What Did I Get Myself Into?
That’s the first question I’m going to throw up into this wannabe essay, which is really just an attempt to put into words some of the things that have been stuck in my head since watching The Odyssey (2026) on a rainy Friday night, in a theater packed with people who weren’t there to see The Odyssey but another movie starring three of the same actors, one of them wearing that iconic red-and-blue suit.
I’m not here to talk about Nolan’s filmmaking or all the differences between the poem of The Odyssey and what ended up on the big screen (maybe a little).
Honestly, I don’t think I’m remotely prepared to dive too deeply into all the different ways Greek mythology can be interpreted, or what we choose to change and carry over when adapting it for a contemporary audience, because the subject just feels massive. It takes a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, and a lot of mythology to talk about one of those stories that somehow still echoes through our world today. And the truth is I still feel a little green when it comes to all of this.
But then I reminded myself that, at the end of the day, this is my blog. It doesn’t have to make perfect sense. My brain doesn’t exactly follow one continuous train of thought, so I guess it makes sense that I’d want to recreate some of that swarm on the page.
Let’s start…
I think most of us, when we’re kids and first start learning about History, go through that phase of being fascinated by Greek mythology. We start connecting the names of the gods to movies we’d already seen, like Disney’s Hercules (Roman name and all, and movie mythology lovers love to criticize for how wildly inaccurate it is. Understandably, but still, what a movie). Maybe a lot of people fell in love with Brad Pitt as Achilles or, in my case, Eric Bana as Hector (sighs) in Troy back in 2004.
One way or another, we’re drawn to this romanticized version of a society from the past, dressed in white and gold robes, Mediterranean colors, perfect faces carved out of marble. The decades keep passing and we keep telling, adapting, and showing up to watch these ancient stories. Why?
I’ll be honest, I personally went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey out of FOMO more than anything else. I love talking about movies, but I procrastinate actually watching them so much that by the time they make it onto a streaming service, everyone has already talked them to death and I’ve lost interest. With this one, I told myself, “Enough. You’re going to go and see what all the fuss is about.” And I did. I sat there for two hours and fifty-three minutes and experienced true blockbuster cinema. The kind that’s actually worth seeing in a theater, eating popcorn, surrounded by other people experiencing the exact same thing as you at that exact moment.
I find Greek mythology, and stories like The Iliad and The Odyssey, hiding in almost every contemporary story, and if I stop and look, their traces are pretty easy to recognize. The heroes we admire, the monsters they have to face, the journeys they embark on only to return transformed. You don’t even have to look that far. In everyday life, even trying to get home during rush hour can become “an odyssey.”
The Eternal Remake
So many of the narrative structures we take for granted today keep showing up again and again in popular culture. Different settings, different names, different eras, but the stories keep asking the same questions and running into the same struggles. Human beings, after all, are somewhat repetitive creatures.
You can see it across different disciplines, in philosophy, sociology, psychology. We repeat stories, feelings, behaviors, patterns, revolutions, catastrophes. And that repetition isn’t limited to the way we behave within society. It also resurfaces in the stories we choose to tell over and over again.
This isn’t new. It’s not like we suddenly decided, in the middle of this boom of self-psychology and remakes, sequels, prequels, and reimaginings of the same movies and TV shows, that we enjoy going back to the same things. Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade, for example, writes about how archaic societies found meaning by constantly returning to a primordial time. Traditional societies sought to return to the center through repetition, because that center represented the point where the sacred world and the human world came into contact. What truly mattered wasn’t doing something new. It was actively retracing a path that had already been laid out.
The Greeks themselves talk about it. The Stoics envisioned a cyclical cosmos governed by a rational order, one that, at the end of each cycle, would be born again and repeat the same history in an eternal recurrence.
Eternal recurrence is also the concept Friedrich Nietzsche plays with in The Gay Science, where, through the figure of a demon, he essentially asks, “would you want this again, infinitely many times?”. If life had to return eternally, if we had to experience the same things over and over again, could we still say yes to it?
