Why We Keep Coming Back To Greek Mythology: Nolan's Odyssey And The Stories That Won't Let Go

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It’s July, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey lands in theaters this Friday, and we are here whether we like it or not. Shirin said it best when we sat down:

As much as I try to get away from Greek mythology, it just keeps coming back and finding me. And I’m like, oh god. I guess we have to talk about this again.

So we did. This is less a review (that part comes after we actually watch the thing) and more an honest sit-down about a question we cannot stop asking. The Odyssey is roughly 3,000 years old. Why are we still retelling it? Why does a studio hand a quarter of a billion dollars to one of the biggest directors alive so he can film a poem older than most of the written work we still read? We wanted to figure out what keeps pulling all of us back.

Note
The following is an editorialized transcript of our weekly literary podcast. If you would like to listen to the podcast, click the play button above orlisten on your favorite platform with the links below.

**Why Nolan’s Odyssey Feels Like Such a Swerve**

Here’s the thing that got us talking in the first place. When you hear “Christopher Nolan,” you think Batman. You think Oppenheimer. You think Interstellar and Tenet and that particular brand of science and time and physics-bending spectacle (we will admit neither of us can fully explain what happens in Tenet, and yes, we both watched it). Greek myth is not the first genre you’d slot him into.

But he does wander off the map now and then. Dunkirk in 2017 was a war epic grounded in something that actually happened, so a myth is really just another swing in a different direction. Shirin gave us the joke we needed here: hearing “Dunkirk” for the first time, she thought, “Who’s John Kirk?” and landed on Captain Kirk, which somehow looped us right back to sci-fi anyway.

Part of what makes the choice loud is the noise around it. A chunk of the internet is furious about the casting, and we want to name that plainly. People are angry about Helen of Troy in a way that has a heavy racial component to it, and that is just people being icky. Meaghan put a fine point on it:

If you don’t think that Lupita Nyong’o is a beautiful woman, you have some problems.

The story is a work of fiction that is three millennia old. It has gods and monsters in it. “Do people not know that?” We’re holding most of our real thoughts until after we see the film, but outrage over a fictional character’s hair color tells you more about the audience than the movie.

The Odyssey, Boiled Down

the odyssey original story — Via Unsplash

Neither of us was a classics major, so forgive the glaze. Here’s the short version.

The Odyssey is an ancient Greek epic poem that follows Odysseus at the end of the Trojan War, after ten years of fighting in Troy. He’s the king of Ithaca, and his wife Penelope stays loyal at home while he tries to sail back. The trip should be quick. It is not.

He angers Poseidon, the sea god, and that one mistake stretches his way home into another ten-year slog. Meanwhile, Penelope is fending off a pile of suitors who all want to marry the queen, raising their son Telemachus, and genuinely not knowing whether her husband is alive or dead. No cell phones back then.

On Odysseus’s side, it’s monster after monster.

A cyclops.
The enchantress Circe.
The deadly sirens.

He survives mostly on cunning because he’s a sharp leader, but his whole crew dies before the end, and he’s the last man standing. When he finally reaches Ithaca, the goddess Athena disguises him as a beggar. Shirin has a bone to pick with that beat:

This is where I get a little pissy with these stories because there’s always a fucking element of the dude disguising himself.

(She’s right, and it happens in Troilus and Cressida, in Tristan and Isolde, all over the place.) There’s a contest to string Odysseus’s bow and fire an arrow through twelve axe heads; the disguised beggar pulls it off, reveals himself, and everyone loses it. “It is I.” “Like a magician?” Peace restored, kingdom reclaimed, roll credits.

Why These Stories Refuse to Die

Even at that altitude, you can see why it holds up. Someone gets ripped away from their whole life and has to claw back to it, and the trip home turns out to be worse than the decade-long war he just survived. There’s intelligence winning out over brute strength, which lands differently coming from a warrior-king who leans on his brain. There’s loyalty, home, family, and a full roster of gods and monsters bolted on for excitement.

What keeps the retellings coming, we think, is the chance to look at old material through a new lens. These older texts tend to run black and white on who’s good and who’s bad. Modern versions get to hand the microphone to the character who was shoved to the side. That’s why feminist retellings are everywhere right now, taking the witch or the seer or the tertiary “villain” and making her the lead. Madeline Miller’s Circe is the obvious one. Give the woman who was only ever “evil” or “off to the side” a full interior life, and the whole story reorganizes itself around her.

The other thing we appreciate about the source is that Odysseus is not clean. Shirin remembers reading it and thinking, your crew is dying and you are not exactly the greatest guy on the planet here. “He’s not like a hero, basically.” The gray area is the point. The story cares less about a spotless champion and more about choices, consequences, and how you crawl back out from under them. We’re curious how Nolan handles that, because the easy move is to sand him down into a standard hero, and the trailers already lean more gladiator than gods-and-monsters.

Worth remembering, too: this story is buried inside far more of your favorites than you’d guess. O Brother, Where Art Thou is one of the more famous modernizations. Cold Mountain, published in 1997, took heavy inspiration from it. Ulysses by James Joyce is basically the whole thing transplanted into a single day in Dublin (Odysseus becomes Ulysse in French, which is where Joyce’s title comes from). 2001: A Space Odyssey nods at it. Percy Jackson pulls creatures and situations straight out of it. Every time an “odyssey” shows up in a title, it usually traces back here.

The Cast, the Accents, and the Hollywood of It All

The lineup is stacked. Matt Damon is Odysseus, Anne Hathaway is Penelope, Tom Holland is Telemachus, Robert Pattinson is the suitor Antinous, Zendaya is Athena, and Charlize Theron is Calypso. Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy and pulls double duty as Clytemnestra, which tracks if he hallucinates her somewhere out on the water. Half the gods aren’t even confirmed yet. Who’s playing Zeus? Who’s playing Poseidon? We don’t know.

Here’s our honest hesitation. Watching Tom Holland deliver “my dad is coming home” in a very, very American accent inside an epic Greek poem is, in Meaghan’s words, “very, very bizarre.” When you modernize a story, it’s easy to roll with anything. When you set it in its own period with the costumes and the scale, the modern cadence pokes at you. Shirin’s counter was simple and fair:

It’s an interpretation, Meaghan. It’s an interpretation.

The bigger risk with a cast this famous is the spot-the-celebrity problem. At some point, a movie stops being about characters and starts being “oh, that’s that person.” Shirin brought up Anne Hathaway’s Interstellar love-transcends-the-universe speech that made a whole theater laugh (no shade, she’s fantastic, the line was just a lot), and Hathaway has done several Nolan films now. The real test is whether we can pull ourselves out of the Hollywood of it all and land back in ancient Greece.

We’ll report back once we’ve actually seen it, probably early next week, maybe with Arthur along for a third opinion. Until then, keep on reading.