The Odyssey (2026): When an Adaptation Loses Its Identity
By David, from David’s Files
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major characters, story changes, and the ending
Christopher Nolan Set My Expectations High
I consider Christopher Nolan one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. He has created many remarkable films, but The Prestige remains my favorite example of his work. It is not merely my favorite Nolan film. It is one of my favorite films ever made by anyone.
That matters because I did not enter The Odyssey hoping to dislike it. I wanted to see one of history’s greatest stories brought to life by one of today’s greatest filmmakers. Few directors could have raised my expectations higher.
That is also why I was so disappointed.
What I Expect from an Adaptation
I accept that every movie based on a written work must adapt, shorten, combine, or remove portions of its source material. Hundreds of pages cannot be transferred directly into a few hours of film. Filmmakers must make difficult decisions about what remains, what changes, and what disappears.
The challenge is making those decisions without stripping away the source material’s identity.
The Harry Potter films could not include every character, conversation, classroom lesson, and subplot from the books. Some changes disappointed readers, but the movies preserved the characters, world, themes, and identity of the series. They remained recognizably Harry Potter.
The BBC’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, took a more radical approach by moving Sherlock Holmes into the modern world. Technology, locations, and circumstances changed because modernization was the entire concept. Despite that reinvention, the series preserved Holmes, Watson, their relationship, and the intellectual character of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries. It changed the setting without abandoning the source.
Nolan’s The Odyssey does neither.
Its changes are not merely the necessary reductions made by the Harry Potter films. They are not part of a clearly defined modernization like Sherlock. The movie presents itself as Homer’s story while changing so many of its characters, beliefs, motivations, themes, and events that it becomes barely recognizable.
This raises the question that stayed with me throughout the film:
Why wasn’t Homer enough?
Historical Immersion
As someone who loves history, I want a historical film to pull me into its world. I want to feel as though I am experiencing another time, not merely watching famous actors pretend to live in it.
Glory accomplished that for me. I did not spend the film thinking about who had been cast in each role. The performances, costumes, dialogue, setting, and story worked together. I became absorbed in the film and experienced its world instead of merely watching it from the outside.
The Odyssey never gave me that opportunity.
The problem was not one inaccurate detail. It was dozens of details accumulating until the illusion collapsed.
Death by a Thousand Historical Cuts
The Odyssey was supposed to transport me to Bronze Age Greece. Instead, it combined Bronze Age Greece, Classical Greece, medieval Europe, Viking culture, modern America, and Hollywood fantasy.
Odysseus and his men sailed aboard what looked like a Viking longship because the production used an actual Norwegian Viking vessel. I understand the practical reason. Nolan needed a wooden ship capable of surviving filming on the open ocean.
That explains the choice. It does not make the choice historically appropriate.
I was supposed to see Greek warriors returning from Troy. Instead, I kept expecting them to raid England.
The armor created similar problems. Some equipment resembled later Corinthian designs rather than Mycenaean armor. Other pieces appeared closer to medieval plate or modern fantasy armor. Agamemnon looked less like a Bronze Age king and more like someone Batman forgot to defeat on his way to Gotham.
The artwork also wandered across centuries. Some depictions of Athena drew upon Archaic Greek sculpture created hundreds of years after the period being portrayed. Buildings frequently looked like the ancient ruins tourists visit today, apparently forgetting that people living in them three thousand years ago would not have considered their own cities archaeological sites.
The film even has characters discussing the Bronze Age as though they know historians will eventually name it that. Having a character announce that the Bronze Age is collapsing is like making a medieval movie in which someone says, “These Middle Ages have been difficult, but I hear the Renaissance is lovely.”
Then there is Ithaca itself. The population looks as though modern Los Angeles held a costume party. Defenders may call that inclusion, but it creates a problem within the film’s own world. The story continually emphasizes how difficult and dangerous travel was. Odysseus cannot complete a journey of several hundred miles without losing years, ships, and nearly everyone traveling with him. Meanwhile, people from across the modern world apparently reached Ithaca without difficulty and settled there as ordinary residents.
If international travel was already that easy, Odysseus should have checked Expedia.
