A Horse of a Different Color: Christopher Nolan’s 10 Biggest Odyssey Updates

Never look a gift horse in the mouth… unless it’s filled with enemy soldiers. That’s the lesson of the Trojan horse. But in Christopher Nolan’s sweeping adaptation of The Odyssey, the horse also leaves cunning hero Odysseus—played by a grizzled-yet-nicely-chiseled Matt Damon—wracked with guilt and suffering flashbacks of Troy’s gruesome sacking. A note for the lightly literate classicist bros who might object to this: Yes, a PTSD-addled Odysseus is anachronistic. I dare say you’ll live.

Unfortunately, none of Odysseus’s men do. Emily Wilson, who translated a much-discussed 2017 edition of The Odyssey, tells VF that the glory Odysseus seeks after losing his men “is a very ambiguous kind of glory.” In Nolan’s telling, his deceit and plundering portend the collapse of the Bronze Age—a foreboding warning about greedy, fading empires that feels a little too relevant.

So, what are the differences between the text version of The Odyssey and the new movie? The short answer: how much time do you have?

It obviously makes sense for Nolan to modernize The Odyssey. The original poem is around 3,000 years old, forged in an oral tradition at a time when the Greeks didn’t have written language. A bard—a.k.a. a poet, a.k.a. a storyteller—would recite the epic’s more than 12,000 lines for an audience, likely over the course of several days. (The rapper Travis Scott performs this duty in Nolan’s film, playing the Ithacan palace’s bard—and pounding a stick in the rhythm of dactylic hexameter, the original poem’s meter.) Scholars dispute how The Odyssey was composed, but some think it was through an iterative process that involved various bards putting their own swag on their performances, until the story was eventually compiled and written down. Others believe that the poem’s coherent structure points to a single author—the allegedly, perhaps not literally blind poet Homer—though we have no assurances that such a man ever lived.

What we do have is this strange, singular poem. Part of what makes The Odyssey both challenging and fascinating for a modern audience is that the titular character can never be pinned down—and that despite being the story’s hero, he isn’t a moral man. Homer’s Odysseus is a shape-shifting trickster: His capacity for transforming himself to suit his circumstances is what makes him remarkable. Sometimes his tricks are strategic, but other times, he seems to lie for the sake of lying. Much of his charm—and admiration from the gods—stems from his endless ability to spin a yarn.

Yet in his film, Nolan almost completely does away with Odysseus the trickster. In its place, he weaves a more somber story that combines classical themes of glory and homecoming with contemporary concerns about immigration, military aggression, and what civility looks like in a diverse and connected world. In other words: While some of the actual magic is lost (unlike in the poem, we never see Zendaya’s Athena appear to Odysseus’s son Telemachus as an old man, then shoot into the sky and transform into an owl—a shame for both us and Tom Holland), something else is gained. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what Nolan changed when adapting The Odyssey, read below. But beware: spoilers follow.

So, Who is Odysseus?

“Tell me about a complicated man.” So opens Wilson’s (somewhat controversial) translation of The Odyssey. “Complicated” here is translated from the ancient Greek word polytropos, which literally means “twisty-turny” or “much-turning”—a term that speaks both to Odysseus’s rollicking adventures and to his many-sided nature. What does it mean to be a man? Can someone who’s undergone many experiences return home and even be recognized? These are the poem’s central questions.

But the titular hero frustrates any straightforward answer. Odysseus is a king, a thief, a warrior, a leader who loses his men, an absentee father, an adulterer, and a devoted husband yearning for home. Ironically, his most stable trait is that he’s a masterful liar. In the poem, he even lies to his long-suffering father, Laertes, about his identity, then watches Laertes cry. More often than not, Odysseus’s deceit is manipulative and self-serving.

Yet one reason both Athena and the nymph Calypso, played in the film by Charlize Theron, favor him above other mortals is because they view his capacity for generating unending fictions as a form of cleverness that’s similar to their own. Homer’s Calypso playfully calls Odysseus a “scalawag;” Odysseus rightfully mistrusts her because she’s a trickster too.

“I don't think there’s anything in the narrative that suggests we should really scold Odysseus for telling lots of lies. I think we’re invited to think it’s really fun to be in the company of somebody who’s always going to have an interesting story,” says Wilson, who hasn’t yet seen the film as of our conversation. His cunning is part of his charm, and he’ll happily tell a few untruths to get home. For an ancient Greek audience, his lies offered stories within the larger story, extending the poem’s narrative and capacity to entertain.

