What Cinema Still Owes Homer

Reflections on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Eleni Phufas-Jousma

Homer Already Understood Cinema

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Whether or not Anton Chekhov actually uttered those famous words is almost beside the point. The sentiment expresses one of the oldest truths of artistic creation: the greatest artists trust the audience to see rather than to be told.

Christopher Nolan’s attempt to reimagine The Odyssey too often forgets this principle.

The irony is profound. Homer wrote one of the most visually evocative works in all of literature. The Odyssey is not remembered because its heroes endlessly explain themselves. We remember the scar on Odysseus’ leg. The olive-tree bed carved from living wood. The bow that no suitor can string. The wine-dark sea. Dawn with her rosy fingers. Homer gives us images that become permanent possessions of the imagination.

Cinema, of all the arts, should possess an even greater advantage.

When Antiquity Begins to Sound Modern

A further difficulty lies in the film's cultural dissonance. Characters occasionally speak less like figures formed by the Bronze Age than contemporary personalities commenting upon it. Homer invites us into another civilization; he does not remake that civilization in our own image. The result is subtle but cumulative. The ancient world begins to sound strangely modern, and with that shift something essential is lost.

When Cinema Stops Trusting Images

Nolan’s adaptation repeatedly chooses explanation over revelation.  In doing so, it embraces Emily Wilson's translation, whose deliberate effort to recast Homer in an unmistakably contemporary voice encourages a screenplay that speaks with modern assumptions rather than the timeless grandeur, mystery, and poetic restraint of the ancient epic.

Many of the film’s most important scenes unfold through extended dialogue while the camera dutifully alternates between the faces of the speakers in familiar shot/reverse-shot sequences. The camera records conversations competently enough, but it seldom participates in the storytelling. Rather than discovering emotional truth through composition, silence, gesture, movement, or symbolic imagery, the audience is frequently told what characters feel.

The result is an unexpected paradox: one of the world's greatest visual epics becomes, at times, surprisingly wordy.   One leaves the theater recalling conversations more readily than visions. 

And one cannot help imagining another conversation—one that never occurred.

Actors Waiting to Act

The encounters with Circe and Calypso illustrate the problem. These should be among the most mysterious and hypnotic episodes in the entire narrative. Instead, they become prolonged conversations whose visual language rarely rises above conventional cinematic grammar. One longs not for more dialogue but for greater mystery—for images that haunt rather than speeches that explain.  

One of the film's greatest disappointments is not the casting but the underuse of the cast. Samantha Morton portrays Circe and has demonstrated elsewhere that she is capable of extraordinary complexity, intelligence, and emotional depth. Here, however, she is reduced to little more than a plot device—a mysterious woman who turns men into animals. Her performance is confined by a screenplay that rarely allows Circe to become psychologically or morally fascinating.  In Homer, Circe is far more than a witch. She is seduction, civilization, danger, hospitality, transformation, wisdom, and ultimately an unexpected teacher. She occupies the ambiguous territory between predator and benefactor. Those contradictions are what make her immortal. In Nolan’s hands, much of that ambiguity disappears.

Homer rarely pauses to deliver ideological lectures. His characters reveal themselves through action, choice, and consequence. In this film, Circe is instead asked to explain herself, sacrificing mystery for exposition.   Again and again, the film’s screenplay pauses to articulate its moral judgments. Rather than allowing character, action, and consequence to reveal ethical truths—as Homer invariably does—Nolan often places those truths directly into his characters’ mouths.  

Throughout the film, one senses an extraordinary ensemble waiting to be unleashed. Yet many of the actors are asked not to inhabit complex human beings but to deliver exposition. The performances are competent, often excellent within their limits, but the screenplay seldom trusts them to communicate through expression, silence, or gesture. Too often the actors explain emotions that gifted performers could have conveyed without saying a word.

The Tyranny of Noise

One further artistic choice undermines the film’s emotional power: its relentless soundscape. Christopher Nolan has long favored overwhelming musical accompaniment, but in The Odyssey the near-constant score becomes distracting rather than immersive. Music, like dialogue, gains its power through restraint. A sustained crescendo eventually ceases to be a crescendo at all.

Silence is one of cinema’s greatest dramatic resources. It creates anticipation, mystery, intimacy, and awe. Homer instinctively understood this rhythm. His epic alternates action with stillness, violence with contemplation, wonder with grief. Those moments of quiet prepare us for the emotional force that follows.

Nolan rarely grants the audience that silence. The score and sound design often tell us what to feel before the image has earned it. Rather than deepening the visual experience, the film’s relentless sonic landscape frequently competes with it.

The Sirens

The Sirens illustrate both the film’s strengths and its missed opportunities. Nolan wisely resists showing them too literally; Homer himself never describes their appearance. Yet their voices should emerge from an almost unbearable silence. Temptation, longing, memory, and death would then seem to arise from the stillness itself. Instead, the sequence remains enveloped within an already saturated soundscape, diminishing its emotional shock.