These were not isolated mistakes. The ship, armor, artwork, buildings, population, dialogue, accents, and costumes repeatedly belonged to different times and places. Every time I began to enter Homer’s world, another decision pulled me back into the theater.
Casting Is About Believability
One defense of the casting is that almost nobody in the cast is Greek, so everyone was technically “race-swapped.”
That argument confuses ancestry with acting.
Movies regularly cast performers from one country as characters from another. British actors play Americans. Chinese actors sometimes portray Japanese characters. Actors from across Europe have played Greeks and Romans. It works when the actor can plausibly embody the character for a general audience.
Search for photographs of modern Greek civilians and then tell me that white European actors could never plausibly portray Greeks. The issue is not whether an actor possesses a Mycenaean birth certificate. The issue is whether appearance, performance, voice, costuming, and behavior create a believable character.
Casting is not a declaration of human worth. It is matching a performer to a role. Sometimes the wrong person is simply wrong for the role.
Ellen Page as Sinon (Credited as Elliot Page)
Ellen Page plays Sinon, a Greek soldier who becomes central to the film’s story and moral argument. Page never convinced me as a hardened Bronze Age warrior, either physically or through the performance. The slight frame and youthful voice already made the casting difficult to believe, but the acting did nothing to overcome that problem.
The performance lacked the strength, authority, physical confidence, and battle-hardened presence the role required. Page appeared uncomfortable in the armor and delivered the dialogue without making me believe Sinon had survived ancient warfare. Instead of seeing a Greek soldier, I saw Ellen Page struggling to portray one.
No matter how much armor Nolan put on her, Ellen Page could not act her way out of being a woman, much less convince me that she was a hardened Bronze Age warrior.
We would not cast Ellen Page as Conan the Barbarian, just as we would not cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as Juno MacGuff. Some actors are simply wrong for certain roles. Even a strong performance can occasionally overcome questionable casting, but this performance did not.
Nolan can build enormous sets, film on the open ocean, and create extraordinary practical effects. What he could not do was make Ellen Page look, sound, move, or behave like a hardened Bronze Age soldier.
Some defenders say Ellen Page was not on screen long enough for the casting to matter. That defense is also incorrect. Sinon is not merely a background soldier who disappears after one scene. The character becomes pivotal to the plot, Odysseus’s guilt, and the movie’s moral interpretation of the Trojan War.
Historical immersion can be broken in seconds. Giving an unconvincing performance additional screen time does not repair the problem. It only gives the problem additional screen time.
Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy
Helen presents another problem.
The defense I have heard is that no actress could ever satisfy everyone’s idea of the most beautiful woman in the world. That is true, but it does not mean the production should stop trying to sell the premise.
Helen’s legendary beauty is not a disposable cosmetic detail. The audience needs to understand why kings and nations would risk everything over her. No actress will be considered the most beautiful woman alive by everyone, but Hollywood has access to performers whom much of the general public considers exceptionally beautiful.
Sydney Sweeney is one obvious modern example. She would not satisfy every viewer, but her casting could help sell the premise. The goal is not mathematical perfection. The goal is plausibility.
This film never convinced me that its Helen was the woman whose face launched a thousand ships. Later, it weakens her importance even further by suggesting that trade routes drove the Trojan War and Helen was largely a convenient excuse.
That does not merely update the legend. It replaces it with a modern economic interpretation. Paris taking Helen was central to the traditional story and could itself be understood as a violation of the guest-host relationship between Paris and Menelaus. Turning Helen into wartime propaganda rewrites the foundation of the conflict and makes the casting problem even more obvious.
If Helen did not cause the war and did not need to embody legendary beauty, why include her at all? At that point, she becomes another famous name attached to a different story.
Zendaya Coleman as Athena
Athena is the goddess of wisdom, strategic warfare, and handicrafts. She should possess intelligence, strength, confidence, and unquestionable authority. When Athena appears before soldiers, the audience should immediately understand why warriors respect or fear her.
Zendaya never projected that presence for me.
She looked too young and physically slight to command hardened Bronze Age warriors. Athena should be able to silence an army merely by entering the room. This Athena looked as though Ellen Page might be able to beat her in a fight, and that is not exactly setting a high bar.