While Matt Damon’s Odysseus also seems eager to return to Ithaca, he’s much more ambivalent about his history of trickery. In the poem, we’re not told what Odysseus hears when he’s tied to the ship’s mast and listens to the Sirens’ call. In the film, though, he reveals that they have told him what he already knows: He doesn’t really want to return home. When a disguised Odysseus eventually reunites with Penelope in his palace, we learn that he’s tormented by the violence in Troy, all wrought by his deceit. In Nolan’s telling, his ambivalence about returning isn’t just about whether he’ll receive a hero’s homecoming, but whether he’s the right man to lead Ithaca after what he’s done.

Odysseus’s Adventures: Monsters and Goddesses

While Odysseus’s mythical encounters on his seafaring voyage are the poem’s most iconic episodes, most of The Odyssey is not about them. The epic includes 24 books; the first 4 focus on Telemachus as he seeks to learn about his father, and the last 13 follow Odysseus after he finally lands home on Ithaca’s shores. But it’s the middle books that most ignite people’s imaginations.

Like Christopher Nolan, Homer loved a flashback. Most of The Odyssey's adventure scenes are actually stories recounted by Odysseus to the Phaeacians, a sophisticated and extremely hospitable people (the ideal practitioners of xenia). Nolan does away with the frame and cuts out the Phaeacians, but the film’s adventure episodes remain largely faithful to the poem. Still, there are some key differences.

After leaving Troy, Odysseus spends 10 years trying to return home. Seven of those are spent on an island with the beautiful goddess Calypso. The poem’s Calypso is love-struck with Odysseus and won’t let him leave: she has promised him immortality if he stays and beds her every night, which he’s been doing against his will (sure) and doesn’t understand why he wants to return to his wife, Penelope. As Calypso tells him, in Wilson’s translation, “I know my body is better than hers is.” And then the clincher: “I am taller too.” Yet movingly, Homer’s Odysseus still wants to return home to his aging wife. As he later tells the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, “For nothing better than when two live in one house, their minds in harmony.” Athena eventually intervenes and convinces Zeus to mandate that Odysseus be set free to resume his journey home.

Nolan’s Calypso is less a love-struck captor, and more a sympathetic therapist who has got good drugs. Odysseus eats the lotus flower she hands him—a narcotic plant Homer actually features in a different section of the poem—which makes him forget his home. But one gets the sense that this Calypso isn’t necessarily being malicious. The lotus serves a therapeutic purpose to mitigate Odysseus’s traumatic memories. And when Odysseus does remember what he’s trying to return to, Calypso willingly lets him go.

In the poem, Odysseus asks the giant Cyclops Polyphemus for help when he and his men meet the monster in his cave. But Polyphemus, probably the worst host in classical myth, responds by grabbing two men and knocking “them hard against the ground like puppies,” making “the floor wet with brains.” This goes against everything Emily Post advises.

Before he escapes, Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is “Nobody,” so that when the Cyclops, now blinded, calls out to his giant compatriots that “nobody” has injured him, they will think he’s demented. Once back on his ship, Odysseus can’t help himself: He taunts the Cyclops and tells him his real name. Polyphemus, who is the son of Poseidon, calls up to his dad and asks that Odysseus never return home, or, at the very least, that he arrive late and alone, having caused the death of all his men.

Nolan’s Polyphemus is less vocal; he has no cycloptic companions, and in the film, the conversations between him and Odysseus don’t occur—including the famous trick of the hero misidentifying himself as “Nobody.” But the film does show the Cyclops eating Odysseus’s men. Nolan’s take on this scene alludes to one of Francisco de Goya’s Black Paintings, Saturn Devouring His Son—which, probably not coincidentally, is another modern adaptation of a classical work.

In the poem, the Laestrygonians are another race of giant cannibals who eat some of Odysseus’s men. In Nolan’s adaptation, they’re giants wearing medieval-ish armor, who hack Odysseus’s soldiers with swords. Honestly, it feels like Homer was getting a little lazy here; Nolan made the right call switching things up.

Circe is a goddess with witchy powers who turns some of Odysseus’s men into swine. In the poem, fleet-footed Hermes gives Odysseus an herbal potion that will protect him from Circe’s magic. The god also advises Odysseus to make Circe swear she’ll turn his men back to humans, then to sleep with her since that’s what she really wants. (We don’t know if Homer existed, but if he did, he was definitely a man.) Finally, Hermes tells Odysseus to be careful to not let Circe cut off his manhood. Circe does, in fact, transform the men back, then treats Odysseus so well that he stays with her for an entire year, forgetting that he wants to return home until his men remind him.

In the film, Samantha Morton plays Circe as an earthy sorceress who doesn’t seek to bed Odysseus. She seems more keen to demonstrate to him and his men that they are greedy little pigs—their “true nature.” This is consistent with the film’s overarching preoccupation with greed, which here takes the form of gluttony.

