Christopher Nolan, director of films such as Dunkirk (2017) and Oppenheimer (2023), has turned his attention to Homer’s Odyssey. Many will be looking forward to what he will make of the story, based on one of the two great epics at the root of the Western literary tradition. The production comes on the heels of the The Return (2024), directed by Uberto Pasolini and starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, a film that dramatizes the end of the Odyssey, the part where the hero reaches Ithaca, slaughters the suitors, and is reunited with Penelope. The selectivity indicates both the potential and some of the challenges that putting either Homeric epic on screen is bound to face.

The frame of epic must, of course, be epic. The canvas of Homer’s Odyssey is even larger than that of the Iliad, in which Homer tells the story of the anger of Achilles and how it eventually leads to the death of Hector. The narrator of the Iliad skilfully sets the scene at a particular point in the war, when Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, insults his foremost warrior Achilles. The withdrawal from fighting of the implacable Achilles leads to many deaths on the Greek side, eventually including Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved companion. The slaying of Patroclus by Hector, the leader of the Trojans, propels Achilles back on to the battlefield. He kills Hector and defiles his corpse; but when Hector’s father, King Priam, bravely makes his way to the Greek camp to beg for his son’s body, Achilles relents and the epic ends with the description Hector’s burial in Troy. The entire action of the Iliad has taken place in less than two months.

Equally, the Iliad is wholly based in one location, the plain of Troy (hence the title of the 2004 film starring Brad Pitt). Homer merely touches on the distant origins of the conflict (the Judgment of Paris and abduction of Helen from Sparta), and the future death of Achilles and destruction of Troy are predicted (though the story of the Wooden Horse is not mentioned until the sequel). By contrast, the action of the Odyssey is spread over many years and spans many locations throughout the Mediterranean. It is not incidental that the narrator begins the tale by stressing multiplicity and distance:

Muse, tell me of a man of many ways, who far and wide

roamed after he had seen Troy’s sacred citadel destroyed:

how many cities did he see, how many minds he learned,

how many were the toils his spirit on the ocean earned,

as he fought for his life and his companions’ safe return.

In fact, Homer begins his tale not with Odysseus himself, but with his absence. The first four of the twenty-four books of the epic deal with events in Ithaca, where the hero’s wife Penelope is staving off the day when she will have to marry one of the dastardly suitors, Ithacan nobles who are vying for her hand and for the kingdom, while feasting at the expense of Odysseus. At Penelope’s side is their son Telemachus, now grown into a young man, since Odysseus was away fighting at Troy for ten years, and his wanderings have taken a further ten. Telemachus berates the suitors before setting out to visit two of the heroes who have returned from Troy – Nestor in Pylos and Menelaus in Sparta – to try and learn more (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) about his father’s fate.

When Homer eventually turns to Odysseus in book 5, he is living on the island of the nymph Calypso, having enjoyed her divine favours for seven years but now pining for home and Penelope. He has already experienced adventures that would test the mettle of any hero. He has escaped the Lotus-Eaters, who had beguiled his companions with drugs so that they would waste away on their shores. He has encountered the terrible Cyclops, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, whom he must blind so that he can escape from his cave and not be eaten alive. He has won over the sorceress Circe, who turned his men into pigs, by reversing her malign magic at sword point. He has sailed past the deadly Sirens and between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. He has even paid a visit to the Underworld and met some of his former comrades including Achilles. Finally, he is shipwrecked; all his companions drown, and he ends up alone on Calypso’s island Ogygia.

The narrator of these adventures is not, however, the epic bard. They are narrated by Odysseus himself. After leaving Ogygia on a raft and being washed up on the island of Scheria, the hero is welcomed at the palace of King Alcinous – after emerging naked from the brine to the surprise and delight of the young princess Nausicaa. In Scheria he is prevailed on to tell his story. His tale takes place over four books of the epic, and leaves the listener both awed by the poet’s imagination and wondering how much of what Odysseus is made to say should be accepted as true. What is clear is the brilliance with which Homer has used, for the first time in extant literature, the cinematic device of the extended flashback. But it is now so common a device that a film-maker must think hard before using it.

There can be no Odyssey without Calypso, Polyphemus, Circe, or Nausicaa. Nor can the epic tale be fully understood without reckoning on the divine motivation that drives it – the love of the goddess Athena for Odysseus, the anger of the god Poseidon at Odysseus’s blinding of his son Polyphemus; but a film will do better to find ways of dealing with these elements other than by depicting the divine realm directly. The audience wants to feel moved and persuaded by a human story, not manipulated by fantasy. In fact, one of the most moving scenes of Odysseus’s return is one that Pasolini has already depicted in The Return. Disguised as a beggar on Ithaca, Odysseus is led by the swineherd Eumaeus toward the palace, where he sees his aged and enfeebled dog Argos lying abandoned on a dung heap. It will be a test of Nolan’s skill to recreate on his own terms the poignant impact of the scene (here given in Alexander Pope’s translation, adapted and abridged):

Seeing Odysseus, him he strove to meet;

In vain he sought to crawl and lick his feet. 

But strength alone he had to wag his tail

to try and greet him – though to no avail.

Deep pity touched Odysseus to his soul,

and down his cheek a tear unbidden stole; 

but unperceived he turned his head and dried 

the falling tear, while silently he cried.

To him the older man his head inclined

and said: ‘He served a man of noble kind. 

You should have seen dear Argos bold and young, 

Swift as a stag, and as a lion strong.

Now time has sapped him, with his master lost,

for many years through mighty oceans tossed.’

So spoke the herdsman and strode on ahead, 

and faithful Argos dropped his weary head.

Though twenty long and dismal years had passed, 

he’d lived to see his lord return at last.

Now darkness closes on his weary eyes;

he feebly wags his tail for joy – and dies.