{"id":2058909,"date":"2026-07-22T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2058909"},"modified":"2026-07-22T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T06:00:00","slug":"the-backlash-to-christopher-nolans-the-odyssey-misses-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2058909","title":{"rendered":"The Backlash to Christopher Nolan\u2019s \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 Misses the Point"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-21-at-4.20.03-PM-e1784668250451.png?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tMonths before Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey<\/em> hit theaters, many on the internet had seemingly already reached a conclusion. The armor was wrong. Agamemnon\u2019s black, plasticky helmet looked, one widely shared post complained, like something out of a Batman movie. Odysseus\u2019s ship was a Norse longship, from the wrong civilization and the wrong era. Most of the costumes belonged to the classical period, a good thousand years after the Bronze Age world the poem supposedly describes.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut despite these obvious anachronisms, the scholars who actually study the poem and the Mycenaean civilization it is based on see the question of accuracy differently. For many, the argument over whether Nolan got the Bronze Age \u201cright\u201d betrays a misunderstanding of what the Odyssey<\/em> is, and always was.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think it kind of misses the point,\u201d Dimitri Nakassis, a professor of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder and a MacArthur fellow who specializes in the Greek Late Bronze Age, told ARTnews<\/em>. \u201cThe point of myth is that it\u2019s supposed to feel timeless. The Greeks messed around with myths all the time, including those around the Trojan War\u2026 [Myths\u2019] flexibility is part of their power, because for a myth to have value in the present day, it has to speak to the present day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe accuracy critiques are not strictly wrong, and none of the scholars I spoke to pretended otherwise. Katerina Zacharia, a professor of classics at Loyola Marymount University whose work focuses on classical antiquity in visual and performance culture, was blunt about the armor featured in the film.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThese are broadly Archaic and Classical silhouettes\u2014Corinthian-derived crested helmets, bronze cuirasses\u2014worn by heroes who belong to a Bronze Age world of boar\u2019s-tusk helmets and Dendra-style full-body plate, some five centuries earlier,\u201d Zacharia told ARTnews in an email. \u201cAgamemnon\u2019s blackened, faceted helmet belongs to no ancient workshop at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the deeper misconception, Zacharia and other scholars say, is that there exists a single, correct ancient world the film could have reproduced. As Nakassis explained, the Iliad<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em> are part of very old oral poetic tradition, and, while there is debate about how old, most scholars agree that the poems were written down hundreds of years after the works were first crafted and perhaps nearly a millennium after the era it depicts. There are some details in those poems that comport with the archaeological record, like Homer\u2019s description of a boar\u2019s tusk helmet, which we have Bronze Age examples of\u2014as well as depictions of in Bronze Age art\u2014but which were no longer used during Homer\u2019s time. However, Homer\u2019s description of the Trojan War bears little resemblance to the war as described in a series of Hittite records, the only existing documentation of a political dispute at that time involving Troy.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u00a0\u201cIf there was a Trojan War in the late Bronze Age,\u201d Nakassis said, \u201cit almost certainly didn\u2019t look very much like how Homer describes it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tZacharia similarly argued that the Iliad<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em> are already the result of an \u201canachronistic layering\u201d at the core of the oral tradition. Nolan\u2019s film then simply continues that tradition. \u201cHomer fused dimly remembered Bronze Age objects with the Iron Age world of his own audience, and every era since\u2014the Attic vase painters, Renaissance tapestry weavers, Hollywood\u2014has armed these heroes in its own imagination,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen Nolan dresses Odysseus in the armor of the vase painters\u2019 era rather than his own, he is doing precisely what the vase painters did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe more interesting question, Zacharia continued, is not whether Nolan accurately portrays the Bronze Age, but rather what his depiction of antiquity says about the current era. \u201cA desaturated, blackened, gritty Homer says a great deal about ours,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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\"Visitors<\/div>\n<\/div>
Visitors walk in the ruins of the ancient city of Troy in \u00c7anakkale, Turkey.<\/span>AFP via Getty Images<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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\"This<\/div>\n<\/div>
This picture shows the historic ksar (fortified village) of Ait Benhaddou, used as a backdrop and set in many Hollywood films about the ancient world.<\/span>AFP via Getty Images<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBy way of example, Zacharia pointed to the film\u2019s stand-in for Troy, the Moroccan ksar A\u00eft Benhaddou, used as backdrop in sword-and-sandals pictures dating to the 1960s, from Pier Paolo Pasolini\u2019s Oedipus Rex<\/em> (1967) to Gladiator<\/em> (2000), Alexander<\/em> (2004), and Prince of Persia<\/em> (2010). The ksar looks nothing like what the archaeological record at Hisarlik, Turkey\u2014the established site of ancient Troy\u2014tells us. The record there shows us a circle of 15-foot-high limestone walls with towers and ramparts on a verdant coastal plain, not a desert city of earth and clay.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEdward Said taught us that the Orient functions as an imaginative geography, a stage the West dresses to play its own other, and the film\u2019s map performs the operation neatly: Greece is shot in Greece\u2014Messenia, the homeland playing itself\u2014while Troy, the enemy city of the East, is conjured from a Maghrebi caravan town,\u201d Zacharia said.\u00a0 \u201cThe film orientalizes a city the tradition itself refused to orientalize,\u201d she added, noting that Homer\u2019s Trojans \u201cspeak, pray, mourn, and die like the Achaeans,\u201d and that the poem\u2019s deepest sympathies extend to Hector.<\/p>\n