Foreign Relations: Xenia, Xenophilia, and Xenophobia

In Nolan’s Odyssey, the Spartans and Ithacans are worried about “people from the sea” who may invade their territories. This particular anxiety doesn’t overtly show up in Homer’s epic. However, it’s worth noting that the poem is not set when it was composed—in the seventh or eighth century B.C.E.—but hundreds of years earlier, during the Bronze Age. This was the period that saw the famed Mycenaean (i.e., an early Greek) civilization flourish with written language, engineering innovations, and impressive palaces—before it mysteriously collapsed. It’s not clear what caused the Mycenaean age’s decline. But one hypothesis, largely debunked, is that Mycenae was invaded by Dorians from the Peloponnese peninsula. These are likely the basis for Nolan’s “people from the sea.”

Wilson explains in the intro of her Odyssey translation that around the time the poem was composed, the Archaic Greeks were expanding their travel and trade (and colonization) across the Mediterranean—a practice that meant embracing their contact with a variety of alien cultures. There was no international law governing relations between city-states, so the Greeks relied on xenia, meaning “guest-friendship”: a bond between households, even those geographically far apart, that continued through generations. It was a form of hospitality that dictated a foreign guest—even an uninvited beggar in rags (like the one Odysseus disguises himself as in Ithaca)—should expect to be welcomed, fed, bathed, and offered shelter wherever he went. Only then would he be asked to tell who he was and where he came from.

Nolan’s film refers to xenia as “Zeus’s Law,” and it encapsulates the golden rule of treating others as you’d like to be treated. But for the Archaic Greeks, xenia wasn’t exactly altruism; it essentially allowed travellers and merchants to network peacefully across otherwise perilous territories. The Greeks promoted xenia as a divine law overseen by Zeus, so it would be observed as a sacred contract that could help expand their cultural and trade dominance. Perhaps just as importantly, when violated, it could justify colonization and piracy. (See, for instance, the Cyclopes, whose monstrousness, Wilson believes, was used as justification for the Greeks colonizing Sicily.)

Homer’s poem does in fact register an apprehension of foreigners who live near the sea. But that apprehension is directed toward monsters, goddesses, sorcerers, and nymphs. Homer’s Odysseus has an attraction to some of these fantastical creatures, i.e., xenophilia: He becomes a lover to the nymphs Calypso and Circe, and predictably finds the Sirens’ call alluring. But Homer’s text also contains a deep anxiety: that by “going native” and entangling himself with these exotic females, who live by a separate, less patriarchal code than their human counterparts, Odysseus might allow himself to be consumed, annihilating the identity he’s seeking so hard to restore. It’s another form of the age-old fear of being cannibalized by the Other—something the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, and the monster Scylla literally do to his men.

The film’s tight focus on Odysseus’s guilt about his military exploits—and lengthy but nevertheless limited three-hour run time—doesn’t leave much room to register this exciting-yet-dangerous attraction, though Calypso does provide him companionship. (Any sexual relationship gets underplayed.) Yet while some of the poem’s colorful explorations are lost, Odysseus’s consistent anguish lends the movie a satisfying thematic coherence.

Zeus’s Law obligates Telemachus and Odysseus’s wife Penelope to host the suitors who hope to marry her in Odysseus’s absence. But crucially, xenia is also a code that mandates behavior on the receiving end of hospitality. Just as a host shouldn’t cannibalize their guests, guests shouldn’t overstay their welcome—which is exactly what the suitors courting Penelope do. Murder might seem like a harsh punishment for being a greedy guest, but in the poem, Zeus and Athena support and divinely assist Odysseus’s plan to massacre Penelope’s arrogant suitors. We don’t overtly see this in the film, though, which contains no celestial scenes of the gods colluding for or against their human subjects.

Does the gods’ intervention mean that Odysseus is ethically justified for killing the suitors? Not necessarily. As Wilson reminds us in her translation’s introduction, “The gods in The Odyssey…are self-interested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences rather than by a consistent commitment to uphold moral law.” In short, the gods—who can never die—are bored, so they need to do something.

The Trojan Horse, Sinon, and the Sacking of Troy

Early in the film, Odysseus’s son Telemachus goes to Sparta in search of information about his dad. The Spartan king Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) explains how he and Odysseus hid together in the Trojan horse’s belly. Homer’s poem never depicts the horse and the sacking of Troy in direct action; the city’s fall is recollected only in the form of stories that glorify Greece’s soldiers.

