As a Greek Mythology nerd and avid movie lover, I had been looking forward to acclaimed director Christopher Nolan’s 2026 adaptation of the epic poet Homer’s “The Odyssey” all year. I grew up on the Percy Jackson series and found a deeper love for the intricacy and eccentricity of mythos in high school reading classic works of epic poetry “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” I even themed my Senior AP Art Portfolio around the often ignored suffering of women in Greek myths.
While Nolan’s “The Odyssey” undoubtedly entertained me, it sacrificed the core themes of the epic poem and the nuances of its female characters to push an alternative anti-war message which the film’s mode of creation ultimately contradicts.
Having seen all of Nolan’s films except “Dunkirk,” I had high expectations for the spectacle of the film. With a filmography featuring films like “Memento,” “The Dark Knight” Trilogy, “Inception” and “Oppenheimer,” the 2024 Oscar’s best picture winner, Nolan’s movies center on complex broken men in intense and often mind-bending scenarios. While the cinematography and set design of his most recent project were equally impressive as his other installments, “The Odyssey” lacks a similar attention to the women of the story. Each of his films propositions its female characters as a mere means towards the male protagonist’s growth.
Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, the protagonist’s wife and Ithaca’s queen, in “The Odyssey,” proves that Nolan refuses to render women as complex, going so far as to abandon the source material to further his narrative of feminine helplessness. While Homer describes Penelope as clever and calm, staging her reunion with Odysseus as a reckoning of wits, Nolan’s version is far more recklessly emotional and dependent.
Despite the story centering on the famed hero Odysseus returning from war in Troy, the women he meets, and leaves behind, are central towards understanding the themes of the poem. Central to the resolution is his reunion with Penelope, his devoted intelligent wife.
My particular irritation at the butchering of this character is tied to my recent reading of “The Penelopiad” by Margaret Atwood, which presents an account of the story’s events from Penelope’s perspective. This influenced me to enter the film with a particular attention to this character’s rendering and heightened my disappointment. The fire and intelligence with which Atwood instilled Penelope, aligning with Homer’s words, was nowhere to be found in Nolan’s lobotomized depiction.
Emily Wilson, a brilliant scholar who has been praised for her 2017 translation of “The Odyssey,” wrote an article criticizing the film which Nolan claims was influenced by her unique translation. She wrote in her own reaction to the film that Nolan’s depiction of Penelope is flat and reminiscent of the far-away wife featured in his film “Inception,” barely a character, serving more as a motivator to the male protagonist. From the crazed wives the director presents in “Inception” and “Oppenheimer,” to the femme-fatales of “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Prestige,” or through his depiction of violence against women serving only to motivate their lovers to action as in “The Dark Knight” and “Memento,” Nolan continuously fails to imagine women as separate from their ties to the men around them.
I argue “The Odyssey” is a regressive adaptation that abandons the complexity of its female characters in order to push an anti-war message which is not central to the poem. Had this message been achieved effectively, I would have been more sympathetic to Nolan’s butchering of Ithaca’s queen. The film criticizes the Greeks’ greed in their war with Troy and their inability to identify the vast harm that it promoted, especially against those not directly involved in the conflict.
Contradicting this message entirely, Nolan chose to film in occupied Western Sahara, a decision criticized by Human Rights activists who have called for a boycott of the film. They argue that Nolan’s decision to film there and stay silent on the possible repercussions makes him “an accomplice to Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.” He too, ignored the consequence of conflict like his characters, prioritizing his film’s aesthetics over solidarity with the Sahrawi people just as Odysseus and his men place their glory over the value of the countless lives they ruin.
Ultimately, through his refusal to depict the complex women the epic poem depicts and his own undermining of his message by choosing to film in occupied territory, Nolan produced a regressive adaptation of a timeless tale. While my expectations were set by the promoted spectacle of the film and inspired casting choices, I was left dissatisfied by the watered-down depiction Nolan offered of Odysseus’ epic voyage.