For psychoanalysis, people compulsively return to painful situations or similar relationships that have never brought us pleasure. Why do we do this? Sigmund Freud calls it the “repetition compulsion,” this tendency we have as human beings to relive experiences that were never fully worked through, with the conscious hope of resolving something that never quite found closure. Frederic Bartlett, from cognitive psychology, introduced the idea of the schema, which cognitive psychology would later develop into the notion of schemas we build from childhood onward, patterns we continue to confirm and reproduce throughout our lives.
Maybe today we still repeat the ways we relate to others, the ways we process pain, the ways we react to certain stimuli. But on a larger scale, even if we no longer generally repeat rituals to bring sacred time back to life, we still return to the same stories.
Every generation retells the hero’s journey, the return home, change, transformation, the fight against a monster, the search for identity, adapting them to its own fears and concerns. Our movies, TV shows, and novels become a kind of new eternal return. Maybe we’re not repeating the exact same stories, but we are still returning to the same questions.
Myths: Greek Fanfiction?
We tend to associate myths with fictional stories. Fiction with a strong element of teaching behind it, or with something it’s trying to tell us through the fantasy it creates. For a long time, myths were one of the ways we could see how the societies that created them made sense of the world around them.
Homer, whoever he was (or whoever they were) didn’t imagine the events of The Iliad and The Odyssey in a bubble, untouched by the real and historical events of his society. Greece was going through the colonization of the Mediterranean, which meant wars, Greeks boarding ships and setting off to explore unknown lands. The Trojan War reflected, in some ways, the collective trauma left behind by the Bronze Age Collapse. Behind all the drama of heroes and gods, the war at Troy worked as a literary mirror of the violent raiding expeditions, piracy (the Sea Peoples) and wars of attrition that marked the end of the Mycenaean era.
The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
In Myth and Reality, Eliade returns to this idea that myth tells a sacred story, an event that took place in a primordial, inaugural time.
Through myths, we try to answer the same questions humanity has always tried to answer through religion, reason, science, biology, history, spirituality. The people telling these myths wondered about death, about the meaning of life, work, love. Each myth becomes a story about the origins of these deeply human questions.
Myth is also a way of creating order, something we humans seem to need, an order that, as Eliade sees it, moves from chaos into cosmos.
Claude Lévi-Strauss approached the creation of myths as a way of dealing with the binary oppositions of the world: nature and culture, life and death, human and divinity. These contradictions that frustrate us can be thought through and given narrative order in stories where we can hear them, confront them, and somehow mediate between them. In a way, all these different stories and perspectives on the most primordial and abstract questions of human existence are part of a constant search for meaning in the face of things we can’t neatly contain within logic.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, northamerican writer Joseph Campbell talks about a structure shared across myths, which he calls the monomyth, a pattern that repeats itself regardless of culture or time period. Within this pattern, the hero goes through a personal and spiritual transformation that reflects something in the human unconscious. We can look at Odysseus in this case, but if we turn to popular culture, we can also recognize it in many (if not hundreds) of the characters we grew up with.
https://conorneill.com/2020/03/03/how-to-find-purpose-and-self-belief-the-heros-journey/
Simba in The Lion King has always felt like one of the clearest examples to me (probably because that Shakespearean retelling was one of my very first hyperfixations as a kid). Frodo, in The Lord of the Rings, leaves the Shire behind and ventures into a world completely unknown to him, facing trials and temptations until he eventually returns, and the hobbit who comes back is no longer the same one who left. Another one of my favorite examples, and one that I think gets pretty overlooked, is Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who is literally ripped out of her ordinary, sepia-toned world and dropped into an unfamiliar one in Technicolor, where she has to find her way back home, meeting allies, facing different trials, and eventually discovering that what she needed to return had been with her all along. Dorothy and Odysseus could honestly sit down for coffee and have a pretty interesting chat.
We see it in Harry Potter, with Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and in Disney classics like Finding Nemo, Toy Story, or more recently, Moana. Even in a slightly different way, we can find it in movies like Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away.
But one of the clearest, most in-your-face examples is probably Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Campbell’s force was particularly strong on George Lucas while he was developing the first film in 1977. Lucas himself acknowledged having read the book and keeping it in mind while building the mythology of Star Wars.
The structure of this story, retold over and over again, is so deeply ingrained in the way we tell stories that we almost expect the hero, whatever kind of story they belong to, to go through a series of trials and a transformation that changes them, so that when they finally return home, they’re no longer the same person who left.
