A film that keeps its gods almost entirely offstage, and treats its monsters as, quite possibly, the fever dreams of a traumatized soldier, has no business being called a faithful Odyssey. And yet British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s nearly three-hour adaptation, in theaters this summer, is exactly that: a film in which the title card announces “a time of apparent magic,” yet the Cyclops is a full-scale mechanical puppet built to be photographed rather than conjured, and in which most of the poem’s supernatural incidents (the witch who turns men into swine, the monster with six mouths, the maidens whose song kills) arrive filtered through the testimony of a man who has spent the preceding scene eating lotus at the hand of the woman holding him captive.

Is that a betrayal of the poem, a domestication of a wild and numinous text by a director constitutionally allergic to awe? Or is it, instead, the most Homeric thing a modern filmmaker could actually do: an act of translation in the fullest sense, carrying the poem’s meaning across a chasm of belief that separates a modern audience from the world in which it was composed?

More than 70 years have passed since a major Hollywood production last attempted a straight adaptation of Ancient Greek poet Homer’s epic, an unfathomable gap given both the story’s standing as the foundational template for the hero’s journey and an industry that recycles any halfway proven material until it disintegrates. The case for the second reading does not rest on Nolan having produced a more faithful Odyssey. In the narrow, philological sense, he plainly has not. It rests on the fact that he has done something art has always done with myth, and done it with unusual technical intelligence: re-earthed a story about gods so that it can once again function as a story about people.

The gods were never the point

The impulse to rationalize Greek myth is not a modern imposition on ancient material. It is itself ancient. By the fourth century BC, Ancient Greek author Palaephatus was already writing treatises explaining how the Centaurs were probably just skilled horsemen misperceived by frightened villagers, and how Actaeon (a famous Theban hero) was not literally devoured by his own hounds but rather ruined financially by the cost of keeping them.

A century or so later, Ancient Greek philosopher Euhemerus proposed, in a book influential enough that this style of interpretation still carries his name, that the Olympian gods were simply powerful kings and queens of a forgotten age, deified by grateful or frightened subjects after their deaths. The Stoics allegorized the gods into forces of nature and aspects of the soul. Zeus became aether, Hera became air, Athena became practical wisdom itself. None of this was considered an assault on Homer. It was a way of continuing to take him seriously once literal belief in Olympus had become, for an educated reader, impossible to sustain.

None of this rationalizing was marginal or embarrassing in its own time. Palaephatus and Euhemerus were read, copied and cited for centuries precisely because their approach solved a genuine problem for later readers of Homer and Ancient Greek poet Hesiod: how to keep transmitting stories whose literal claims an increasingly philosophical culture could no longer accept at face value, without simply discarding the stories themselves. This matters because it locates Nolan’s choice inside a 2,000-year-old tradition of reading, not outside it.

The alternative to earthly retelling was never some purer, more faithful communion with the myth as the ancients experienced it. That experience is not recoverable, and it was not stable even in antiquity, where rhapsodes, tragedians and philosophers were already fighting over what the gods in the poem meant and how literally to take them.

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato wanted Homer’s gods thrown out of his ideal city precisely because he took their behavior in the text seriously enough to find it morally scandalous. The gods lie, they squabble, they seduce and punish arbitrarily, and a poet who represents divinity that way corrupts the young, in Plato’s judgment. Every era that has kept faith with Homer has had to decide, implicitly or explicitly, what to do with a pantheon that even antiquity found difficult to defend on its own terms.

What successive generations have discovered, again and again, is that the poem survives the removal of literal divine machinery remarkably well, because the psychological architecture underneath the machinery was always doing the real work. When Athena “gives” Odysseus courage before a fight, or when a god “hardens” a man’s resolve, the poem is describing something recognizably internal: resolve arriving, courage cohering, a decision crystallizing after hesitation.

The divine apparatus in Homer is frequently a vocabulary for psychological events that a culture without a fully developed idiom of interiority had not yet learned to narrate in first-person terms. Homeric psychology externalizes what a modern narrator would internalize, attributing sudden shifts of feeling or judgment to divine intervention because the poem’s world does not yet have a fully articulated concept of a bounded, autonomous, choosing self. A filmmaker who relocates the gods’ action into his characters’ psychology is not distorting the poem’s logic; he is making explicit a structure that was implicit in it from the start.

Nolan’s actual method

The gods are not simply absent from the film’s world. American actress Zendaya plays Athena, and British actress Samantha Morton plays Circe, meaning the pantheon is present in a register the film keeps deliberately ambiguous. What Nolan withholds is not divinity itself but its confirmation. The film declines to adjudicate whether what is being watched is a god intervening in human affairs or a man’s mind organizing coincidence, memory and desperation into the shape of intervention because that is the only shape available to him.

