5 min readAug 3, 2026 03:44 PM IST First published on: Aug 3, 2026 at 03:44 PM ISTFor all its monsters, divine retribution, and shipwrecks, Odyssey has always been a poem about an ordinary human longing: The desire to go home. But homecoming is never a simple reversal of departure — time transforms both the place one leaves behind and the person who left it. And so, every return arrives with an element of estrangement. One can cross the threshold of one’s own house and still arrive as a stranger.Which is why watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey feels strangely unfulfilling. It is spectacular in its ambition, operatic in its vision of an extraordinary man overcoming impossible odds to reclaim his place in the world and at home. Unlike most Nolan films, it even allows its women their moments of assertion. But it leaves little emotional imprint because it refuses to engage with Odysseus in his complexity. Notwithstanding the travails of his journey or the ravages of time, the Odysseus who returns to Ithaca after 20 long years in the film is essentially the same man who left it.AdvertisementIn the London Review of Books, classicist Emily Wilson, whose 2017 feminist interpretation of Odyssey has been cited by Nolan as one of his chief source materials, writes, “Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.”Wilson’s review has drawn criticism, including from writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, for being dismissive — especially as a translator — of alternative readings of the classic. But it is difficult to discount her critique outright. The point of an adaptation has always been to engage with the question: What does this story mean now? But, as with most of his films, be it Memento (2000) or Oppenheimer (2023), Nolan reads the Homeric epic as a story of masculine perseverance, of one man’s attempts to overcome odds to return home.Also Read | How much kissing is too much kissing? CBFC has an answer for Spider-ManYet Odysseus is also more than the sum total of his greatness. In every telling and every translation, he is a great man. But his charisma is matched by his manipulation, his compassion by his propensity for startling brutality. And, as with all epics born of oral tradition — and this is perhaps why Nolan’s interpretation feels inadequate — he is also a storyteller. Homer invites us to admire his hero’s ingenuity, but also to wonder what kind of narrator he is. Odysseus survives not only because he is an extraordinary man, but because his greatness precludes the ability to shape a narrative: What to reveal, what to conceal, and how to cast himself in the best possible light. In that, both the epic and its hero are post-modern. Both are fascinated with the narrative itself, with the act and art of recounting the adventures at its core.AdvertisementIt makes Odyssey a poem about narrative authority, about who gets to tell the story, whose account gets accepted as truth and whose voice is dismissed. The Homeric epic never entirely separates storytelling from self-mythologising. Much of Odysseus’s adventures are revealed through his own telling. He is a man whose greatest talent lies in persuading others, and perhaps himself, of the justice of his actions. He is the story’s most accomplished spin doctor. It is this that makes the epic profoundly contemporary. We live in an age obsessed with narratives, with the idea of curated identities, of personal brands. Questions about who controls the story increasingly determine who controls power, and Homer asks, again and again, not who is the strongest, but who gets to tell the tale.you may likeThat complexity is largely absent from Nolan’s version. Matt Damon’s Odysseus joins the familiar gallery of Nolan protagonists, burdened by destiny, morally serious, defined by endurance, a Hollywood imagination of what stoicism entails. The result is an adaptation that is visually astonishing but intellectually narrow.The greatest epics hold out because they throw up new questions for every generation, even as they refuse to settle into a singular interpretation. Nolan’s film is a cinematic triumph, but in the end, it is the story of an uncomplicated man. It fails to move because it never stops to ask who ultimately gets to decide what home — and heroism — mean.The writer is senior associate editor, The Indian Express. paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com