Epic—especially of the Homeric kind—attracts hyperbole. The Iliad is violent, chaotic in its creation of an ancient “fog of war,” and unsparing in its reflections on how “great men” bring harm to themselves and those around them. The Odyssey, in contrast, projects a certain calm in its exploration of one man’s journey home, although it is no less critical to understanding both ancient Greece and the worlds that claim it as inheritance. Despite the fact that the Iliad was long considered the greater poem—so much so that the late antique philosopher Longinus calls the second poem “nothing other than an epilogue to the Iliad”—, the Odyssey has been ascendent for at least a century, climbing still higher over the past twenty-five years from the release of Stanley Lombardo’s translations and O Brother Where Art Thou in 2000 to Christopher Nolan’s IMAX extravaganza. We are living in the “Odyssecene” and few people are asking why. (Full disclosure: I am doing so in my recent book Why Odysseus? Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)Hero.)

The story of the Odyssey over time is of its own reception. The epic tells us about its nature in book 4 when Menelaos describes his encounter with Proteus. The “old man of the sea” can show Atreus’ surviving son his way home if Sparta’s king can only hold the sea-god long enough as he changes shape: now animal, now vegetable, now mineral, now fire. Proteus is elemental matter, what Greek physicists referred to as hulê (incidentally, the same word used for the timber that carried war across the sea to other deforested lands).

According to Aristotle, the earlier philosopher Alcidamas remarked that the Odyssey “is a fine mirror for human life,” but reading that mirror requires a kind of necromancy to piece things back together. To get an answer from Proteus, we need to hold on until he disambiguates himself. And once we do, we can enjoy a homecoming—that nostos through which we come to know ourselves.

Bad Dialogue, Great Suspense

Transforming Greek epic into film is impossible. But the gravity pulling epic towards film is understandable. I am personally drawn to the music of Homer’s poetry and a complexity of making meaning that makes William Empson’s seven types of ambiguity look pale in comparison. Film has always been tied to capital in a way that incentivizes—but does not require—kinds of homogenization. Greek epic has a compromising place in the history of cultural assimilationism as well. As a Panhellenic product—that is, a representation of what many Greek cities could ascribe to culturally—Homeric epic appropriated from and eventually erased local (epichoric) multiforms to a degree that we cannot fairly characterize today. Indeed, the sheer economic gravity of Nolan’s movie has made me stop and search desperately for more ways to think about Homer’s Odyssey as a material object of authority and power. Of course, epic’s centripetal trick is the pretense that these questions do not matter and for most of the poems’ histories they have gone under-investigated. But it is important to note that Nolan’s movie—combined with multiple translations of the poem on international bestseller lists—reaffirms an intimate connection between epic and power, rendering poetry a commodity that assigns meaning to those who possess it.

As any good Homeric speaker would, I have digressed. Nolan’s The Odyssey is a visually stunning film that confirms many of my expectations—and fears—about the direction of the genre. The action scenes are riveting: the use of the Trojan Horse is innovatively realistic; the set-up for the famous archery contest had me motionless in silence (although the tedious execution could have been cut in half); and I suspect that Circe’s man-handling, stomach-churning transformation of Odysseus’ companions into pigs will be studied—and imitated—for years to come. Indeed, the pacing and framing was so compelling that I did not leave my seat for the film’s full run-time.

Yet the moment I finally did leave my seat, I felt little more than frustration, both for what the movie is and for what it cannot be. The structure is not the problem: the storytelling moves between three different timelines—the Trojan War and the Sack of Troy; Odysseus with Calypso; Telemachus and Penelope on Ithaca and in the Peloponnese—until the threads can be braided together in a fashion anyone familiar with Nolan’s oeuvre would recognize from Oppenheimer, Tenet or Interstellar. The omissions from the conventional tale are not the problem (I repeatedly told myself before, during, and after the film that this is Nolan, not Homer). Indeed, after two viewings I appreciate how much from Greek myth Nolan stuffs into the film. I have no doubt that fans will be picking out his breadcrumbs for years. Meanwhile, real problems arise in the language, the narrative’s thematic structure, and how the story ends.