The film’s most consequential structural decision does the rest of the work. A great deal of the poem’s most fantastical incidents — the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla — are presented as a story Odysseus tells aloud, first in a banquet hall and later to Calypso, while under the influence of the lotus she keeps feeding him. This solves a problem that has no clean solution in a literalist adaptation: how to stage a one-eyed giant, a woman who turns sailors into pigs and a six-headed sea monster inside a film otherwise committed to tactile, practical reality, without the tonal seam showing.

Nolan’s answer is to make the seam the subject. The audience watches a man’s account of his own suffering, and the film is candid that an account is not the same thing as an event, that memory reshapes itself, that trauma looks for symbols adequate to its size, that a soldier returning from ten years of war might reach for monsters because the truth is otherwise unspeakable. Homer’s own Odysseus is already a self-mythologizing narrator, telling his story at length to strangers, embellishing a life already halfway toward legend within the poem itself.

None of this required Nolan to abandon spectacle. The Cyclops was built as a full-scale mechanical puppet, photographed practically on location rather than assembled in post-production, consistent with a directorial signature that goes back to flipping trucks and building physical sets rather than generating them digitally. Making the monstrous heavy, physical and present on set rather than digitally superimposed is not a hedge against fantasy. It is a wager that fantasy is more convincing, not less, when it has weight. What Nolan withholds is not scale or craft but certainty: whether what is being seen belongs to the register of history or the register of a traumatized man’s testimony. That is a more interesting artistic problem than simply asking whether a studio could afford good special effects.

What Earthing a myth actually achieves

Myths travel by being retold, and retelling has never meant transcription. Attic tragedy took the same Trojan War material Homer had used and rebuilt it around interior conflict. Athenian Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides turned epic action into psychological and moral crisis, with the chorus frequently doing the work of externalizing anxiety and doubt that the epic form had handled through divine machinery. Euripides in particular was known for making the gods look capricious, cruel or simply unnecessary to the human drama unfolding beneath them, and was accused in his own time of a kind of impiety for it. That accusation is itself evidence that demythologizing myth is not a modern innovation but a live tension inside the Greek tradition from very early on.

The same pattern recurs whenever a culture takes myth seriously enough to keep working on it rather than merely quoting it. Italian writer and philosopher Dante Alighieri folds classical myth into a Christian moral cosmology in which pagan gods have no ontological standing, yet Virgil walks through the Inferno as a guide whose authority the poem never questions. Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli paints Venus rising from the sea not as a devotional act but as a Neoplatonic allegory of the soul’s ascent toward beauty. The goddess survives the death of the religion that produced her by becoming a symbol available to a different metaphysics. Italian painter Titian, French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin and Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens paint Ovidian myth for patrons who did not believe in Jupiter but did believe that stories about Jupiter could still say something true about desire, power and cruelty.

By the 19th century, German composer Richard Wagner was rebuilding Norse myth into a psychological epic about will, renunciation and the corrupting nature of power, borrowing heavily from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will rather than from any literal belief in the Norns.

The 20th century simply made the psychological register explicit and named it. Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud reached for Oedipus because the myth had already done, in miniature, the work his theory wanted to describe, not because he believed Oedipus was a real man cursed by real gods, but because the story had encoded a durable pattern of human experience that could be recovered once the question of whether Apollo’s oracle was real stopped mattering.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung went further, arguing that myths across unconnected cultures rhyme because they emerge from structures common to the human mind itself. In this account, the gods were never meteorological or political facts. They were maps of the psyche, personifications that let a premodern culture externalize and discuss forces such as rage, cunning, desire and grief that a therapeutic culture would later learn to locate inside the individual instead.

American mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, whatever its scholarly limitations, popularized exactly this idea for a mass audience: The hero’s journey is compelling across cultures because it is a psychological itinerary of separation, ordeal and return, dressed in whatever supernatural costume a given culture has on hand.

Seen against this long history, Nolan’s Odysseus, a man whose gods may be delusions born of trauma and lotus, whose monsters may be memory doing violence to itself, is not an eccentric departure from how myth has been handled. He is working the same seam that Euripides, Wagner, Freud and Jung worked before him, using the idiom available to a filmmaker in 2026: the psychological thriller, the unreliable narrator, the practical effect that makes horror tactile rather than remote. If there is anything unusual about Nolan’s version, it is that he does it with such evident love of surface and spectacle. The Cyclops is built, lit and staged with total conviction, even as the film quietly declines to promise that any of it happened.

This approach is not free of cost. At bottom, Nolan’s film is not very The Odyssey, and it is worth being honest about what it loses rather than simply celebrating what it gains. Homer’s poem depends on its gods being real to its characters for much of its strangeness and grandeur. Athena is not Odysseus’s superego wearing a costume. She is a being he can see, argue with and be humiliated by, and the poem’s comedy and pathos both depend on the gap between divine caprice and mortal stakes. A version of the story in which the gods are optional, in which a viewer is free to read every intervention as hallucination, necessarily loses some of that comedy, and loses the specific vertigo of a cosmos genuinely run by beings smarter and crueler than any mortal, who owe nothing to anyone.