Perhaps she could command an army if every soldier were played by Tom Holland, but that is not the same as embodying a warrior goddess.
The problem extends beyond casting. Nolan barely allows Athena to function as a goddess. Instead of actively guiding, protecting, disguising, and strategizing with Odysseus as she does in Homer, she resembles a memory, hallucination, or psychological coping mechanism produced by his trauma.
The film minimizes or removes Zeus, Poseidon, Hermes, and other gods. Poseidon’s anger is fundamental to Odysseus’s prolonged suffering, yet direct divine intervention is largely replaced by bad luck, weather, guilt, and psychology.
Defenders say Nolan wanted a more grounded interpretation. That might be convincing if the same movie did not contain a Cyclops, witches, monsters, prophetic visions, historically impossible equipment, and a Viking ship carrying the most diverse population in the ancient Mediterranean.
Apparently, the gods were too unrealistic, but everything else received a boarding pass.
Travis Scott as the Bard
Travis Scott’s casting creates a different distraction.
Nolan explained that he wanted to acknowledge the connection between ancient oral poetry and modern rap. He considers an epic handed down through oral performance analogous to rap. I understand the comparison.
My problem is not rap. One of the rap songs on my own playlist is “Facts” by Tom MacDonald featuring Ben Shapiro. I am perfectly capable of enjoying rap when I like what it has to say.
My problem is that I never stopped seeing Travis Scott.
Ancient bards preserved stories through poetry, music, memory, performance, and song. Casting a rapper because rap resembles oral poetry is an interesting classroom observation. It does not automatically produce a believable bard.
Scott’s modern celebrity identity, appearance, performance style, and casting all stood out from the setting. I needed to see a storyteller who belonged in that world and could carry an ancient ballad. Instead, I saw a celebrity cameo built around Nolan’s analogy.
The moment I recognize the celebrity instead of the character, historical immersion is gone.
Himesh Patel and “We’re Greeks from Ithaca”
Himesh Patel’s Eurylochus presents the same issue over a much larger portion of the film. He is not a background figure. He is Odysseus’s second-in-command and receives substantial screen time.
At one point, he announces, “We’re Greeks from Ithaca.”
The line unintentionally summarizes the problem. The movie must tell us what the casting, accents, costumes, and shared culture have failed to communicate.
Again, Patel does not need literal Greek ancestry to play a Greek character. He needs to make the audience believe he belongs among the people of Ithaca. His appearance, contemporary American accent, and performance never did that for me.
The line sounded less like something a Greek warrior would naturally say and more like the screenplay stopping to reassure the audience.
“We’re Greeks from Ithaca.”
Thank you for clarifying. Nothing else had given it away.
Race-Swapping Works Both Ways
Race-swapping cannot become acceptable or unacceptable according to the direction in which it occurs.
Imagine Hollywood casting a white actor as Martin Luther King Jr. or Frederick Douglass. The outrage would be immediate, widespread, and justified. Nobody would seriously argue that race was irrelevant because the performer was talented or because the movie was only an interpretation.
Those are historical figures rather than mythological characters, but the reaction demonstrates a principle that Hollywood selectively remembers: appearance can be part of the identity being portrayed.
The same problem would exist if a movie based on ancient African folklore populated its world with white European actors and dismissed every criticism by saying, “They are only actors.” Audiences would correctly recognize that the casting weakened the cultural identity of the story.
If racial authenticity matters when portraying African, Asian, Indigenous, or Middle Eastern people and stories, it cannot suddenly become meaningless when portraying Greeks or other Europeans. Historical and cultural respect must work in every direction. Otherwise, it is not a principle. It is a political exemption.
Race-swapping problems work both ways. You cannot demand cultural authenticity for the stories you want protected while telling everyone else that their history, mythology, and cultural identity are available for unlimited revision.
Modern Hollywood’s Conveniently Changing Standard
I have heard some of the same commentators defending every choice in The Odyssey criticize other productions for changing familiar characters.
They objected to casting decisions in The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, Snow White, the new Harry Potter adaptation, and comic books. Some criticized Jane Foster assuming the identity of Thor. Others objected when new characters inherited the names and identities of established heroes. Their argument was that studios should create new characters instead of rewriting existing ones to satisfy current political priorities.
