Sex, Family and Horrific Executions: What Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Changed and Invented – and Then Was Axed | film

TTurning a 12,000-line poem that takes a day to read aloud into a three-hour movie has always required some trimming. This is proven by the movie “The Odyssey” by Christopher Nolan, which dispenses with a number of scenes and characters from Homer’s ancient Greek epic. The director also changed the focus on some of the story’s most famous episodes and made some additions of his own. Here we make the most important adjustments.

What Nolan left out

Gods
Homer’s Odyssey begins with a discussion between Zeus and Athena on Olympus; With Zeus’s blessing, Athena plays an active role in guiding Odysseus home, supporting him in defeating the suitors and offering encouragement to his son, Telemachus, while adopting multiple disguises. Meanwhile, Poseidon thwarts Odysseus’ advances and Hermes is sent on two major quests. The only deity Nolan portrays is Athena (Zendaya), who appears as a vision seen only by Odysseus (Matt Damon) and appears to represent his conscience rather than a fully realized divine entity.

Nausicaa and Fascists
One of the Odyssey’s most famous scenes is the meeting between Odysseus and the young princess Nausicaa; He is washed up naked on a strange island where she and her maids are playing ball. After they handle this awkward situation delicately, Odysseus follows Nausicaa to the city of the Phaeacians, where he tells his tales of the Cyclops, Circe, Scylla, and Charybdis before granting him safe passage back to Ithaca. Nolan completely ignores the fascists and has Odysseus tell those stories to Calypso (Charlize Theron) as recovered memories.

Some major ghosts
The film shows Odysseus meeting his former commander Agamemnon (Penny Safdie) in the underworld (Nolan is right not to depict it as an underworld). But we do not see Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors, nor Ajax, who in the poem silently rejects Odysseus’s attempt at reconciliation. We also do not meet Odysseus’s mother, whom he tried and failed to embrace three times. Another character omitted is the unlucky Elpenor, who drowns to his death after drinking too much wine and then asks to be properly buried. It is easy to see why Nolan wanted to economize on these spiritual encounters, despite their power and resonance in the poem.

Execution of unfaithful women
It’s no surprise that Nolan avoided including the most sinister scene in the Odyssey, in which 12 enslaved women who were not loyal to the family and slept with their suitors are hanged by Telemachus. But Nolan invents a detail along the same lines when he shows one of those unfaithful women, Melantho (Mia Goth), effectively condemned to death by Odysseus’s wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), who pushes her into the slaughter while her suitors are slaughtered. It spares us the horrific spectacle of what happens in the poem to the hateful goat herder Melanthius, who has his nose, ears, hands, feet, and genitals cut off.

Penelope bed test
Homer’s Penelope does not have it easy when Odysseus returns, and in order to convince herself that the beggar who has just slaughtered the suitors is in fact her husband, she lures him into describing their marital bed, for only he and Penelope know that Odysseus had made it from an olive tree. Nolan omits this detail, showing how Penelope matches her husband in cunning; Instead, Odysseus shows her a statuette of Athena to prove his identity.

What Nolan added

Wooden horse
Homer does not tell the full story of the wooden horse, but it is mentioned on three occasions in the Odyssey (and not at all in the Iliad). Given that using the horse to storm Troy was Odysseus’ idea and crucial to the Troy Odyssey, it seems appropriate to include it in the film.

Sinon
The character Sinon (Elliot Page), who is shown in the film unwittingly tricking the Trojans into accepting the Wooden Horse, does not appear anywhere in Homer. Nolan relies on Virgil’s account of the fall of Troy in Book II of the Aeneid. He also invented the backstory for Sinon who was created to replace Antinous (Robert Pattinson) in the Greek army at Troy.

People from the sea
There is a lot of talk in the film about the world of Greek heroes being threatened by the “people of the sea.” This is not the main concern in Homer’s Odyssey. No Homeric character says, as Nolan’s Odysseus does, that the Trojan War was actually about “trade routes.” But these nods to ancient historians’ concerns show that Nolan has done his research.

Nolan hasn’t changed

Calypso
Calypso Nolan drugs Odysseus with lotus flowers to make him lose his memories, but somehow takes pity on him and lets him go on his way. Calypso in the poem does not take drugs but is very into sex (something we do not see in the film), forcing Odysseus to share her bed night after night even though he is desperate to get home. She released him only after Hermes appeared to tell her that Zeus had decided that she should do it; As a mere nymph, she knows she must submit to the authority of Olympus. Once it is clear that he can leave, Odysseus is able to enjoy one last bit of lovemaking before heading to his raft.

Giant
The giant Nolan doesn’t talk (much), while in the poem he engages in deadly comic banter with Odysseus. The lack of dialogue in the film makes the one-eyed giant even scarier, but it means we miss some important details from the poem: the trick with which Odysseus identifies himself as a nobody so that other giants won’t come to the aid of the blind monster, and the moment when Odysseus rashly reveals his true name, which the giant can then use to ask his father, Poseidon, to curse Odysseus’s return journey. These changes fit Nolan’s decision to downplay Odysseus’ abilities as a trickster and highlight his resilience and traumas hardened in battle.

Circe
Why Homer’s Circe turned some of Odysseus’ companions into pigs is never explained. She turned them back into men because Odysseus proved immune to her potion (thanks to an herb given to him by Hermes) and then agreed to have sex with her. She proves to be a very useful ally and stays with her for an entire year. Circe Nolan (Samantha Morton) seems driven by anger at male animal behavior, but then meekly agrees to return Odysseus’ men to their human bodies after intuiting that he really shouldn’t touch that soup and make her feel sorry for a group of men who just want to go home.

The ambush and the reunion of father and son
In the film, a group of villains hired by Antinous attempt to kill Telemachus (Tom Holland) in a temple, but are thwarted by Odysseus, who arrives on the scene in disguise. Shortly thereafter, Telemachus realizes that his savior is his father. In the poem, Antony leads an ambush at sea and is easily (and undramatically) averted by Telemachus, who then meets his father in Ithaca in an encounter carefully managed by Athens.

the end
Homer’s Odyssey reaches an unsatisfactory conclusion. Nolan sensibly ignores all of the poem’s final scenes: the suitors’ arrival in the realm of the dead; Odysseus’ encounter with his father, Laertes, who unnecessarily upset him by adopting another false persona; and the anticlimactic battle between Odysseus and the suitors’ relatives. In the film, Telemachus becomes king of Ithaca, allowing Odysseus and Penelope to sail off into the sunset on a mission to honor his fallen comrades.