithaca. But the line from the film’s teaser—“Then I challenge the gods”—reveals more about Nolan than about Odysseus. The phrase does not appear in the Odyssey, and indeed Odysseus himself could scarcely have uttered it. From beginning to end, we know that—with the sole exception of Poseidon—Odysseus is loved and protected by the gods. At the outset, Zeus himself responds to Athena’s reproach that he has neglected Odysseus’s miserable fate: “How could I so quickly forget noble Odysseus, who surpasses all mortals in cunning and who, more than any other, has offered sacrifices to the immortal gods who dwell in the broad heavens?”

The philosopher Luc Ferry helps us understand that the Odyssey is, in many ways, a moral journey: “the passage from war and hatred to love, from exile to home.” We may add that it is also the passage from the wild world, where Odysseus has no name, to the world in which, prompted by King Alcinous, he can finally speak his name, weave together his memories, and recount his own story. It is likewise, as Jacqueline de Romilly perceptively observes (Walls of Troy, Shores of Ithaca, 2022), a journey in which the figure of woman gradually softens and becomes more fully human. It begins with the enchantress Circe, who transforms men into animals; it continues with the divine nymph Calypso, who offers Odysseus immortality; and it culminates in Penelope, the wife who offers him a home.

Nolan’s world is more fragile than that of the ancients. In his universe, the human being stands alone before the cosmos. One may concede that there is something modern about Odysseus: his cunning, which can anger the gods yet enables him to escape the gravest dangers and distance himself from magical thinking; his curiosity; and his desire to understand the world. But the Greek hero must return to Ithaca because that is the place assigned to him within the order of the cosmos. It is true that Odysseus is a violent man, “the sacker of cities,” as Homer calls him. Yet Nolan’s modern man—like the protagonists of Oppenheimer or Interstellar—is a far more radical destroyer. For that reason, the terrible sentence from the Bhagavad Gita, which recurs in Oppenheimer’s nightmares in Nolan’s film, belongs more fittingly to Nolan’s solitary universe—one that may also be our own: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”