How Christopher Nolan’s Blockbuster Echoes the Timeless Oral Tradition of the ‘Odyssey’
July 9, 2026
- Author
- Jay Pfeifer
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is already shattering box office records before a single reel has played.
Driven by unprecedented demand for 70mm IMAX screenings, initial advanced ticket sales eclipsed those of Nolan's previous blockbuster, Oppenheimer, by more than double — sparking global sellouts and a frenzied secondary market in advance of its July 17 release.
To make sense of why this ancient tale still commands such a massive grip on our collective imagination, we sat down with Keyne Cheshire, the Joel O. Conarroe Professor of Classics.
In this Q&A, Cheshire breaks down the narrative brilliance of Homer's timeless text, the historical realities behind its latest translation and why a Hollywood blockbuster is the perfect modern continuation of a centuries-old oral tradition.
Why do you think the Odyssey is so timeless?
It's an amazing, complicated work with its movements forward and backward in time. It smacks of contemporary TV series’ and movies that frequently make time shifts a gimmick because it’s an easy way to challenge the viewer. But it really works thematically in the Odyssey.
The story starts with Odysseus trapped on an island by Calypso, who's this goddess/nymph. She forces him to spend every night with her against his will — in a striking gender reversal for an ancient Greek epic — but he spends every day on the shore, looking out to sea, longing for home. Then the first four books of the Odyssey focus on Telemachus, Odysseus' son. He leaves his home in Ithaca to travel around Greece trying to find out news about his dad. It's brilliant conceptually in terms of crafting the narrative. The reader doesn’t know anything about Odysseus but you start to learn bits of his story through backstories that Telemachus hears. All of Odysseus’s adventures are told as stories within the larger story.
We’ve only seen the trailer so far. What caught your eye?
When I heard Matt Damon was cast as Odysseus, I was like, ‘How could he possibly pull it off?’ But he’s not the young kid I remember; he has aged nicely into the role. Then I remembered that he played the sly trickster in a lot of his early movies, like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Rounders. That could work really well for Odysseus, who is a slippery figure who lies to everyone he meets in the epic — some of his most famous feats, like the Trojan Horse, are masterful deceits.
The Trojan Horse figures prominently in the poster and the trailer. What was your reaction?
My colleagues and I have been texting back and forth about the horse. The ancient Greeks always showed the horse on all fours. And the horse in this version is rearing up, which is admittedly a more dramatic pose. But it does raise the question of how the men are situated in the horse’s belly. We’re all wondering how this will work.
Though the Trojan Horse is one of the defining images from the preview — and one of the more durable symbols of the Odyssey — it plays a very small part in the actual text. Portions of its story are shared very briefly at two points in the epic, but it is such a memorable ruse and it communicates Odysseus’s cleverness so well that the Trojan Horse is now more well-known than the book itself.
The Odyssey is remade on a pretty regular basis. How do you feel when the Odyssey is adapted for TV or movies?
When I was younger, I used to be appalled at the liberties Hollywood would take with the classics in general but I've come to appreciate it. That's just part of it.
The Homeric tradition — the Iliad and the Odyssey, among many others — springs from an oral tradition where a guild of poets sang these songs accompanied by the lyre. There was a lot of opportunity for improvisation until a particular version was finally written down toward the end of the 8th century B.C. It largely crystallized then, but even after that professional singers called “rhapsodes” (“stitchers of song”) would riff on the traditional epic cycle. So, even the ancient Greeks would not have pointed to a single, definitive version of the story. Now, when my students complain about anachronisms or changes, I just tell them it's okay. We have to have a story for our age.
If you really tried to do the Odyssey justice and keep it all, you'd have to have something like The Lord of the Rings series. It’s really long. It takes about 12 to 15 hours to read the whole book aloud.
The Odyssey director Christopher Nolan has credited Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation as the basis for the movie. How will that shape the movie?
Wilson is the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English and one distinguishing quality of her work is that she accurately represents slavery in ancient Greece. Greece had a slave culture, so they have lots of different words for enslaved people. And over the years, those have been invariably translated as “servant” or “housemaid” or “nurse” by a lot of different translators. Wilson’s work reflects the culture of Ancient Greece more clearly — even though it’s not always flattering. It will be very interesting to see how Nolan's two-hour blockbuster handles slavery.
Her work also has revealed some of the sexist and misogynist language that previous male translators have introduced. Her work shows that earlier translations are introducing pejorative words that are not in the actual Greek text. Greek words for "girl" or "woman” are used for certain characters, but because these characters are antagonists, some earlier translators would introduce terms like "whore" or "slut" to characterize them more vividly for the modern reader. Wilson has done a fantastic job of calling that practice out.
