An Odyssey of Hot Takes

My take on the adaptation that launched a thousand think pieces

Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon

When I started Becoming Literary, I told myself it would also give me a space to dabble in other forms of writing about topics beyond the classroom. I suppose doing a review of the Odyssey is hardly a feat of interdisciplinary daring-do, but I enjoyed stretching some different muscles with this one. It’s fairly brief and not comprehensive, but I want to practice writing some pieces of criticism that don’t require me to go back through my dissertation’s work cited page for the millionth time. Enjoy!

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It’s hardly a surprise that, in the year of our lord 2026, an adaptation of a Greek epic directed by the guy who made the Dark Knight trilogy and featuring an A-List cast including Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, and Eliot Page sparked Big Discourse(tm) online. The purpose of this review is not to unpack the bad faith, ahistorical, white supremacist clown takes that have roiled across the right wing chudosphere for the last 6 months, as there are plenty of other folks who have done that work.

Instead, I wanted to elaborate on a note that I posted and focus on what I read to be the “take” that structured Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey. When I first started formulating my interpretation, and especially after hearing it echoed so clearly on Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley’s “Why Theory?” podcast, I didn’t think my perspective was that unique. The more I read into the The Discourse, however, and the more people engaged positively with the note I reflexively spat out after viewing, the more I felt it would be worth it to flesh out my interpretation.

I can totally sympathize with the critiques that Damon’s Odysseus was yet another brooding Nolan hero whose whole being is determined by some past trauma. From The Dark Knight through Oppenheimer, his characters—and by extension his storytelling oeuvre—are defined by emotional compartmentalization, intellectual fixation, and bloodless, self-imposed asceticism. The result is a rather joyless rendition of the Greek hero, sapped of the wit and charm of his page-bound counterparts. As classicist Emily Wilson—whose landmark translation served as primary inspiration for the film—pointed out in her blistering review for the London Review of Books and interview in The Ringer, the adaptation transforms the wily, storytelling survivor of the epic into an "uncomplicated action hero who feels bad about being an action hero." His hubris—so central to basically every conflict in The Odyssey—is also muted. As is his libidinal investment in testing and tasting the fruits of various lady goddesses across the ancient world. In the classical epic, Odysseus’s lingering with Circe or Calypso is driven by a rapacious carnal appetite and a hero's curiosity to conquer the divine on both the battlefield and in the bedroom. In the film version, he is more of a lotus-eating Ken doll than well-endowed Homeric playboy

Without these flaws, Odysseus loses much of the moral ambiguity that made him such an interesting hero in the first place. Instead of many-faced, virile, swaggering, boasting, clever, flawed, wise, playful Odysseus we get “wise warrior monk living in a shame-cage of his own making” Odysseus; a label that would describe J. Robert Oppenheimer and Bruce Wayne with equal accuracy. Gone is the clever “I’m nobody!” Odysseus and the boastful, flesh-and-blood Odysseus who wept, feasted, lied, and lusted his way across the Mediterranean. Instead, Nolan gives us a sour, self-flagellating stoic—a hero who navigates the ancient world not out of a hunger for life fully lived, but under the crushing momentum of his own guilty conscience.

Here is where my interpretation of Nolan’s “take” diverges from much of what I’ve seen in The Discourse though. Many viewers and critics seem to assume that Odysseus’s shame is a product of the violence he unleashed on Troy. They see his trauma and regret as a rather obvious analogue to the alienation felt by modern veterans, particularly those in the era of America’s forever-wars, as they reckon with the acts of violence they carried out for a cause they no longer believe in. If that were as deep as it got, then I’d probably be right alongside the critics. I think, however, this is missing something vital about why Odysseus is such a sad sack for the whole film. I’d even go as far as to say the interpretation I offer in the next section is the beating heart of this version’s “take” on The Odyssey.

Unlike most of the criticism I’ve seen of the film, I don’t think Nolan’s Odysseus has PTSD about violently murdering people, even innocent ones. He doesn’t even really have regret over the sacking of Troy as such. His trauma stems solely from the fact that he weaponized xenia—the sacred law of guest-host hospitality overseen by Zeus Xenios—to pull it off.

In the world Homer’s poems imagine, xenia was one of several overlapping sacral protections that held civilization together. In truth, it was primarily an aristocratic institution—a network of reciprocal obligation binding elite households to one another across generations. It did, however, sit alongside broader protections for the vulnerable stranger, rooted in the anxiety that any beggar might be a god in disguise. These interlocking codes demanded that hosts offer food, shelter, and safety before even asking a guest’s name, while in return requiring guests to honor the sanctity of their host’s home. They were the social infrastructure that allowed for commerce, knowledge sharing, alliance building, and all other forms of exchange. In essence, it was the means through which a civilization could grow the connective tissue it needed to survive.

By framing the Trojan Horse as a sacred offering governed by Zeus’s Law, Nolan’s Odysseus turns this divine trust into a lethal instrument. He uses the very dictum that enabled Greek civilization to thrive as a feint to deliver the exact form of barbarism it was designed to prevent. This interpretive angle elevates his guilt: his agony is not over a single, albeit horrible, genocidal war, but over shattering the ethical foundation that Greek civilization was built upon. The Trojan War itself began with a violation of xenia: Paris, while a guest in Menelaus’s home, stole away his host’s wife. Such a transgression may have cracked the foundation xenia provided, but Odysseus winning the war through escalating that breach at a civilizational scale will doom all of Greece in the process.

