We open on Mount Parnassus. This is unmistakably Greece — the air has a crystalline quality, the limestone a gray whose depths recall eternity, the scrub that covers the rock smells, even through the movie screen, of wild thyme. Down from the peaks, forests envelop the earth, and we descend through the firs to find, at the edge of a small clearing, a wild boar rooting in the dirt. It’s a big one, all thick hairs and massive tusks, and while it snuffles around for food, it suddenly pauses and picks up its head. Something is happening.

We pull back a little and discover, across the clearing, crouched in the underbrush, a 12-year-old boy. He is clear-eyed and intent, a spear held loosely in his right hand. He breathes and waits for the boar to return to its rooting. He looks young and mature at the same time. The boar drops its head again, and the boy begins to creep forward.

In the background, the silence of the forest is broken by the crash of men and dogs, and the wild boar again looks up — and this time the boy is in its sights. It charges, but the boy is ready. They collide, tusk on flesh, spear on hide, and bounce apart.

By the time the men arrive, the boy and the boar are each lying on the ground. The boar is dead, a spear through its neck. The boy is bleeding from a long gash across his inner thigh. The boy’s grandfather approaches him, already gathering cloth to bandage the wound; he is rangy and strong and as gray as the limestone; he speaks with distance and irony: “Are you okay? Does it hurt?”

The boy gazes at his grandfather, performing some secret calculation, before surveying himself and the scene. “Yes,” he says calmly, “of course it hurts.”

We cut to the sea. A storm has just ended. The sky is gray and a last spatter of raindrops hits the rough but manageable waves. A raft drifts across the water, if by raft we mean three sodden, splintered logs strung together with fraying leather straps. Across the raft lies a man in his mid-40s, almost naked, muscled and scarred, bearded and worn down, exhausted but breathing. Along the inside of his right thigh runs a thin, white scar, long since healed but marking him forever. We think we know who this is.

This is not how The Odyssey begins, either the roughly 2,800-year-old epic poem or, I’m guessing¹, the new movie by Christopher Nolan, the director behind Oppenheimer, the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Memento². The epic poem begins instead with the famous invocation “Sing to me, O muse, of the man of many ways.” Or the man of twists and turns, the complicated man, the ingenious man — the man we all know, or at least have heard of, the man whose exploits, whose fortunes, reversals of fortune, and reversals of reversals of fortune inspired a tale that much of the world has been grappling with and riffing on for millennia. Consider that line — ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ — the opening credit, Homer’s very own Star Wars scroll.

But from there, well, The Odyssey takes some twists and turns before it really gets going. First, the gods must discuss whether Odysseus will be allowed to return home to Ithaca, the Ionian Sea island where he is, technically, king, and which he left nearly 20 years earlier to fight in the Trojan War. Up in Olympus, Athena, Odysseus’s biggest fan, hashes it out with her father, Zeus, who finally gives her the thumbs-up: Odysseus can go home! And so she immediately ties on her sandals — “the marvelous golden sandals that she wears to travel sea and land, as fast as wind,” in Emily Wilson’s translation, which I’ll quote from throughout — and heads not to the island of Ogygia, where Odysseus has spent seven years as the prisoner-consort of the nymph Calypso and where, presumably, Athena could free him directly, but to Ithaca, to have a chat with Telemachus, Odysseus’s teenage son. See, he and his mother, Penelope, have been beset for years by the young men of Ithaca, who, believing Odysseus dead, want to marry Penelope and inherit the kingdom, and meanwhile they’ve all set up camp in Odysseus’s palace, taking advantage of the Ancient Greek laws of hospitality to eat his family out of house and home. Moody Telemachus isn’t too happy about any of this, so Athena — in disguise as Mentes — inspires him to leave Ithaca for mainland Greece in search of news of his father from those with whom he fought in Troy.

As you can see, there is a lot of exposition to get through — and that’s only the first of the story’s 24 “books,” or chapters. But The Odyssey is written in such a way that its audience is expected to know these things already. Zeus, Athena, and even our Homeric narrator make shorthand references to events that will be elaborated on later — Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops, for instance — but to a modern reader, these can fly by with the speed of Hermes, a flock of unfamiliar or half-remembered names and myths.