But this is the price every Earthly retelling of a myth has always paid, and audiences have judged the trade worth making whenever the retelling illuminates something the original, taken literally, no longer easily illuminates for them. Irish novelist James Joyce’s Ulysses has no interest in whether the gods are real. Its interest is in showing that the pattern of exile, wandering, temptation and homecoming survives relocation to a single ordinary day in a colonized city, played out by an advertising canvasser, a woman he has failed and a young man he has not yet met. That relocation does not diminish Homer. Arguably, it shows that the poem’s real subject was never Olympus at all, but a durable and recognizable human situation: the man far from home, the woman waiting and doubted, the son who does not know his father, the difficulty of return after violence.

That is the wager Nolan is actually making with his considerable resources: that The Odyssey’s power was never fundamentally theological, that its endurance across 3,000 years has had less to do with residual belief in Poseidon’s grudge and more to do with the fact that it is one of the first and still one of the best stories available about what war does to the men who survive it and the households that wait for them. The film’s frame makes this explicit rather than merely implying it.

The man who begins the story in the banquet hall is a storyteller performing, not a god’s mouthpiece, and the film keeps returning to the fact that stories are how the traumatized manage what they cannot otherwise metabolize. An Odysseus who may be inventing his own monsters to survive the telling of his own war is, if anything, a more devastating figure than an Odysseus persecuted by an angry sea god, because his suffering has nowhere outside himself to be blamed.

The human shape beneath the myth

The film’s technical choices do the argument’s heavy lifting, not decorate it after the fact. A digitally rendered Cyclops would sit comfortably in the register of pure fantasy, cordoned off from the human-scale, photographed reality around it. A mechanical, on-set, practically lit Cyclops instead insists on inhabiting the same physical plane as Odysseus’s very real, very human crew, which is exactly the confusion of registers the film wants, since it is arguing that the monstrous and the human have never been cleanly separable to begin with.

The restraint with which the gods themselves are handled works the same way in the opposite direction. Rather than staging Olympian spectacle, the film gives its actors playing gods scenes that could, without much strain, be read as entirely mortal encounters. The uncertainty is the argument.

The film’s fractured, non-chronological structure serves the same end. Homer’s poem is itself famously non-linear, opening in medias res and recovering Odysseus’s ten years of wandering largely through his own extended flashback narration at the court of the Phaeacians. A directorial habit of scrambled timelines, often treated as a stylistic tic imported from a filmmaker’s earlier psychological thrillers, turns out to be one of the more genuinely faithful things about this adaptation rather than one of the more indulgent. A story told out of order, filtered through memory and retelling, is not a departure from Homer’s method. It is closer to a return to it than a straightforward chronological adaptation would have been.

None of this is unprecedented in the specific medium of film, either. Cinema has been quietly rehearsing this same argument for a century, in forms less prestigious than a Nolan tentpole. The Ray Harryhausen adventures of the 1950s and 1960s, which brought Jason and the Argonauts and the Sinbad cycle to the screen through stop-motion animation, never pretended their skeletons and gods were anything but craft objects, built by hand and animated frame by frame. Yet, audiences loved them anyway, because the pleasure of watching a myth was never contingent on believing its monsters were real.

Later filmmakers reworked the poem itself as a Depression-era chain-gang comedy, others as sword-and-sandal cheapies shot on shoestring budgets, and all of them took for granted that a myth’s usefulness to a filmmaker has nothing to do with the literal truth of its supernatural claims and everything to do with whether its underlying pattern still fits a human shape audiences recognize. What is unusual about Nolan’s version is only the scale of resources brought to bear on a question that smaller, cheaper films had already been quietly answering for decades: that the gods were always optional scaffolding, and the human shape underneath them was the load-bearing wall.

Whether The Odyssey succeeds scene for scene, whether three hours sustains what the film asks of it, is a separate argument about pacing and tone. But the narrower question of whether Nolan’s earthly treatment of gods and monsters represents a failure of nerve or a coherent artistic choice has a fairly clear answer.

What Nolan has done is neither a betrayal of Homer nor an act of directorial cowardice in the face of the supernatural. It is the latest entry in a very old project: asking what a myth is actually for once its literal cosmology has become unavailable, and discovering, as the allegorists discovered, as Freud and Jung discovered, as Joyce discovered, that the myth survives the loss of its gods because the gods were never really where the meaning lived. Nolan has simply done what serious artists have always done with their mythic inheritance: taken it apart to find out what still moves under the surface, and rebuilt it so that a contemporary audience, watching a soldier come home from ten years of war with something in him permanently altered, can feel that movement as something like their own.

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.