As it surpasses $1 billion in box office revenue just weeks after its release, Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey continues to stir longstanding debates—and enhance the study of myth and movies at CU Boulder

“It is a truism that historical films are always about the time in which they are made and never about the time in which they are set.” So opens Jeffrey Richards’ 2008 book Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds, published after the turn-of-the-century flurry of Gladiator, Troy, Alexander and 300. How much truer is it of movies based not on any real historical moments, but rather on myths and literature of antiquity? 

Much of the controversy about The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s $1 billion-and-counting epic, has centered around questions of authenticity, faithfulness to the source or, more directly, how Nolan has imagined it: the racially diverse casting, the level of remorse (and chastity) shown by a Homeric hero, the absence of Achilles or women in the Land of the Dead, even how well any of the actors can draw a bow. 

Mitchell Pentzer is a lecturer and Latin program coordinator in the CU Boulder Department of Classics.

When viewing a film explicitly based on such a famous work, certain expectations are understandable, and sorting through those expectations is something students at CU Boulder could do in a Department of Classics course, CLAS 3400, titled “Swords and Sandals on the Silver Screen”—more colloquially known as “Classics and Film.” In this course, students unpack expectations, get past questions of authenticity and dig into what films inspired by ancient history and literature are trying to do with the source material. We can see how writers and directors use antiquity’s art and history as vehicles to explore ideas important to us today; that is, if a movie is not (just) about some historical event or ancient text, what is it about?

We learn far less—about our own moment and culture, and about antiquity as well—from picking on what a director and their team get wrong, and far more from investigating the positive decisions made to accomplish their vision. And the vision of Nolan’s Odyssey is less one of ancient heroes and monsters than it is one of a fragile, modern, even global civilization.

As Nolan’s latest blockbuster gets variously knocked around or defended on social media and in longer-form reviews and opinion pieces (Emily Wilson in the London Review of Books, Wilson again in The Atlantic, Theo Nash in Slate, and Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books are some landmarks), its predecessor in treating Homeric epic, 2004’s Troy, has appeared as an obvious point of comparison. We open “Classics and Film” with this movie, directed by Wolfgang Petersen of Das Boot and written by David Benioff of HBO’s Game of Thrones. 

And although Troy has the enduring star power of Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom (Legolas in the Lord of the Rings films), it wasn’t so well-received upon its release. Nevertheless, some of today’s critics of The Odyssey have cited Troy as the exemplary treatment of Homeric epic in film. It isn’t, for many reasons, but among them is the conspicuous figuring of the steely-gray-armored Greeks as secular, cynical, greedy invaders of an Eastern Trojan nation characterized by earth tones and a religiosity deemed outdated even by its defenders. Was this film really meant to present an unadulterated, authentic Iliad, or was it really a product of a world at that moment watching the United States wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan? 

A more faithful presentation of ancient text is Michael Cacoyannis’ 1977 film Iphigenia, sometimes delivering lines from Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis as verbatim as can be. Yet Cacoyannis, through choice cinematography and editing, still offers a warning about the dangers of mobs and armies that reflects the experience of Greeks who lived under the 1967-1974 military junta and witnessed the violence at Athens Polytechnic in 1973. 

The Coen brothers, on the other hand, sidestep the matter of Homeric faithfulness by following the Odysseus of 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, George Clooney’s Ulysses Everett McGill, through 1930s Mississippi instead of the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Still, the film explores ideas central to Homer’s own Odyssey: What makes civil society, justice and a person’s identity?

Nolan’s Odyssey, in contrast to that other treatment of Homer’s Odyssey, looks and feels nominally ancient, if not Bronze Age, through set design, costuming (for the most part), and even some of the musical scoring. The decision to embrace American accents (the British Tom Holland’s Telemachus shows us it’s not careless but deliberate) instead of some vaguely British one—more common for the sword-and-sandal epic—is the first indication that this retelling isn’t just about a mythical and ancient world, or even one in a minor way distanced from our own. 

People have picked on Telemachus calling his father “Dad” for being anachronistic—as though ancient Greeks must honor father and mother without diminutives—but Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess who discovers the shipwrecked Odysseus, calls her father πάππα (“Pappa” or “Daddy”) in Book 6 of Homer’s text. They’re not altogether different from us.

Then there are certain objects that seem deliberately anachronistic and embody a theme of modernity. The Trojan Horse is for Nolan an instrument of destruction that breaks Zeus’ law, a version of xenia, an imperative of hospitality for ancient Greeks, that was broadened by the film for a post-Christian world. It is so conspicuously crafted, nigh-unbelievably smoothed and curved (in far better shape than the decaying palace on Ithaca, despite being constructed on a beach by an army 10 years into its campaign), as to seem Classical or even modern—in contrast to Troy’s almost laughably ramshackle horse. 

This fantasy, this work of amazing craftsmanship that leads to the end of a civilization, bears obvious similarities to the atomic bomb in Nolan’s Oppenheimer, as viewers have already observed. Likewise, Agamemnon’s armor is black, spotless, plastic-seeming, like Darth Vader or a brand-new action figure; this Agamemnon, greed-driven as always, is an impersonal, artificial product of industry, and the more ominous for that. 

A scene of Odysseus and his men from Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film The Odyssey. (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

The film doesn’t limit its conscious modernity to visual elements. Composer Ludwig Göransson’s score stands out as perhaps the most original in the genre, with reconstructed ancient instruments holding pride of place much of the time. Odysseus’ theme on pipes and flutes, when he converses with Penelope before the trial of the bow and axes and recounts his transgressions, is suitably haunting. The ancient aulos, an ancestor of the oboe, backs the Sirens, a panoply of bronze gongs adds texture throughout the film, and the repeated bow-pluck has a lyre behind it in homage to an authentically Homeric simile:

Just as a man who has mastered the lyre and the art of song

Will easily stretch a string all the way round a new peg,

Attaching the twisted sheep-gut firmly at either end —

So, with no effort at all, did Odysseus string the great bow.

With his right hand he held the bow while he made a test of the string,

Which sang out beautifully, like the sound a swallow makes

(Odyssey 21.406-411, trans. Mendelsohn, 2026)

But Göransson also makes frequent use of synthesizers, especially for bass notes or for jarring, percussive screeches in the Land of the Dead. When Menelaus tells the story of Troy’s infiltration to Telemachus, the drums beat out dactyls, the meter of epic, that blend into galloping four-counts. 

All of this tells us Nolan’s priority is not authenticity. He is, in fact, calling attention to the artificiality of it all and challenging us to see how the story can map out onto our own world, now one much bigger than Homer’s. With this in mind, other decisions make more sense: for example, the diverse casting. 

Apart from the fact that people have been able to travel for a very long time, Nolan is telling a story about the breakdown of social contracts spanning different continents and how the consequences rebound upon the violators. It is appropriate, then, to see how we’re all in this together: though we may look different, be variously heroic or rash or dosed with lotus blossom at times, we are nevertheless small and dependent on each other’s kindness in an unpredictable and dangerous world.

Will Nolan’s Odyssey find a place in the required viewings of “Classics and Film”? Ousting O Brother, Where Art Thou? is not an act I take lightly. It’s also in competition with a spate of other films released in just the last few years: the 2023 John Malkovich vehicle, Seneca; Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 Megalopolis; that same year’s The Return with Ralph Fiennes; and Gladiator II.

We keep returning to antiquity to make meaning for ourselves and tell vital stories, and I don’t expect us to stop. This is a good problem for us classicists to have.

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