What happened to that principle when Christopher Nolan made The Odyssey?
There is nothing wrong with creating a female hero. Literature and mythology already contain many, and writers can create more. There is nothing wrong with creating a Black, Latino, Asian, or gay hero. Create the character, write the story, and give audiences a reason to care.
The problem arises when Hollywood treats an established identity as disposable while continuing to market the recognizable name. Filmmakers want the audience, prestige, and cultural importance attached to the original, but they reject any responsibility to preserve what made the original valuable.
My standard does not change according to which political side approves of the alteration. If changing the identity of an established comic-book character deserves criticism, then changing the identity of Odysseus deserves the same scrutiny.
Were We Watching The Odyssey, The Iliad, or The Aeneid?
At some point, I began wondering what story I was watching. Was this The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid, or Nolan’s collection of favorite moments from Greek and Roman mythology?
Sinon is the clearest example.
Sinon does not appear in Homer’s Odyssey or Iliad. His famous role in deceiving the Trojans into accepting the wooden horse comes primarily from Virgil’s Aeneid, written centuries later from a Roman perspective.
Nolan did not include Sinon as a brief reference. He made the character central to Odysseus’s guilt, the fall of Troy, and the film’s moral argument.
Meanwhile, important parts of Homer’s story are removed or substantially changed. The Phaeacians and Nausicaa disappear. Poseidon’s divine role is minimized. Penelope’s test involving the marriage bed is replaced. The gods become psychological suggestions. The Cyclops encounter loses much of its verbal contest. The ending is rewritten.
This is where the adaptation excuse fails. Nolan removed material from The Odyssey because a movie has limited time, then used that time to expand a character from The Aeneid.
If there was room for Virgil, perhaps there was still room for Homer.
Odysseus Without Odysseus
The greatest identity problem involves the main character.
Homer’s Odysseus is intelligent, deceptive, resourceful, proud, persuasive, curious, ruthless, courageous, and deeply flawed. His greatest weapon is not his sword. It is his mind.
He survives because he studies problems, manipulates enemies, invents convincing lies, and recognizes when brute force will fail. His flaws are equally important. After escaping the Cyclops, Odysseus cannot resist revealing his identity. His pride turns victory into disaster when Polyphemus calls upon Poseidon to punish him.
Odysseus’s own choices contribute to his suffering. He is admirable, infuriating, brilliant, selfish, loyal, deceptive, and human.
Nolan replaced much of that complexity with a familiar modern character: the traumatized veteran seeking redemption.
The film softens Odysseus’s infidelity, minimizes his arrogance, reduces demonstrations of his verbal cunning, and shifts responsibility for many failures away from his personality. His guilt over the Trojan Horse becomes more important than the pride, intelligence, deception, and difficult morality that define Homer’s hero.
Homer treats cunning as one of Odysseus’s defining virtues. Nolan treats his greatest strategic victory as something resembling a war crime.
The ancient Odysseus triumphs because he outsmarts his enemies. Nolan’s Odysseus spends much of the movie ashamed that he outsmarted them.
Ancient warriors were still human and could certainly experience fear, grief, guilt, and trauma. The problem is not that Nolan gave Odysseus emotions. The problem is that he replaced Homer’s psychology with a distinctly modern therapeutic interpretation and allowed it to consume the character.
Even Odysseus’s ultimate purpose changes. The Odyssey is fundamentally a story about returning home. He struggles for years to reach Ithaca, reunite with Penelope and Telemachus, destroy the suitors, and reclaim his household and kingdom.
Nolan’s version finally reaches Ithaca and then leaves again. Telemachus becomes king while Odysseus and Penelope sail away on another redemptive journey.
How do you adapt one of history’s greatest stories about longing for home and then have the hero abandon home at the end?
This was not Homer’s Odysseus shortened for the screen. It was a replacement wearing Homer’s name.
“Zeus’s Law” Is Not Homeric Xenia
The film repeatedly discusses “Zeus’s law,” presenting it as something similar to the Golden Rule: treat strangers properly, never abuse hospitality, and do not use a gift to harm its recipient.
That resembles modern Christian moral language more than the specific Greek institution of xenia.