Because Odysseus’s most famous deed is tricking the Trojans, Nolan can be forgiven for opening his film with a grand shot of the horse itself on a shore: partly submerged, attended by a single soldier named Sinon (Elliot Page). Though Sinon is a character in Virgil’s Aeneid, he doesn’t appear in The Odyssey. The poor guy is tasked with telling the Trojans that the horse is a gift for the gods, before he’s unceremoniously killed.

Before we learned who Page was playing in the film, there was a rumor he would depict the legendary warrior Achilles (which sent certain corners of the internet into a tizzy). Yet interestingly, Nolan’s Sinon is something of a moral counter to Achilles’s character. Achilles is an acclaimed warrior who willfully pursues glory at the cost of a short life. Sinon, by contrast, is an unknowing pawn—presumably chosen as the Greeks’ messenger because he’s small and wouldn’t be very helpful in sacking Troy.

Secondly: when Odysseus travels to Hades in the poem, seeking counsel on how to get back to Ithaca, he speaks to the fallen Achilles, who admits to his old comrade that he’d rather be dirt poor and alive than rule over the dead. Achilles’s speech appears to affirm Odysseus’s resolve to survive at all costs—even if it means losing all his men in the process. In the film, however, it’s Sinon Odysseus encounters. Sinon admonishes his king for failing to properly honor Ithaca’s dead soldiers, contributing to Odysseus’s guilt.

The Slave Girls

Probably the most difficult part of Homer’s Odyssey for today’s audiences to digest is the grisly fate of a group of female slaves. In the film, workers in the palace are mostly referred to as “servants;” Wilson, however, says she used the term “slave” in her translation because there’s no ambiguity in the original Greek. Slavery was a fact of life for ancient Greeks; anyone could be captured and trafficked. And nothing in The Odyssey indicates an overarching political or philosophical objection to this practice: in Wilson’s words, it “is not an abolitionist text.” Yet the notable gap in the poem between Odysseus, who will do anything to reclaim his home, and the slaves, who lack their own homes, still indicates that the life of a slave is undesirable. As Odysseus tells Calypso, “The worst thing humans suffer is homelessness.”

The poem tells us of 12 slave girls who sleep with Penelope’s boorish suitors. After Odysseus kills the men who pursued his wife, the slave girls are forced to clean up the massacred suitors’ blood. Then Odysseus orders all of them to also be killed: “Hack at them with long swords, eradicate all life from them. They will forget the things the suitors made them do.” Telemachus, “showing initiative,” has an even better idea: hang them from a single rope. “So the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with a noose around their necks to make their death an agony,” Homer writes, per Wilson’s translation. “They gasped, their feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”

The poem’s narrator expresses pity for the hanged slaves, who likely had little choice about sleeping with the suitors. But that doesn’t mean the poem views their deaths as wrong. “These killings are about glory,” Wilson tells VF. “You have to not have people in the household who’ve been claimed by other men, because that dampens down the glory and control that Odysseus can have over his household. So they’re a kind of honor killing…. And Athena loves it.”

It seemed unlikely that Damon would be shown onscreen giving the directive to murder a bunch of innocent girls, so it’s unsurprising that Nolan more or less elides the scene. In his adaptation, the only “servant” girl we get to know is Melantho (Mia Goth), a treacherous handmaid who is cozy with Antinous (Robert Pattinson) and betrays Penelope. When the suitors’ massacre begins, Melantho tries to escape, but Penelope shuts the hall’s door on her and presumably seals her fate.

The Ending

Homer’s Odyssey has a few false endings. The poem doesn’t finish when Odysseus kills the suitors and slaves; it doesn’t stop when he reunites with Penelope and they share their marriage bed; it doesn’t end when the hero finally reunites with his father. It concludes, instead, after the news spreads of the suitors’ massacre, putting the Ithacans on the verge of mutiny. Athena, with Zeus’s backing, then swoops down and tells the people of Ithaca to stop fighting. She also makes them forget what’s happened. But even here, the hero’s story is not really over. Odysseus tells Penelope he’s about to embark “on raids” to replace all the wealth he’s lost—and this is where Homer stops.

At the film’s end, Damon also leaves on a ship, but the reason for his journey is much nobler than greed. Rather than replacing his wealth, he’s attempting to pay something back: We last see him heading west, toward the end of the world, where he can finally honor his fallen men with Penelope by his side. His remorse is echoed earlier in the film by Nolan’s Helen (Lupita Nyong’o), who expresses regret for all of the violence she’s caused. In this way and others, Nolan’s adaptation is asking a different question than the poem, but one that’s no less deep: What do we owe others, especially when we’ve taken so much for ourselves?