Nolan’s Odyssey: Virtues and Shortcomings

Juan Cristóbal Cruz Revueltas (30 July 2026)

There is no doubt that we owe Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey our gratitude for having brought Homer’s name back into the conversations of younger generations. We may also credit the film with the virtue of drawing attention to episodes and themes from ancient Greece that are less familiar to modern audiences. Yet these merits should not prevent us from observing that Nolan’s interpretation takes certain liberties with the original texts. He is, of course, entitled to do so. Nevertheless, it is worth pausing over some of these departures, for otherwise we risk unnecessarily obscuring Homer’s meanings while overlooking what belongs specifically to Nolan’s own historical moment.

Among the film’s less obvious episodes, perhaps the most revealing is that of Butes. The reference has probably escaped many critics because it does not come from Homer but from the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the third-century BC poet. In Nolan’s version, Butes leaps overboard and throws himself into the sea, while the prudent Odysseus, bound to the mast, listens to the song of the Sirens without placing his life in danger. One cannot help wondering whether Christopher Nolan—or perhaps his brother Jonathan, the director’s closest collaborator and the creator of acclaimed series such as Westworld—has read Pascal Quignard. For the French writer, Butes is not a secondary figure but the reverse image of both Odysseus and Orpheus: where they resist or master the Sirens’ song, Butes abandons himself to it. His leap embodies the decision to desert the civilized world and surrender to the oldest of all calls: that of immediate sensation, of the desire to merge with the sea and with primordial song.

Moreover, in this sequence, filmed by Nolan with remarkable intensity, what is at stake is not merely different ways of hearing the Sirens’ song, but different human responses to truth and beauty. The allusion is significant. The French philosopher Barbara Cassin has suggested that one of the central passages of Parmenides’ poem On Nature may be read as a paraphrase of this very episode, transformed from a maritime adventure into an image of the journey toward knowledge. Seen in this light, Odysseus lashed to the mast ceases to be merely the prudent hero who resists temptation; he also becomes a precursor of Plato’s philosopher, the one who separates himself from ordinary human beings in order to attain a vision they can scarcely glimpse. Yet this same interpretation lends even greater significance to Butes’ presence, for his leap introduces a radically different possibility: not to know by mastering the song, but by surrendering to it.

If Nolan succeeds in introducing the figure of Butes, it is somewhat surprising that he relegates to the background what this character ultimately embodies: the full affirmation of sensuous beauty and the pleasure it awakens. One need not be a philosopher to notice the striking absence of sensuality in Nolan’s portrayal even of the leading actresses in his cast. Quite apart from the debate surrounding the color of her skin, the film presents Helen with a disfigured face in the scene in which Telemachus arrives at Menelaus’ court—a disfigurement that has no counterpart in Homer. Likewise, Nolan seems to overlook the fact that a large part of Circe’s bewitching power derives precisely from her capacity for seduction and from the erotic dimension that accompanies her figure throughout the poem.

This is no minor matter. For the Greeks, sensuous beauty exerts its spell because it persuades us that an ordinary mortal may in fact be a god, and because it allows us to glimpse, within the visible world, a reflection of the order of the cosmos. This conviction runs through the entire history of Greek art, from before the Dark Ages to, at the very least, the Classical period, and was later inherited by Rome. In the middle of the fifth century BC, Pericles gave memorable expression to this ideal in his celebrated Funeral Oration, distilling Homeric wisdom into a single, decisive phrase: “We cultivate beauty without extravagance and wisdom without softness.”

Perhaps this apparent indifference to beauty is more intelligible if we recall that Nolan, although he has on occasion quoted Christopher Marlowe’s famous description of Helen as “the face that launched a thousand ships,” seems, in keeping with the puritanical temper of our own age, to have preferred to leave its most disturbing implication in the shadows. That men may die for beauty alone accounts for an essential part of the fascination Homer has exercised over the Western imagination. As recently as the twentieth century, William Carlos Williams evoked this idea with remarkable clarity in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, his subtle homage to Homer:

Theres comes to mind

The Iliad

And Helen’s public fault

That bred it.

Where it not for that

There would have been

No poem but the world.

Nolan, by contrast, chooses to emphasize the image of an Odysseus consumed by guilt: guilty of violating the code of hospitality (xenia), of having sent his companions to their deaths, and of having taken part in the sack of Troy. It is for this reason that some critics have observed that Nolan’s Odysseus recalls a familiar figure from American cinema: the war veteran who returns home marked by the psychological trauma of combat.

Nolan is, of course, entirely entitled to draw upon that tradition, just as he is free to imagine a Trojan Horse half-buried in the sand, evoking the ruined Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes. Yet nothing prevents us from turning back to Homer’s Odyssey and to the work of E. R. Dodds, who, in The Greeks and the Irrational, advanced a decisive thesis: the Homeric world was not organized around a culture of guilt.

For Dodds, the Greek heroes lacked the kind of moral interiority that would become far more pronounced with Christianity. What mattered to them was not inward guilt but public approval or disapproval; not the torment of conscience but honor, glory, and shame. In the Homeric universe, disastrous decisions were not attributed to an evil conscience but to the intervention of the gods. Odysseus, therefore, is not an ancient Oppenheimer, defined by inner contradictions and crushed by an unbearable burden of guilt. Homer’s Odysseus is a man of mētis—resourceful, cunning, and therefore morally ambiguous, even unsettling—whose choices are often difficult to reconcile with the ethical sensibilities of the modern reader.

Nolan is right, following Dante Alighieri, to remind us that Odysseus will one day leave Ithaca again. Yet in Homer this second voyage does not represent an existential sentence or the fate of a tormented soul. It is simply the fulfillment of the condition imposed by Poseidon before Odysseus can finally enjoy a peaceful return to his homeland. Friedrich Nietzsche understood this Homeric Odysseus perfectly when, in Daybreak, he called him “this happy adventurer.”