Homeric xenia is a reciprocal relationship between guests and hosts. A host provides food, shelter, gifts, and protection. A guest respects the household, does not become a threat or burden, and may later repay that hospitality. These relationships could create obligations between families lasting for generations. Zeus Xenios protected strangers, guests, and hosts.
The suitors violate xenia because they occupy Odysseus’s home, consume his wealth, threaten his son, pressure his wife, and refuse to leave.
Nolan stretches that institution into a universal condemnation of deception. The Trojan Horse becomes a violation because the Greeks disguised an attack as a gift.
That interpretation does not fit the source.
Troy was not an unsuspecting household inviting Odysseus inside for dinner. The Greeks and Trojans had been at war for ten years. The horse was a military deception used against an enemy city. Homeric tradition celebrates the Greeks’ cunning, especially Odysseus’s role in achieving victory.
Nolan takes the very quality Homer admires and converts it into Odysseus’s original sin.
The film then contradicts its own rule. Odysseus returns to his palace disguised, conceals his identity, takes advantage of the suitors’ failure to recognize him, and launches a surprise attack that kills them.
If disguising violence through deception violates Nolan’s “Zeus’s law,” Odysseus repeats the same supposed crime at the climax.
Perhaps Zeus needed a better legal department.
Penelope Deserved Better Than Modern Activism
Homer’s Penelope is already strong.
She survives years of pressure from the suitors by using patience, intelligence, deception, and emotional discipline. Her weaving scheme allows her to delay remarriage. Her final test involving the marriage bed proves that the returning stranger is truly Odysseus. She does not need to sound like a modern political activist to possess agency.
Nolan gives her a speech about being prevented from ruling because she is a woman. The concern may resonate with a modern audience, but the language and framing sound imported from contemporary politics rather than developed from Penelope’s culture and circumstances.
The problem is not that Penelope discusses power. She is a queen surrounded by men trying to seize her household. The problem is that she speaks as though she has temporarily stepped out of Bronze Age Ithaca to deliver a lecture written for a twenty-first-century audience.
That is representative of the dialogue throughout the film.
Dialogue Written for the Audience, Not the Characters
I did not expect Homeric Greek. I did not require Shakespearean English or exaggerated British accents. I expected dialogue that maintained the illusion of another place and time.
Instead, the characters speak with modern vocabulary, contemporary rhythms, casual phrasing, and inconsistent accents. Telemachus calling Odysseus “Dad” is the most famous example, but the problem is much larger than one word.
The actors sound like modern Americans discussing ancient events.
The screenplay is also painfully explicit. Characters explain themes that the story should communicate naturally. They announce historical developments, moral rules, political grievances, and personal motivations as though the audience has been assigned a worksheet.
Having someone announce that the Bronze Age is collapsing does not create historical depth. It sounds like exposition written by someone who knows the audience may not have read the Wikipedia page.
The accents make matters worse. Matt Damon sounds like Matt Damon. British performers adopt contemporary American accents. Other characters sound like whichever celebrity happens to be wearing the costume. They do not sound as though they come from the same island, kingdom, culture, or century.
If Hollywood insists upon giving every ancient Greek the wrong accent, it could at least give them the same wrong accent.
Even hearing the dialogue becomes difficult because the musical score frequently overwhelms it. Nolan has faced complaints about sound mixing before, and this film continues the tradition. When the writing is already clumsy, forcing the audience to strain to hear it does not make it profound. It merely makes it clumsy at a higher volume.
Spectacle Cannot Replace Story
Visually, The Odyssey is impressive. The practical effects, ocean photography, enormous sets, monsters, and IMAX presentation deserve recognition.
The Cyclops is an especially impressive technical achievement.
But beautiful effects cannot turn a Viking ship into a Bronze Age Greek vessel. Expensive armor can still belong to the wrong period. A massive Trojan Horse can dominate an IMAX screen without making Sinon part of Homer’s Odyssey.
Hollywood often uses spectacle to mask weak dialogue, thin characters, and poor storytelling. Nolan gives audiences so much to look at that they may temporarily forget to ask whether any of it belongs together.
The practical effects are among the film’s greatest strengths. They may also be its most effective distraction.
