Rather than writing about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in terms of historical accuracy,  comparing it with earlier film adaptations, or assessing its faithfulness to Emily Wilson’s recent translation, I’d rather focus on the story’s enduring legacy. Granted, The Odyssey is not as ancient as Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian epic ���ϳԹ��� students encounter in the first year of Core. Yet both works follow heroes on arduous journeys and invite audiences, ancient and modern alike, to reflect on life’s trials and tribulations. Across vast differences in culture and time, both epics present heroes who fail in frustratingly human ways.

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, as in the original poem, Odysseus and his companions face hardships both of their own making and those inherent to the world they navigate. In this adaptation, however, fortune and poor decisions shape events more than divine intervention. Athena is the only Olympian to appear on screen, and (as a professor who regularly plays Athena in the classroom) I suspect she would be as disappointed by her limited screen time as Zendaya often seems to be with her co-star. Damon portrays Odysseus as an everyman—flawed and frequently shortsighted—rather than as the exceptionally cunning hero whose intellect earns the unwavering favor of the goddess of wisdom. His hubris and ignorance as he leaves Troy are so conspicuous that one wonders why Athena did not simply ask Zeus to lend her a lightning bolt and end his journey before it began.

Nolan’s greatest achievement is not historical reconstruction but relevance. His striking cinematography provides a compelling visual touchstone for readers imagining the ancient world, a world that remains foundational to ���ϳԹ���’s Core Curriculum. Every fall, students read Antigone (Core 101), Aristotle (Core 202), and the Oresteia (Core 301)—the parallel story of Agamemnon’s bloody homecoming after Troy. As we debate these texts and the values they express, our conversations may not be so different from those of Athenian audiences reflecting on their own mythic past. To what extent does a man control his fate? And what about the women of the Odessey? Nolan reminds us that the struggles of the archaic age remain recognizably human, even if his characters could use a bit more of the psychological complexity we see in Aeschylus’s Oresteia.

One of the film’s most compelling themes is xenia, the “Law of Zeus” governing hospitality and the treatment of strangers. Throughout the story, characters repeatedly violate this sacred obligation. While xenophobia means fear of strangers, Wilson notes in the introduction to her translation that the converse—the less utilized word xenophilia—can reflect the Mediterranean world of Bronze Age trade routes. One can even see xenophilia in the evolution of these stories themselves—from oral tradition to written epic through the adoption of the foreign technology of the alphabet. Nolan plants a xenophilic message, connecting his characters’ prophetic warnings about the collapse of civilization to a twenty-first-century lesson about how societies treat outsiders and the vulnerable.

Since its Renaissance rediscovery, The Odyssey has launched a thousand debates, and those conversations continue today in Phoebe Hearst Hall. Students still wrestle with many of the same questions readers asked generations ago. For instance: why, at roughly twenty years old, is Telemachus not a man capable of defending his own household? Why does Odysseus even want to go home when he can “lotus and chill” as an immortal with Calypso? As classics are cut at campus across the United States, our Core provides rare continuity across centuries and alumni cohorts. Nolan deserves credit for renewing interest in works, cultures, and questions that have long been part of ���ϳԹ���’s intellectual tradition.

As the credits rolled, a friend turned to me and asked, “What was the moral of that story?” My answer is that The Odyssey has no moral and perhaps nothing that our culture would even perceive as an appropriate lesson. However, like Odysseus, we are all on a journey. We encounter danger, hardship, plans gone awry, unexpected turns, and events we cannot fully explain. We make mistakes, sometimes serious ones. The challenge is not to avoid every failure but to continue the journey, hopefully wiser than before. It’s best to process it all with your therapist—played here by Charlize Theron.

And as I can’t refrain from offering my personal opinion; I will say the Laestrygonians look more like medieval knock-off Knights who say Ni and that you can find a better siren song in O Brother Where Art Thou?, but otherwise The Odessey is a captivating way to escape the heat and go on a voyage to a past that may live in us all.

ABOUT KATHRYN MARSDEN, PH.D.

Kathryn Marsden, Ph.D. serves as a senior lecturer in Core Studies and is a 2024-2026 Core Fellow. She is also a TALLI Faculty Fellow and advisor to students in the Fulbright Program. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Georgia, and her master’s and Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Irvine.