Since its blockbuster release over the summer, Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has garnered mixed reviews from classics scholars who have spent their academic careers studying the 2,700-year-old poem of a Greek hero’s homecoming.
While scholars like Emily Wilson — the first woman to translate the ancient poem into English — have heavily criticized the film, ancient Greek classicists at Brown generally appreciated the adaptation as a work of its own merit.
“I was really impressed by the whole experience,” said Professor of Classics and History Graham Oliver, who teaches ancient Greek history. “The movie captures very much the heroic quality of Odysseus, whilst also highlighting some of the trials and tribulations of a man who, on his return from Troy, obviously gets waylaid.”
Johanna Hanink, a professor of classics whose research focuses on classical Athens, also enjoyed the film. “Any version of (the epic) is going to make some changes and show some variation that I think then just serves as a really fun and productive starting point for conversation.”
Nolan “did a good job with imagining space of the heroic past,” said Jana Mokrisova, an assistant professor of archaeology of the ancient Greek world. It really “did look like what we would imagine of the Mycenaean palaces.”
For Professor of History and Classics Kenneth Sacks, his enjoyment of the film wasn’t about its faithfulness to the source material but about Nolan’s “strong voice” as a director. “He took an ancient poem, and he made it into a commentary on the modern world,” Sacks said.
But classicists also took note of some differences between the poem and Nolan’s adaptation. Nolan inserts a historical perspective into the film that is not in the poem by attributing the Late Bronze Age collapse between 1225 and 1150 B.C.E. to the Sea Peoples, who turn out to be Odysseus and his crew.
Historians no longer find this narrative to be a convincing explanation for the end of the Bronze Age, Mokrisova said. Though decades ago, scholars thought this narrative was plausible, “now we really view the end of the Bronze Age palatial systems more in terms of localized phenomena that crippled a lot of the centralized palatial systems,” she added.
Mokrisova said she “really did not appreciate the prominence of the Sea Peoples in the narrative (of) the fall of the society.”
“It blurs this line between myth and perhaps him wanting to insert it more into history,” she added.
Another point of contention scholars had with the adaptation was the omission of Odysseus’s encounters with the Phaeacians from books nine and twelve of the poem. In the poem, Odysseus tells the narrative of his various adventures to the Phaeacians on the island of Scheria in order to convince them to help him return home, giving readers the impression that he is a “master manipulator,” according to Hanink.
But the film supplants this with “therapeutic, psychological flashbacks that are urged by Calypso through administering and withholding of lotus,” Hanink said. “What the poem really gives us a lot more of than the film can is questions about how reliable a narrator Odysseus is.”
Teaching Professor of Classics Pura Nieto Hernandez, who specializes in Homeric texts, has been hesitant about watching the adaptation after learning about the poem’s deviations from its source text.
Hernandez said she found the elimination of the Phaeacians “terrible because The Odyssey is a poem about people narrating.”
She added that she was disappointed upon hearing from her colleagues that Polyphemus — the Cyclops — in the film remains mostly mute. In the poem, Polyphemus “has a big mouth” because in ancient Greek, Polyphemus means “the one who speaks a lot,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez also did not appreciate Nolan’s elimination of the trick Odysseus plays on Polyphemus by telling him his name is “Nobody,” which prompts Polyphemus to shout out to the sea that “Nobody” attacked him. She said that it took away from Odysseus’s key trait as a trickster in the poem.
Mokrisova, who saw the film, felt similarly. In the film, “Odysseus was much more of a troubled hero, so to me, he wasn’t the hero I would have imagined,” Mokrisova said. “To me, Odysseus is much more wildly self-serving and a trickster.”
Even though Nolan’s presentation of the story took a detour from some of the poem’s plot points, Oliver said it didn’t really “particularly bother” him because “it’s impossible to do a complete film of every single detail of the Odyssey.”
“If you love the poem, then you know what the poem says,” Sacks said. “(Nolan) had other things he wanted to say in a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and that’s his decision as a strong-voiced director.”
“Every generation interprets classics the way they want to,” Sacks added. “That’s the right way to treat classics — as a contemporary living document.”
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Rosenbaum.
Ivy Huang is a University News and Science & Research editor from New York City. Concentrating in English, she has a passion for literature and American history. Her favorite authors include Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Toni Morrison. Outside of writing, she enjoys playing basketball, watching documentaries, and beating her high score on Subway Surfers.
