When Homer meets Hollywood: anachronism and ideology in The Odyssey

By Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson

Has film director Christopher Nolan reinvented Homer’s Odyssey for modern audiences at the expense of historical authenticity? Lloyd argues that the film replaces ancient Greek understandings of heroism, divine intervention and human psychology with contemporary values. His provocative critique raises wider questions about Hollywood, cultural representation and our understanding of the past. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is President of the New Enlightenment Project.

It would have been both entertaining and instructive to see a film version of the Greeks as they existed around 1200 BCE before the full development of a modern, continuous, volitional self. In that world, people largely followed cultural scripts when faced with challenges, and experienced profound anxiety when no sanctioned response was available. What we might now call hallucinations were frequently interpreted as the direct voices or interventions of the gods. Homer, composing roughly four centuries later, treated the Trojan War and its aftermath as historical fiction. His Odyssey is saturated with the heroic drive for glory, sexual encounters, and the pervasive influence of divine will on human affairs.

Amazingly, Christopher Nolan’s twenty-first-century Odyssey largely evacuates all three of these central Homeric elements. The councils of the gods that micro-manage mortal lives have entirely disappeared. Athena is reimagined less as an independent Olympian and more as Odysseus’s internalised conscience or psychological projection. Hermes, who in Homer supplies the magical herb that allows Odysseus to resist Circe’s enchantment, is absent. In the original poem, Odysseus becomes Circe’s lover and remains with her for a full year until his restored companions urge him to resume the journey home. Nolan’s version strips the episode of its erotic and domestic duration, turning it into a briefer, darker confrontation.

“Nolan’s Odysseus is rendered sexually chaste...”

Similarly, the film omits Calypso’s offer of immortality in exchange for Odysseus remaining as her consort, as well as the Phaeacians’ hospitality and their attempt to marry him to their princess Nausicaa before conveying him home to Ithaca. Nolan’s Odysseus is rendered sexually chaste, his desire narrowed almost exclusively to reunion with Penelope and Telemachus. The result is a hero reshaped by modern psychological and moral assumptions rather than by Homeric ones.

Homer’s innovation was to elevate cunning and guile as heroic attributes capable of winning glory. In the Cyclops episode, Odysseus first gets Polyphemus drunk on strong wine and tells him his name is “Nobody”. While the giant lies in a drunken sleep, Odysseus and his men drive a fire-hardened olive-wood stake into his single eye. When Polyphemus cries out that “Nobody” is attacking him, the neighbouring Cyclopes assume he is afflicted by the gods and leave him unaided. Only later, once safely at sea, does Odysseus compound the injury by shouting his true name, an act of hubris that allows Polyphemus to identify him to his father, Poseidon. Nolan’s version strips away this verbal cleverness. The “Nobody” ruse and the wine are omitted, and the other Cyclopes never appear. Odysseus and his men still blind Polyphemus with a heated stake, but as they escape Odysseus fires an arrow into the already ruined eye.

Having emptied the Odyssey of much of its cultural essence, Nolan attempts to create the illusion of depth by drawing on what worked in his earlier movie, Oppenheimer. In that movie, the inventor of the atomic bomb experiences guilt and remorse over the implications of his invention for the future of mankind. Nolan has Odysseus exhibit similar feelings over his invention of the Trojan Horse that resulted in the defeat of Troy. This shifts the narrative toward contemporary themes of agency and humanism, rather than the archaic attribution of volition primarily to external divine forces. We are led to believe that that psychology of the 21st century human immersed in Western civilisation is the same psychology that existed 3,300 years previously.

Homer portrayed Helen as a fair-skinned Greek beauty, but Nolan casts Lupita Nyong’o as Helen with no visual attempt to evoke a Mycenaean or Archaic Greek appearance and without a narrative explanation as to how a black woman becomes queen of Sparta. In the absence of any in-story rationale, the choice reads as representational priority of Woke identity politics rather than historical or mythic coherence – an approach reminiscent of certain AI-generated images that re-cast the US Founding Fathers as a multi-racial group in period costume. More striking still is the prominent scar on Helen’s left cheek. Nolan does supply a brief explanation for this innovation: Menelaus deliberately scars her upon her return from Troy as a mark of possession and punishment. Yet the visual effect remains jarring. A mythic figure defined for three millennia by transcendent beauty is introduced disfigured, an alteration that shifts the audience’s first impression from allure to damage.

The viewer could be forgiven for thinking Nolan’s Odyssey is not about the ancient Greeks at all. None of the principal cast has Greek ancestry, the ships resemble Viking longships, and the warriors wear armour and helmets that belong to the Iron Age rather than the Bronze Age world in which the story is set. This is a contemporary US film made primarily for US audiences with the plot changes driven, at least in part, by representation quotas, awards eligibility and virtue signalling. If the term “cultural appropriation” has any coherent meaning, this production comes closer to it than most of the examples usually cited.

It is tempting to shrug and say, “this is just Hollywood”. That response, however, underestimates the cumulative effect of mass media that systematically rewrites the past in the image of the present. When we accept the myth that ancient people were psychologically identical to ourselves, complete with modern trauma, guilt, and identity categories, we freeze a particular contemporary worldview in place and make genuine historical understanding, and further cultural progress, more difficult.

Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson’s forthcoming book Unbottled and Rebound: The Self, The Enlightenment and the New Collectivism (2027) examines precisely these questions of selfhood, historical discontinuity, and the rise of new forms of collectivism.