A Repetitive Journey
Many encounters follow the same structure.
Odysseus and his men reach a new shore. They discover something that appears useful, safe, or inviting. A monster or hostile group attacks. Several crew members die. Odysseus orders everyone back to the ship.
Then they repeat it.
The repetition makes the story feel simultaneously rushed and drawn out. Individual episodes do not receive enough time to develop, yet the movie lasts nearly three hours. It becomes a collection of expensive incidents rather than a journey with growing narrative momentum.
The armored giants provide a good example. They look impressive and produce material suitable for trailers and posters, but the sequence contributes little beyond another attack and retreat.
Arrive. Investigate. Lose men. Run to the boat.
Apparently, the greatest monster Odysseus faced was structural repetition.
Where Did Homer’s Wit Go?
Homer’s story contains suffering, death, revenge, temptation, terror, absurdity, intelligence, and humor. Those tones coexist.
The Cyclops episode should demonstrate Odysseus’s cunning. He tells Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody,” allowing the blinded Cyclops to tell the others that nobody is attacking him. The escape beneath the sheep combines danger, intelligence, irony, and dark humor.
Nolan delivers a technically impressive monster but diminishes the wit and verbal contest that made the episode memorable.
The entire film is relentlessly solemn. Every scene is treated with ominous seriousness. The movie rarely balances tension with wonder, adventure, charm, or humor. Even situations containing natural absurdity are presented as though smiling would violate the terms of the production.
Homer understood that an epic could be terrifying and entertaining. Nolan appears convinced that seriousness is measured by how long everyone can stare somberly into the distance.
Would Critics Call It a Masterpiece Without Nolan’s Name?
This returns me to my admiration for Christopher Nolan.
Because I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers alive, I expected more from him, not less. His reputation should raise the standard rather than protect him from it.
If an unknown director produced the same historically confused world, mismatched casting, modern dialogue, altered mythology, repetitive structure, inconsistent moral system, and rewritten hero, would critics still proclaim it a masterpiece?
Or are some critics reviewing Christopher Nolan’s reputation instead of Christopher Nolan’s movie?
The visual ambition deserves praise. Nolan remains an extraordinary technical filmmaker. But technical achievement does not excuse weak dialogue, lost character identity, or a story that no longer knows what it is adapting.
A great filmmaker can make a disappointing movie.
What Better Historical Epics Understand
Master and Commander understands immersion. Its ships, language, hierarchy, behavior, physical conditions, and relationships create a coherent historical world. The viewer feels aboard that ship with those men.
Gladiator takes substantial historical liberties, but its characters, architecture, costumes, performances, and atmosphere work together to create a recognizable Roman identity. The movie may not be a documentary, but it knows what world it wants the audience to enter.
Neither film is perfectly accurate. That is not the standard.
The standard is whether hundreds of creative decisions support the same illusion.
Those films demonstrate what happens when the details work together. The Odyssey demonstrates what happens when they do not.
Conclusion: Why Wasn’t Homer Enough?
Homer’s Odyssey has endured for nearly three thousand years because its themes remain timeless: perseverance, loyalty, pride, humility, intelligence, temptation, consequence, and the longing for home.
Nolan had one of history’s greatest stories, an extraordinary budget, an enormous cast, groundbreaking cameras, practical effects, global locations, and nearly unlimited creative freedom.
Yet the film repeatedly behaves as though Homer’s characters, beliefs, conflicts, humor, gods, and ending needed to be corrected for a modern audience.
This movie was not ruined by one actor, one race swap, one Viking ship, one suit of armor, one modern line, or one changed scene.
It was dozens of choices.
Each one moved the film farther from Bronze Age Greece, farther from Homer’s characters, and farther from the identity of The Odyssey. Eventually, the title became one of the few recognizable things left.
I wanted to experience Homer’s Odyssey. Instead, I watched a different story concealed beneath a name that audiences already loved.
If Nolan wanted to create a movie about a guilt-ridden Bronze Age veteran confronting war, trauma, immigration, economic conflict, and moral redemption, he could have done that. It might even have been an excellent original film.
But if you want to tell a different story, give it a different name.
Otherwise, you have not adapted The Odyssey.
You have used it.