Great composers understand that music is measured not only by the notes they write but also by the silences they leave behind. Great filmmakers should understand the same truth.

The Sirens should be among the most unforgettable sounds in cinema. They have certainly been imagined in millennia of retelling of Homer’s saga. Their voices ought to embody irresistible temptation, grief, longing, memory, and death simultaneously. Whether achieved through human voices, electronic manipulation, or orchestral color, the effect should leave the audience feeling that these are not merely singers but supernatural beings whose music has lured sailors to their doom for millennia. Instead, the sequence never fully transcends the merely strange. It is heard – barely - but it is not felt except in Damon’s grotesque attempt to show suffering. But to Nolan's credit, he resists the temptation to present the Sirens too literally. Homer himself never describes their appearance, understanding that mystery is often more powerful than revelation. Here, the director wisely leaves much to the imagination.

Yet while the visual restraint is admirable, the sequence never achieves the overwhelming emotional and psychological force that the episode demands. Their voices should haunt both Odysseus and the audience. Instead, despite an inventive sound design, the moment never fully acquires the mythic inevitability that Homer conveys with astonishing economy.

Action Is Not Epic and Domesticated Heroes

Even the battle sequences, while technically accomplished, often feel strangely literal. Homer understood that epic is not merely action; it is wonder. Spectacle alone is not enough. Great cinema transforms action into memory through unforgettable images. 

One of the film’s most consequential departures from Homer occurs during the fall of Troy. As the Greeks emerge from the Wooden Horse and the city descends into slaughter, Nolan’s Odysseus pauses, seemingly contemplating the horrors unfolding around him. It is a striking image—but not a Homeric one.

Homer never asks us to mistake Odysseus for a modern humanitarian. He is the architect of the Wooden Horse, one of the principal agents of Troy’s destruction, and a warrior who has spent ten years engaged in relentless warfare. His greatness lies not in moral purity but in his extraordinary complexity. He is cunning, courageous, compassionate at times, merciless at others. To soften him into a reluctant spectator of violence is to diminish one of literature’s most fascinating protagonists. Nolan domesticates Odysseus, making him morally more acceptable to contemporary sensibilities while sacrificing the disturbing complexity that Homer gave him. Should we remake ancient heroes in our own image, or should we allow them to remain products of their own civilization?

The Missing 'Outis'

Among the film's most puzzling omissions is Homer’s famous “Outis” episode. Asked his name by the blinded Polyphemus, Odysseus replies, “Οὖτις”—"Nobody.” When the Cyclops cries for help, he can only shout that “Nobody” has attacked him, sending his fellow Cyclopes away in bewilderment. The scene has delighted audiences for nearly three thousand years because it distills Odysseus into a single unforgettable act of crafty intelligence. It is not merely a clever joke; it is the defining expression of the complicated man – perhaps a hero but a flawed one.

To omit “Outis” does not merely condense the story  but removes one of the foundational moments in Western literature—the episode that reveals why Odysseus is remembered not simply as a warrior but as the supreme strategist of the ancient world.

Nolan repeatedly overlooks the very moments that reveal Homer’s genius.

An Imagined Symposium in Elysium

After seeing Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, one imagines this conversation taking place in Elysium.

Stanley Kubrick: Why are they talking so much?

Michalis Cacoyannis: Because the director no longer trusts the image.

Kubrick turns toward Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy is silent for a long while.

McCarthy: The image was enough.

Again there is silence.

Plato, who has listened without interruption, finally speaks.

Plato: Then why show us what you do not trust us to see?

No one answers.

Reaching—or Failing to Reach—Ithaca

This, ultimately, is my disappointment with Nolan’s The Odyssey. Not that it lacks intelligence or ambition. It possesses at least ambition in overabundance. Rather, it too often speaks where it should remain silent and explains where it should trust the image.

On opening day, I saw The Odyssey in IMAX in a half-filled theater of moviegoers who, like me, had been underwhelmed by the trailers yet still hoped to be proven wrong. Homer deserves at least that much faith. When the credits ended, the audience rose almost in unison and hurried back into the smoke-filled summer air of Buffalo. Few lingered. Few seemed inclined to remain with Odysseus a moment longer. Perhaps that is the tragedy of so much modern cinema. It entertains spectacularly, then releases us back into the world before its images have had time to become memories—because, in the end, too few of those images are worthy of remembrance.

Homer trusted words to become images in the imagination. Great cinema trusts images to become permanent memories. That, ultimately, is what cinema owes Homer. Christopher Nolan embarked upon one of the most formidable artistic voyages a filmmaker can undertake, and for that ambition he deserves admiration. Yet this voyage does not quite reach Ithaca. Homer’s epic remains unconquered, awaiting the filmmaker who will once again trust silence, mystery, and the image itself.

Until then, the poet Constantine Cavafy’s counsel still awaits every traveler: “Pray that the road be long.” Homer has not yet reached the end of that road. Neither has cinema.