Furthermore, this means Odysseus’s fear about returning home isn’t a traditional “soldier dreads returning after doing bad stuff” story. The true reason he hesitates is his anxiety over what his destruction of xenia will bring to his own doorstep. Agamemnon serves as the tragic blueprint for this ruined order: stepping oblivious into his own hall, he is slaughtered in the bath under the guise of a welcoming feast in a grotesque, domestic inversion of guest-right. Agamemnon, the man portrayed as an unflinching ghost of war in every scene prior to his death, is killed the instant he returns home. His death serves as a warning that, though he may be able to take off his helmet, the transgressions against his own people could not be set aside so easily. Odysseus, who was always a bit more savvy than his departed king, senses that, having killed the old rules, home is no longer a sanctuary, and very possibly, even a tomb.

This reading also transforms the off-screen threat of the “men from the sea.” Popular theories regarding the Late Bronze Age Collapse suggest that the mysterious “Sea Peoples” who ravaged the Mediterranean included displaced Mycenaean veterans wandering the post-war world. Nolan takes up this historical hypothesis to form a thesis of his own. In his film, the “men from the sea” aren’t a mysterious force threatening Greece from the outside. They aren’t even unruly veterans who simply decided to pillage their way home from Troy. They are everyone who fought in the war, including Odysseus and his men. They are those who shattered the foundational law of Greek life, forfeiting their standing within the shared nomos of the Hellenic world. Having destroyed the sacred code of hospitality that allowed named, ordered places to form and flourish in the first place, they have become stateless phantoms too afraid to return to a home they may not recognize—or that may no longer recognize them.

This might work to resolve Wilson’s claim that the film applies a double standard — condemning violence against Troy for its xenia violation while endorsing the slaughter of the suitors for theirs. I think one could make the case this is a misreading of the moral stakes of the final scene. Part of Odysseus’s grief is that he holds himself responsible for the suitors actions, but simply because he was away at war, but because his actions in Troy are the very reason for their predation. This version of Odysseus does not kill the men out of vengeance or justice, but as yet another form of recompense for his sins. His breach of xenia, and the subsequent chaos it unleashed, foreclosed the ability to resolve the suitor situation peacefully. There was no way to save his family from his sins except through violence.

This is what I take to be Nolan’s central take. Instead of treating The Odyssey as the tragic adventure of a flawed, complex man, he used it as a vehicle to explore what happens when we forsake the bonds and agreements that societies are built upon. I’d imagine it is also one of the reasons that folks with a particularly strong investment in or attachment to the original Greek epic are having such a visceral reaction to the film. While Nolan was clearly invested in creating the scale and spectacle of the original story, he was less interested in using it to make the arguments that it has been historically deployed to make. It’s fine to dislike or disagree with his take on The Odyssey, but while I sympathize with some of Wilson’s arguments I also find it weird that a translator—who experienced quite a bit of grief about her own work being too modern and simple—would have such smoke for someone who had their own unique take on The Odyssey. Yet, whatever one thinks of Nolan’s departure from Homeric tradition, one must acknowledge that his adaptation at least attempted to offer a diagnostic for our present cultural anxiety.

It’s notable that Nolan’s political sensibilities have clearly shifted since The Dark Knight trilogy. As Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley often emphasize, the political logic underpinning many of Nolan’s films is organized around a constitutive lie—the tragic contradiction where a social order relies on a foundational deception or breach to survive. In The Dark Knight, the extra-legal surveillance and noble lies were treated as dangerous, temporary measures to preserve a fragile Gotham—a plot point often read as apologia for the passing of The Patriot Act. With Oppenheimer, this logic shifts towards the tragedy of institutional complicity, showing how liberal technocrats who think they can ethically guide the state power apparatus will eventually be crushed by it. By the time we reach The Odyssey, Nolan seems to have sunken even more into despair, wondering if the existential harm we have inflicted on ourselves is so great, if our loss of trust is so fundamental, that no hero or institution can repair the damage done.

Yet this liberal anxiety carries inherent limits. The foundational protections of American civic life—due process, asylum, sanctuary—have never been extended equally across lines of race, class, and gender. Much like ancient guest-rights, which functioned as an elite pact long before they were idealized as universal virtues, our own social contracts have always been fraught and exclusionary. What makes Nolan’s adaptation hit home, however, is the terrifying threshold a society crosses when it stops even pretending to honor those ideals. When ICE conducts raids in churches, schools, hospitals, and courthouses, it reflects the exact political nightmare Nolan is probing: the moment protective structures are either dismantled, or worse still, weaponized into sites of ambush.

The Trojan Horse Nolan fears is institutional: the realization that the structures built to protect us have been hollowed out and filled with violence and deceit. It’s fair to say this reflects a distinctly liberal vision of doom—the collapse of a worldview that placed far too much stock in aspirational rhetoric, elite stewardship, and managerial control and far too little faith in the demos. Yet it turns Nolan’s Odyssey into an urgent parable for a culture whose sacred social contracts are under siege. More poignant still, once the film leaves the communal sanctuary of the theater, it will be livestreamed on the same devices viewers use to witness that potential collapse.

PS: That’s right—don’t think I didn’t notice Nolan’s attempt to shoehorn a line in at the end about the literacy crisis! For those of you who missed it, Damon’s final VO shares Odysseus’s decree that his tale would be sung just in case they lost the ability to read and write in the coming dark age. If you haven’t read my article on the “literacy crisis” then consider checking it out before we all forget how to.