\n\tNakassis, who has spent his career studying the archaeological record of the Mycenaean and other early Greek civilizations, is sympathetic to the practical challenge a film production depicting the ancient world faces. He pointed to the Dendra panoply\u2014a complete bronze suit of armor excavated from a tomb and dated to roughly 1400 BCE. \u201cIf you make a movie and everybody\u2019s dressed in armor like that, maybe it looks kind of crazy to a modern audience,\u201d he said. And where does one draw the line, he wondered. Bronze Age frescoes depict women wearing flounced skirts and open bodices, with their breasts bared. Depicting that dress faithfully would likely be distracting to a modern audience and leave the film unmarketable.\u00a0 The question that matters, he added, is not whether the objects are correct but \u201cwhether it\u2019s in service to the story Nolan is trying to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Nolan appears to strive towards realism, Zacharia described the film after seeing it as a \u201crealism of texture,\u201d mud, bronze, and grime that trades the resplendent color that conservation science has more recently restored to that era\u2019s palaces and statues for \u201ca desaturated, earth-toned antiquity\u201d that represents the dominant 21st-century cinema style, not the ancient world.<\/p>\n

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\"GREECE<\/div>\n<\/div>
Bronze plate armor with greaves, from Dendra, Midea (Greece). Mycenaean Civilization, 15th Century BC. Nauplia, Arheologik\u00f3 Mouss\u00edo (Archaeological Museum) <\/span>De Agostini via Getty Images<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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\"GREECE<\/div>\n<\/div>
Female figure, Akrotiri fresco, Thera (today Santorini) (Greece). Minoan Civilization, 16th Century BC. Athens, Ethnik\u00f3 Arheologik\u00f3 Mouss\u00edo.<\/span>De Agostini via Getty Images<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tRyan Platte, a professor of classics at Northwestern University who studies the cinematic reception of Homer, sees the film\u2019s closest touchpoint as Wolfgang Petersen\u2019s Troy<\/em> (2004), a film derided at release that many internet users have recently pointed to, somewhat dubiously, as being of higher historical fidelity than The Odyssey<\/em>.\u00a0 Notably, Nolan\u2019s film hews closer to the epic tradition than Troy<\/em> due to its inclusion of the supernatural and the gods, which were excised from Peterson\u2019s film.\u00a0 What struck Platte most after seeing the film was how it ties Odysseus\u2019s story to the real end of the Mycenaean Bronze Age, \u201cas if the war and the Greek actions therein somehow led to the end of that era.\u201d\u00a0 That causal link, he told ARTnews<\/em> in an email, \u201cis, to my knowledge, new and is really intriguing.\u201d Further, such a framing of the epic seems to echo its actual creation, in that the poem is Iron Age Greek culture\u2019s remembrance of the Mycenae hundreds of years after a major civilizational collapse.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd while many have argued that Nolan\u2019s casting of Odysseus\u2019s plight as a story about a veteran\u2019s trauma and guilt is anachronistic to how those Greeks understood the world, Nakassis argued that aspect is latent in the poems\u00a0because nearly all ancient Greek men were veterans. For his 1995 book Achilles in Vietnam<\/em>, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay read the Iliad<\/em> with Vietnam War veterans to better understand post-traumatic stress syndrome; the veterans in that book recounted numerous parallels between their experience and that of the soldiers in the poem. Nakassis posited that Greek veterans would have understood the subtext of Odysseus\u2019s 10-year journey home from the war.<\/p>\n

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Anne Hathaway as Penelope in The Odyssey<\/em> (2026).<\/span>Universal Pictures<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tQuestions about the film\u2019s treatment of race sparked by the casting of Lupita Nyong\u2019o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra are largely beside the point, according to Zacharia. \u201cRace as we understand it is a modern concept; the ancient world did not organize humanity by our categories, and the Homeric heroes have been recast in the image of every era that told their story\u2014the vase painters gave them Archaic armor, the Renaissance gave them Italian faces, and the nineteenth century gave them a marble whiteness the painted originals never had,\u201d she said. Nolan\u2019s film imagines the poem \u201cas more encompassing of race and gender than earlier retellings did, and that is not a departure from the tradition; it is the tradition doing what it has always done, absorbing the self-understanding of the audience in front of it.\u201d That film focuses considerable screentime on the drama involving Penelope in Ithaca\u2014more a framing device in the original poem\u2014similarly reflects the current moment\u2019s impulse to reread the epics through its women.<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch of the online ire has been directed at Emily Wilson\u2019s 2017 translation of the Odyssey<\/em>, which Nolan has said he used as the backbone of his telling. Wilson\u2019s translation has come under fire for her decision to render Homeric Greek into a direct, colloquial English. But Zacharia, Nakassis, and Platte largely praised Wilson\u2019s work, with Platte noting that both the translation and the film privilege \u201cwell-crafted but more regular speech\u201d that \u201cleans into the immediacy of the Homeric style.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEarlier this week, after seeing the film, Wilson told the Associated Press that while she was celebrating that so many people were being introduced or reintroduced to the epic,\u00a0she felt that Nolan \u201cwas trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem.\u201d Wilson\u2019s critique largely echoed that of Zacharia, who noted that Nolan\u2019s film largely removes the poem\u2019s core theme, that it is a \u201cperformance about performance.\u201d Instead, the story becomes about a solitary mind retelling a story to himself, akin to a patient on the therapist\u2019s couch, a fitting image for an Odysseus of our contemporary age.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/christopher-nolan-odyssey-classics-scholars-respond-backlash-1234792965\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-21-at-4.20.03-PM-e1784668250451.png?w=1024″] Months before Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey hit theaters, many on the internet had seemingly already reached a conclusion. The armor was wrong. Agamemnon\u2019s black, plasticky helmet looked, one widely shared post complained, like something out of a Batman movie. Odysseus\u2019s ship was a Norse longship, from the wrong civilization and the wrong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2058909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2058909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2058909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2058909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2058909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}