And so what do you remember of The Odyssey? What scenes and images stand out from the last time you read it, in high school or in college? Or maybe you never read it, and only know it from its ubiquity in culture high and low. Is it the tale of a clever man battling supernatural forces to return home? Is it a story of revenge? Do you picture Penelope weaving and unweaving her father-in-law’s funeral shroud night after night? Do you see the cyclops, the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, great ships collapsing at sea? Do you imagine launching an arrow through the holes of 12 empty axe heads, or hunting suitors to their deaths in the halls of the palace?

For me, those were the elements that always stood out — the “fairy tale” elements, as the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn described them to me. Maybe that’s because I was a teenage boy when I first read The Odyssey, and they fed my adolescent hunger, stoked Dungeons & Dragons and Stephen King, for fantasy, action, violence, and horror.

Those are also the elements that, if you were going to make a big Hollywood production, might seem to be the obvious focus of your story. Odysseus tricking his way out of the cyclops’ cave! Odysseus matching wits with Circe as she turns his men to pigs! Odysseus voyaging to the land of the dead! I watched Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts as a kid — I can picture a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion Scylla with ease.

But those elements do not make up the bulk of The Odyssey. In fact, the fairy-tale stuff doesn’t even show up until Book 9, when Odysseus, having found himself washed up on the island of the friendly Phaeacians, finally relates the fantastical adventures that have brought him there: cyclops, lotus eaters, Laestrygonians, bag of winds, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, sirens, sun god’s cattle, Calypso — he dispatches with these in a mere four books. The island of the lotus eaters — where some of Odysseus’s sailors sampled the local cuisine and lost their desire to return home — merits only 22 lines.

You could see this as admirable narrative compression, or precariously unbalanced storytelling, or a wise understanding that a light touch with fantasy goes a long way³. Far be it from me to second-guess Homer⁴! But it points up the structural challenges of transforming this epic poem into a movie. Do you immediately play up the monster stories that stick in everybody’s minds (or at least in teenage boys’)? Or do you make your audience wait for the epic action to begin?

The waiting is not, of course, just waiting. In the lead-up to Odysseus’s storytelling, there is… a lot of other storytelling. In Pylos, Telemachus visits King Nestor, who tells him about the war in Troy and its aftermath, and gives the boy advice. In Sparta, Telemachus visits King Menelaus, husband of Helen (yes, that Helen), who gets teary-eyed talking about Odysseus, the war in Troy, and its aftermath, then gives the boy advice. In fact, much of The Odyssey, both before and after the monster stuff, consists of people going to other people, who tell them long stories that are not always germane. That is, they don’t, in a strictly Hollywood sense, advance the plot. Instead, people tell the stories they want to tell, that reveal in subtle ways the changes wrought upon the world by what appeared to be a glorious triumph in Troy: murder, revenge, loss, dissolution. If, as a filmmaker, you’re going to include them all, do you render them as monologues or flashbacks?

As lopsided as The Odyssey might first appear, it does have a structure that slots fairly neatly into the classical Hollywood three-act story. Act one we might label “The Mystery of Odysseus,” a stretch of narrative from which he is mostly absent. Where is this guy? Who is this guy? When is he ever going to come home? We see Telemachus, Penelope, Nestor, Menelaus, and others recall his deeds and his character, reflect on the effects of his absence, and muse upon his whereabouts before, as the act wanes, we find him at last drifting on the sea, having escaped Calypso but newly punished by Poseidon. This is act two, “The Reality of Odysseus,” where we see the man in full, his past and his present, his pain and his genius — or at least, through his cunning storytelling, the version of himself he wants his hosts, the Phaeacians, to see. These two acts are the early stages of a chess match, in which the pieces are slowly, carefully, sometimes obscurely set up for a what we know will be a dramatic endgame.

Act three, the last 12 books, is that endgame, “The Revenge of Odysseus,” in which Odysseus returns to Ithaca in secret, reunites with Telemachus, and wreaks his vengeance upon the suitors. And that revenge, in Book 22, is 100% pure Hollywood: In disguise, Odysseus plays coy games about his identity with Penelope, demonstrates his skill by firing an arrow through those 12 axe heads, then, with Telemachus and two loyal servants on his side, proceeds to hunt and kill every single one of the 108 suitors. This is the climax of a musclebound 1980s action movie, a ludicrous, outsize slaughter that can only be perpetrated by a hero given plot armor, either by the gods or by his agent.