Obviously, not every story follows these exact same steps, but we can recognize something of this formula in many of them. Hollywood loves reheating this structure because it knows exactly what it does to an audience. When it comes to myths, I think Campbell is an interesting name to bring into all of this. Mostly because he takes us right back to the same questions. Why do we keep getting emotionally invested in what we could now think of as an ultra-commercialized, heavily-North-Americanized story told over and over again in different disguises? Maybe it’s because we recognize in it that very ordinary human experience of having, at some point, to leave behind what we know and encounter the unknown, to be changed by it, and eventually return with a different, perhaps wiser perspective? Isn’t that, in some way, the journey imposed on all of us from the moment we’re born?
Odysseus of a Thousand Identities
The story of Simba in The Lion King resonates with us. Or at least it does with me. A little lion still far too young to understand the meaning and depth of everything happening around him who, after watching his father die, runs away carrying all that pain and guilt with him. He grows up somewhat hidden away, rejecting everything he left behind, until he’s finally pushed to confront the past he had been running from (“Remember who you are”). And it’s everything he learns during that exile, along with the past he’s forced to face, that transforms him into someone capable of returning home and stepping into his true identity. This retelling of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, adapted primarily (among the many names listed on IMDb) by Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, and Linda Woolverton, may be a familiar story, adapted from a classic, built around the very formula I’ve been talking about, and yet it still gets us every time. Maybe that’s just the millennial experience making us feel it somewhere deep inside. We cry, we laugh, we get emotional.
It’s an original way of telling a story that has already been told, and in much the same way, having grown up with these narratives intertwined into the movies we watched as kids, going to see an adaptation of The Odyssey doesn’t feel all that strange. And in it, we recognize what is valued in Odysseus, the hero who survives, who endures, who makes it home, and who must also recover his identity.
Odysseus is not Achilles, the hero of The Iliad (or was Hector the real hero? For the sake of staying on track, I’m going with the guy with the heel), which precedes Nolan’s film. Achilles seeks glory, a reputation capable of outliving death itself. The Greek hero’s journey is defined by the epic, by kleos (fame and glory), and by the warrior’s pursuit of something beyond fleeting recognition. Achilles is the prototype of the masculine hero, violently hungry for that kleos.
In the second part, Homer places the figure of the hero somewhere different. If Achilles is violence, strength, passion, and glory, Odysseus is survival and endurance. He is a hero who has already been through war, already absorbed everything those ten years taught him, and now has only the grueling task of making it back home. Mêtis is one of the concepts that runs through The Odyssey. Ingenuity, cunning, subtlety, and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, to know when to deceive and how to find a way out of whatever situation presents itself. Both characters embody different versions of the Greek hero.
When it comes to Odysseus, we also talk about identity. If you’ve seen the movie, one thing we can take from an adaptation that, understandably, changes, disrupts, and reshapes the material it adapts is that, at first, Odysseus is a missing character. Everyone else talks about him, waits for him, keeps him present without even knowing whether he’s still alive. In the written text, we find “keînos”, a Greek term we could translate as “that man,” someone who is far away. Odysseus exists in the memories and stories of others until, later on, he becomes “hóde”, “this man,” the man who is finally here.
Odysseus plays around with identity a lot. We see it when Athena transforms him into a beggar so that no one will recognize him (I think in the movie he just throws a piece of cloth over himself). The movie adds another layer to this game of names through Odysseus’s constant switching to Sinon (played by Elliot Page), a young warrior who takes part in the deception of the Trojan horse and dies.
It happens again when the cyclops Polyphemus asks for his name and, instead of giving him his own, Odysseus answers Outis, “Nobody” (did this actually happen in the movie? I can’t remember, but whatever, we’re mixing things up). Odysseus willingly gives up his name in order to survive, though not for very long. Once he reaches the ships and puts enough distance between himself and Polyphemus, he reveals his true identity and where he comes from. This is what eventually leads Polyphemus to pray to Poseidon, his father and god of the sea, asking him to make sure Odysseus never reaches home, and if fate says that he must, that he return late, after years of suffering and having lost all of his warrior companions. This is the tragedy that turns Odysseus’s journey into... well, an odyssey, more or less.
