Director Christopher Nolan says that when he was adapting Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey as his latest film, he altered the story’s ending to omit details that he found too “misogynistic.”
Warning: SPOILERS for The Odyssey (2026)…
The Odyssey will definitely be a financial success, thanks in part to its higher-than-average ticket prices for IMAX screenings, but it has quickly become the most divisive film of Nolan’s career.
Most pre-release criticism focused on stunt casting in Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and transvestite actress Elliot Page playing a Greek warrior, but negative reactions to the full movie have focused on Nolan’s thematic changes — particularly his decisions to frame the strategic deception of the Trojan Horse as an evil so great it shattered the entire world order and haunts Odysseus’s conscience to the point of making him not want to go home, and to omit the tale’s gods (i.e., the characters in the story believe the gods exist, but the film’s perspective does not depict the gods as real characters who take actions that affect the story. Odysseus speaks with a young woman who is supposed to be Athena, but she is merely a hallucination of a young priestess of Athena whose decapitation he saw during the sack of Troy. Matt Damon has confirmed this interpretation was how he approached his scenes with Zendaya).
YouTuber and film critic “The Little Platoon” has aptly described The Odyssey as a tropey Vietnam War movie wearing the trappings of ancient Greece. Odysseus goes to war; he faces horrific, mysterious threats from the wildlife and inhabitants of far-off lands; he witnesses an atrocity and loses faith in his mission and himself; he has recurring visions of the victim of said atrocity; he goes to a therapist who uses drugs to help him safely process his traumatic memories (this is now the role of Calypso, who releases him voluntarily from her island, whereas in the poem she keeps him against his will and only stops when the gods force her); he goes home to face off with a draft-dodger antagonist; and despite his heroic return, he still feels so morally compromised that he abdicates his throne for the next generation to rebuild the kingdom which he allowed to degenerate in his absence.
In an interview with TIME Magazine published this Friday, Nolan confirmed the objections that his take on the classic text was a revisionist one. “Talking about choices of adaptation, the end of the poem is so grim and so misogynistic, I had to exclude some of that material,” he said, referring to Homer’s exhaustive revenge granted to Odysseus when he returns to Ithaca. Every single suitor who tried to usurp his throne is killed, a male accomplice gets tortured and dismembered, and housemaids who had sex with the suitors are all executed. The film softens the first story beat (some of the suitors are detained rather than slaughtered) and excises the other two.
However, Nolan said, “I didn’t want to completely take it off the table in terms of what it is saying about men and the way they wage war,” so he altered the character of Circe to make this point elsewhere. In the original poem, she is a treacherous sorceress who Odysseus has to outsmart. In the film, she gets a monologue about why she transformed Odysseus’s crew into pigs (she was afraid they would rape her, because men are rapists), which Odysseus does not dispute.
Similarly, the filmmaker said his take on Menelaus and Helen of Troy discounted any possibility of reconciliation after her adulterous marriage to Paris — although Homer clearly depicts Menelaus being merciful.
You imply that Menelaus purposefully scarred Helen’s face either because he believes she’s responsible for the Trojan War or to prevent anyone from taking her again.
That line, “The face that launched 1,000 ships, or maybe just 500” just occurred to me to write. Sometimes what you do as a writer is purely instinctive. I felt the poem didn’t necessarily address what it is for Helen to be brought back by Menelaus and how that would ever work. How would that relationship be? How could it possibly be anything other than the most acidic, awful marriage? [emphasis added]
You don’t buy that he saw her face and said, “She’s so beautiful I can’t kill her after all,” as he does in the myth?
There’s a lot of sh-t that’s happened in that relationship, and we have a very brief moment of time with them in this story. I was looking for a shorthand way to communicate the aftermath of the war and how it’s been traumatic for the entire world.
Criticisms of the film’s historically myopic, feminist, anti-war themes were skewered in a viral comment from pundit Matt Walsh: “In ‘Apocalypto,’ Mel Gibson transports you into the mind of a Mayan 500 years ago. In ‘The Northman,’ Robert Eggers transports you into the mind of a Viking a thousand years ago. In ‘The Odyssey,’ Christopher Nolan transports you into the mind of a liberal woman in 2017.”