And not only that, he goes on to murder a dozen “treasonous” slave girls who had sided with the suitors and, on some level, plotted against their absent king. Oh wait, no. First Odysseus makes them clean up the gore-drenched house “with wet, absorbent sponges,” and then, despite having ordered his men to “hack at them with long swords, eradicate all life from them,” he lets Telemachus step in. “I refuse to grant these girls a clean death,” the son declares, and hangs them instead⁵.

Um, is that too much? Maybe if Quentin Tarantino was directing, but even so, it doesn’t really jibe with our contemporary notion of a hero — with his (and it’s almost always his, not her) sense of violence versus mercy. For us, a hero doesn’t kill unless he has to, unless the history and the situation calls for it. Of course, once the history and situation call for it, he can be pretty damn vicious about the killing, but we get it — what else can you do?

This is the biggest challenger for an Odyssey filmmaker: How do you represent Ancient Greek morality? Or: Do you represent Ancient Greek morality? For it was a very different beast from our own. The laws of hospitality — xenia, or ξενία — were sacrosanct, and applied both to people you knew and people you didn’t. Zeus himself was the protector of strangers and travelers. To contravene those laws, either by mistreating a guest or taking advantage of a host, was grounds for execution. To uphold them was everyone’s duty, while to restore the god-given order of the world by any means necessary was what heroes did.

As a reader, a watcher, a consumer of culture old and new, I want it both ways: I want an Odyssey movie to feel strange. The Ancient Greeks were not us, and they shouldn’t be made to seem like us just for the box-office-driven sake of “relatability.” Nearly three millennia separate their culture and ours, and I want to feel that distance. Which feels like a cleaner death to you, being hanged or being hacked at with long swords?

At the same time, I want to be able to draw an emotional line between them and us. That’s tough in any movie, but maybe more so in The Odyssey, with its complex politics, alien traditions, capricious gods, and fantastical creatures. But underneath all of that, I think, is one theme that sings as clear and true today as it did in antiquity: the desire to go home. It is the prime motivation for Odysseus’s struggle, and apart from the physical obstacles to his achieving it — the shipwrecks, the monsters — he faces the temptation to simply give up. He could stay on Phaeacia and marry Nausicaa, the king’s comely daughter. He could remain with Calypso and become her immortal spouse. He could, we can imagine, choose any life for himself anywhere he wanted, if Athena allowed it. Instead, he fights and suffers, and suffers, to return to Ithaca. He is the personification of the original Greek sense of nostalgia, a word that combines nostos, or homecoming, with algia, meaning pain. He’s a masochistic Steve Martin in an archaic version of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

To watch Odysseus, whether on the page or on the screen, is to understand this nostalgia, this need to get ourselves back where we think we belong. Yeah, that’s a bit of an equivocation, but that’s because The Odyssey, especially in the 21st century, employs a double nostalgia — we participate in Odysseus’s journey, we identify with his struggle, because we ourselves long not to get home but for a time when getting home might be all we needed to solve our problems. Odysseus’s homecoming ends with storybook neatness: First the slave girls mop up the gore, and then, when the families of the slaughtered suitors pursue Odysseus and his family bent on revenge of their own, Athena herself steps in and tells them, “Stop this destructive war; shed no more blood, and go your separate ways at once!” And they do, fearfully but gratefully. Their odyssey ends because it has been ended. The pain is over, the credits roll. Who doesn’t long for that?

But careful readers/watchers/listeners of The Odyssey know that even that is not the end for Odysseus. They will recall that during Odysseus’s visit to the land of the dead, the blind seer Tiresias had given our hero one final quest to perform: Once you’re back in Ithaca and the suitors are dead, “you have to go away and take an oar to people with no knowledge of the sea, who do not salt their food. … When you meet somebody, a traveler, who calls the thing you carry on your back a winnowing fan, then fix that oar in earth and make fine sacrifices to Poseidon — a bull and a stud-boar.” Only then can he return home and die a “gentle death” in “comfortable old age.”

I love how hidden that is — how, after all the twists and turns, after the graphic violence and emotional reunions, one last, unspoken quest remains. When Athena shuts down his final war, does he know in that instant what he’s going to have to do next? Does he realize the pain of his homecoming is not yet over? Is it ever? And is that the point? I can imagine the ancient version of Reddit in an uproar: Is that a plot hole, or is Homer, our first and greatest storyteller, just setting up the final sequel of his blockbuster trilogy? I only hope he doesn’t decide to direct it himself. Authors are usually the worst handlers of their own material. Just look at George Lucas. 🪨🪨🪨