There are stories that we carry with us, and there are stories that carry us.

Homer’s Odyssey has always struck me as belonging firmly to the latter category; a work so deeply embedded in the foundations of Western storytelling that its influence is felt even by those who have never turned a single page of the poem itself. Indeed, from the basic narrative arc of a hero’s long journey home, to the very notion that the road back from war may prove more harrowing than the war itself, the fingerprints of The Odyssey are everywhere in our modern stories, whether we recognize them or not. And yet, despite its unparalleled significance, the poem has often lingered in the shadow of its more visceral companion, The Iliad, at least in popular consciousness. Where the Iliad gives us the pyrotechnics of battle and the white-hot rage of Achilles, The Odyssey asks us to sit with something quieter, more elusive, and perhaps more unsettling: the question of what it means to find your way back to yourself after the world has done its worst to you.

It is for this reason that Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, slated for a July 2026 theatrical release, feels less like a Hollywood event and more like a cultural homecoming in its own right.

For those who have not been following the developments, Nolan’s film boasts a staggering ensemble cast, with Matt Damon set to portray the wily Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as the steadfast Penelope, Tom Holland as the young Telemachus, and Zendaya reportedly cast as the goddess Athena, among many others. The film has been shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras across locations in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, and Western Sahara, and is, by all accounts, the most ambitious undertaking of Nolan’s already formidable career. However, beyond the spectacle, what strikes me most about Nolan’s approach is the sensibility he appears to be bringing to the source material. In discussing the project, Nolan has cited Emily Wilson’s landmark 2017 translation as a point of reference, particularly praising the way Wilson renders Odysseus as, in her now-famous opening line, a “complicated man.” This is significant, not merely because Wilson’s translation has been rightly celebrated as a groundbreaking work of scholarship and literary art, but because it signals a willingness on Nolan’s part to engage with the moral ambiguity that lies at the very heart of the poem.

And it is this moral ambiguity, I would argue, that makes The Odyssey not only a great story, but a necessary one for our times.

As students of the Classics will know, Odysseus is not a hero in the modern, sanitized sense of the word. He is polytropos, a man of many turns, many devices, many faces. He is the architect of the Trojan Horse, a stratagem born of cunning rather than courage; a survivor who endures the wrath of Poseidon, the temptations of Circe and Calypso, and the seductive call of the Sirens; but also a man whose cleverness frequently shades into deception, whose leadership is marked by the loss of every single one of his companions, and whose homecoming is sealed with a bloodbath in his own hall. Homer does not shy away from any of this, and neither, it seems, does Nolan intend to. As the director himself noted in discussing his interest in the character, Odysseus is “an amazing strategist, a very wily person,” and it was precisely this complexity, this irreducible tension between brilliance and moral compromise, that drew him to the material.

“Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

and where he went, and who he met, the pain

he suffered in the storms at sea, and how

he worked to save his life and bring his men home.”

-(Homer. The Odyssey. 1.1-6, trans. Emily Wilson)

It is worth pausing to consider Wilson’s rendering here, particularly in contrast to the more traditional translations that many of us, myself certainly included, grew up with. Where Robert Fagles gave us “the man of twists and turns,” and where Lattimore offered the more archaic “the man of many ways,” Wilson’s choice of “a complicated man” is at once disarmingly simple and remarkably provocative. It strips away the grandiosity that has accumulated around Odysseus over centuries of translation and reception, and asks us to see him, perhaps for the first time, as something recognizably human. This is not a diminishment of the character; it is, I would argue, a restoration of something Homer always intended. The ancient Greeks did not use the word “hero” in the way that we do. Their heroes were not moral paragons; they were individuals who had accomplished extraordinary feats, for better or for worse, and whose stories illuminated something essential about the human condition.

Naturally, this brings us to the question that I suspect many will be asking in the months ahead, as Nolan’s film draws nearer and public interest in The Odyssey continues to surge: why does this story still matter?

The truth of the matter is that The Odyssey endures because its central concerns, the desire for home, the cost of war, the tension between who we were and who we have become, are as pressing today as they were nearly three millennia ago. We live in an era of profound displacement, both literal and figurative. Millions around the world are separated from their homes by conflict, and countless others, even those who have never left their native soil, experience a kind of spiritual dislocation, a sense that the world they once knew has shifted beneath their feet and that the path back to solid ground is uncertain at best. The Odyssey speaks to all of this. It tells us that the journey home is never simple, that we will be changed by the road, and that the home we return to may not be the home we left. These are not comfortable truths, but they are honest ones, and it is precisely this honesty that gives the poem its enduring power.

In this light, Nolan’s decision to bring the Odyssey to the screen feels less like a commercial calculation and more like an act of cultural necessity. If his previous work is any indication, and I am thinking here particularly of Dunkirk, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer, Nolan possesses a rare ability among modern filmmakers to translate grand, thematically dense material into visceral, emotionally immediate cinema. The Odyssey demands precisely this kind of treatment. It is not a story that can be reduced to action set-pieces and mythological spectacle, though it certainly contains both in abundance. At its core, it is a story about a man trying to get home, and about the world conspiring, through gods and monsters and his own flawed nature, to prevent him from doing so. If Nolan can capture this essential tension, as he captured the moral weight of the atomic bomb or the desperate intimacy of a husband and father’s love across the dimensions of space and time, then we may very well be looking at something extraordinary.

As such, and I say this with the full awareness that we are still months away from the film’s release and that any number of things could change between now and then, I would encourage anyone with even a passing interest in the Classics to use this moment as an opportunity. Read The Odyssey, or reread it. Pick up Wilson’s translation, or return to Fagles, or Lattimore, or Fitzgerald, whichever version speaks to you. Sit with the poem. Let it work on you. Because regardless of how Nolan’s adaptation ultimately turns out, the source material is one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of human storytelling, and it deserves to be encountered on its own terms before it is encountered through the lens of any filmmaker, however gifted.

The Classics have a way of finding us when we need them most. In uncertain times, when the way forward is unclear and the way back seems impossibly long, there is comfort in knowing that a blind poet, some twenty-seven centuries ago, understood exactly what that felt like, and gave us a story to carry us through.

Works Cited

Homer, and Emily Wilson. The Odyssey. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.