And when he finally does return, the people around him are no longer quite sure of the identity of this man who has become a myth. That identity has to be rebuilt within his own home, and through the relationships he slowly puts back together with the people he left behind, he gradually becomes Odysseus again. Even then, recognition looks different for each of them.
There’s Telemachus, and a reunion you could almost question calling a reunion at all, considering father and son barely know each other. Argos, his dog, on the other hand, recognizes him immediately. Eurycleia discovers who he is while washing his feet, when she recognizes the scar from his youth.
With Penelope, resistance comes before acceptance. Penelope, who shares her husband’s cunning, remains suspicious and puts him to the test. And her recognition goes even further than that, because there’s still debate over whether the test of the bed is really meant to determine whether Odysseus is who he claims to be, or to confirm something she already suspected (or perhaps even knew) before finally allowing herself to acknowledge him and emotionally restore a relationship that had been suspended for twenty years.
In the poem, there are also Eumaeus and Philoetius, as well as his father, Laertes. Different moments of recognition that reveal him as someone different to each of them.
These reunions and confirmations, whether intentional or accidental, gradually reveal different sides of the hero’s identity depending on who recognizes him. He is a father, a son, a master, a husband, a king. Odysseus’s identity is also defined through the relationships he has with others.
The Presence of a Divinity
Every adaptation comes with changes. It took me a while to understand that, and I had to learn it the hard way. Not only because of everything that goes into turning something that has already been written into a screenplay, but also because of legal and cultural considerations, budgets, runtime, creative decisions, studio demands, casting, technical limitations, and the need to condense stories that might span hundreds of pages into two or three hours. Sometimes, what we read simply isn’t easy to translate onto the big screen and, even when you try, it doesn’t work the same way visually. Other times, completely different ways are found to convey the same feeling, an idea, or even a character.
The changes in The Odyssey (2026) didn’t bother me all that much because I read it when I was a teenager and, even though I did it willingly, it felt more like a social assignment. Something I had to do to build up my cultural capital and feel a little better about myself after seeing how badly I was doing in school.
Could some of the changes have been handled better? Probably. Strictly speaking, I don’t know if I could tell you whether it’s a good adaptation or not. I know I appreciated its big, cinematic, popcorn-movie quality more than I probably would have if I’d stopped to think too deeply about the story itself. Within all the sensationalism of the North-American blockbuster (and considering it’s a Nolan production, and I’m really not that into him) it’s a good film.
One of the changes I found most interesting from Nolan as both director and screenwriter was the ambiguous, psychological role he gives Athena.
The Greek gods will never stop fascinating me, and I’m always interested in seeing how they’re represented across different formats. And while I would’ve loved to see them take on a more active role, the space they’re given here definitely left me with a lot to think about.
In Homer, Athena is the one who asks Zeus to finally allow Odysseus to return to Ithaca. Once Zeus agrees, Athena begins actively intervening in the hero’s journey home.
Athena disguises herself, approaches Telemachus in the form of Mentor, and pushes him to search for news of his father (I understand that, given the nature of the movie, this probably would’ve felt a little strange, but… scenes with Tom Holland and Zendaya? Would’ve been 100% on board). She alters Odysseus’s appearance so he can plot against and defeat the suitors, and eventually intervenes to put an end to the violence after the slaughter. The goddess doesn’t simply accompany Odysseus along his journey, she becomes his partner in strategy. She is, after all, the goddess of mêtis. You could even say that her qualities are the ones Odysseus embodies, and that through her we see the restoration of both divine and social order in Ithaca.
In the movie, we get something a little different. It begins with Odysseus’s memories coming back to him as he recounts the events of the Trojan War to Calypso (not the goddess from the myth. I mean the therapist in the movie) and, in a way, to himself. There’s a couple of incredible scenes where Odysseus witnesses the beheading of a woman associated with the image of Athena, an image that continues to haunt him throughout his journey home. In her presence, Odysseus is forced to confront his own actions. The heroic war is shown as an event riddled with atrocities, looting, death, and rape (though the latter isn’t shown in the movie). Having Zendaya follow you everywhere must be pretty cool, but having Athena follow you around as a manifestation of all the guilt you carry from Troy… yeah, good luck with that.
On the other hand, I’m not entirely sold on this humanization of the gods. And maybe that isn’t exactly the right word for it, but it’s one I can still somewhat apply here. While I liked this interpretation of Athena, and the idea that her presence can be read as a manifestation of Odysseus’s guilt, I feel like Nolan strips the deities of much of the presence and direct intervention they have in the poem, turning them instead into figures to pray to and fear in a very Western way. The Catholicization of the Greek gods, more or less.
In Homer’s Odyssey, we read about these gods on Olympus as divine forces that directly intervene in earthly events and in the fates of mortals. In the movie, Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, and the other deities exist in a way that feels closer to how we experience the gods of contemporary religions. They’re invoked, prayed to, feared, but we don’t necessarily see them objectively intervening in the world.
In Homer, Athena is one of the reasons Odysseus is able, one way or another, to survive and make it home. Nolan, on the other hand, uses her to force Odysseus to remember what he has done, what he did in order to survive and win, but also what he now has to confront in order to move past it and change.
That process of moving forward also comes with a lesson we could probably all use. Something good can produce horrors too. Odysseus’s greatest quality, his mêtis, is what helped him secure victory at Troy. But that same victory opened the door to the looting, killing, and atrocities that followed. It’s a fairly contemporary way of looking at war. The Homeric poems don’t exactly idolize it, but the heroes of Greek mythology didn’t look back on their own victories through the same moral categories we use today. War brings pain, loss, and destruction, but concepts like kleos, honor, and duty belong to a different framework through which a warrior’s actions were understood. Nolan, once again, takes that same heroic past and questions it through a North-American, contemporary lens. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it says something about the way we adapt classics today and where we choose to place the emphasis, which, in turn, tells us something about where we stand in the present.
The semi-beheading of Athena, the goddess who represents so many of the qualities Odysseus himself embodies, becomes particularly meaningful when we see Matt Damon (a great Oydsseus, by the way) staring in horror at the consequences of his own virtue. Right in front of him, the deity who embodies so many of the attributes that elevate him from an ordinary mortal to a hero is literally beheaded.
And We Still Love the Same Things
Okay, but then we come back to this. Why do we like it? Why did a story almost three thousand years old manage to bring millions of people back to movie theaters? At the time of writing this, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has surpassed $1.1 billion at the global box office.
Is it FOMO? Is it Nolan and the brand he’s built for himself after Oppenheimer, Interstellar, and The Dark Knight? Is it a ridiculously stacked cast full of familiar names? Robert Pattinson! The marketing campaign? Are we just desperate to have movies that feel big enough again to justify getting off the couch, paying for a ticket, and watching them on an actual movie screen? Is it IMAX? The 70mm, which I have to admit I criticized with my whole heart because of how elitist it felt to me? Is it the spectacle, the collective experience? Or is there still something about the story of a guy who has spent years just trying to get back home that manages to hit a nerve?
What a mix.
What I think is that, as a society, we’ve changed a lot, but also not that much. Odysseus wants to return home, and today a lot of us would probably be debating what home even means. But the idealization of that place is still somewhere inside us. Odysseus questions his identity, who he really is after twenty years away. I, for one, question who I am about a hundred times a year.
Just as Odysseus builds and rebuilds himself after facing monsters, creatures, attacks, and even fate itself, we also build and rebuild ourselves through things that may not involve giant Cyclopes who just want to make cheese and live in peace, but through the more ordinary experiences of life. Studying, getting new jobs, making new friends, falling in love, becoming parents, losing people. All of these experiences constantly reshape our identities, altering and remaking us along the way. We wonder whether everything we went through meant something, whether it was worth it in the end. Did it make us stronger? Did it add something to who we are?
It’s these human struggles that allow us to see ourselves in stories that end up being much more about us than they first appear. Eliade wrote about traditional societies returning to reconnect with something primordial and divine. I’m not saying that paying the ridiculously high price of an IMAX ticket to watch a Christopher Nolan movie with a bucket of popcorn is a way of participating in something sacred. But I can’t help finding something familiar in that need to return and keep asking ourselves the same questions.
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