https://youtu.be/f_bKjZeJBBI?si=H8rzkSJFjfrEY5Ym
On 17 July 2026, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened in cinemas.
It is difficult to imagine a more modern production: Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, a vast international cast, and a film shot entirely with IMAX film cameras. Nolan has taken one of the oldest surviving works of Western literature and rebuilt it using some of the most advanced tools in cinema.
But the technology is not what interests me most.
What interests me is the choice.
After Oppenheimer, Nolan could have made almost anything. He chose a story composed nearly 3,000 years ago about a man trying to get home.
Why does this story still deserve such scale?
Not merely preservation.
Retelling.
A story about going nowhere new
We usually describe The Odyssey as an adventure.
Odysseus escapes the one-eyed Cyclops. He encounters the enchantress Circe, listens to the Sirens, descends into the underworld, sails between Scylla and Charybdis, and spends years detained by the goddess Calypso.
It contains enough monsters, shipwrecks and divine interventions to supply an entire cinematic universe.
But I do not think it is fundamentally a story about adventure.
It is a story about return.
Odysseus has already completed the heroic part of his life. He has fought for ten years at Troy. He has helped the Greeks win the war through the stratagem of the wooden horse. He has earned the fame that ancient heroes were supposed to desire.
Now he wants something much less spectacular.
He wants to go home.
He wants to return to Ithaca, to his wife Penelope and to the son he left behind as a baby. He is not travelling towards a new kingdom. He is trying to recover an old life.
That difference matters.
The destination in The Odyssey is not self-discovery, conquest or transcendence. It is belonging.
The monster inside the hero
The most interesting thing about Odysseus is that he is not a particularly admirable man.
He is brave, but also cruel.
He loves his family, but he is not consistently faithful.
He is exceptionally intelligent, but repeatedly endangered by his need to display that intelligence.
After he blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus escapes by giving his name as “Nobody.” When the wounded Cyclops calls for help and says that Nobody is attacking him, the other Cyclopes dismiss his cries.
It is a perfect trick.
Yet once Odysseus has reached his ship, he cannot resist revealing his true identity. He wants Polyphemus to know who defeated him.
That moment of pride allows the Cyclops to call upon his father, Poseidon, to punish Odysseus and obstruct his voyage home.
The quality that saves Odysseus also destroys him.
His intelligence becomes vanity. His confidence becomes recklessness. His desire to be recognised becomes an inability to remain silent.
That is not the psychology of a simple hero. It is the psychology of a human being.
The ancient Greeks seem to have understood something we still resist: our greatest strengths rarely remain pure. They cast shadows.
Intelligence can become manipulation.
Courage can become brutality.
Loyalty can become possession.
Justice can become revenge.
We are often wounded not by the qualities we lack, but by the virtues we cannot control.
Every island asks the same question
The episodes of The Odyssey can look disconnected. Odysseus reaches an island, encounters a danger, escapes and sails on.
But the monsters are not really the point.
Each encounter tests a different part of him.
The Cyclops tests pride.
Circe tests desire.
The Sirens test curiosity.
Calypso tests whether comfort and immortality are worth more than purpose.
The cattle of the sun god test whether his starving men can maintain discipline when no one appears to be watching.
The surface changes, but the deeper question remains the same:
Who are you when one part of your character is placed under unbearable pressure?
This may be one of the oldest principles of storytelling.
A weak story gives its protagonist a series of events.
A strong story gives its protagonist a series of tests.
The danger does not merely block the journey. It exposes the traveller.
That is why a compelling character does not need to confront the same enemy repeatedly. The writer changes the situation and allows a different weakness to emerge.
Good stories do not keep changing the person.
They keep revealing the person who was already there.
The hero who no longer wants glory
One of the most striking moments occurs when Odysseus enters the underworld and meets Achilles.
Achilles was the supreme warrior of the Trojan War. He chose a brief life of immortal fame over a long and obscure existence.
In death, however, he rejects the bargain.
He tells Odysseus that he would rather be alive as the servant of a poor man than rule over all the dead.
This quietly overturns the heroic values of the world that produced the poem.
Glory is not enough.
A name that survives forever cannot compensate the person who is no longer alive to hear it spoken.
If The Iliad is partly concerned with how a warrior earns immortal fame, The Odyssey asks whether survival, domestic life and ordinary human attachment might matter more.
Odysseus makes the same choice on Calypso’s island.
Calypso can offer him immortality. She is divine, beautiful and untouched by age. Penelope, by contrast, is mortal. She has grown older during his absence, as he has.
Still, Odysseus chooses Penelope.
He chooses ageing over eternity.
Limitation over perfection.
A finite human life over an endless existence in a place where he does not belong.
Returning is not the same as arriving
When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, the story does not end.
That may be the deepest insight in the poem.
He has returned geographically, but not yet socially or emotionally. His palace has been occupied by men competing to marry Penelope. His son barely knows him. His servants have divided between loyalty and betrayal. Penelope has spent twenty years surviving without certainty that he is alive.
Odysseus therefore enters his own home disguised as an old beggar.
He must discover who still recognises him.
His dog Argos does.
Neglected and dying, Argos sees through the disguise, recognises his master and dies after witnessing his return. Nolan has described the dog as emotionally important to his interpretation of the story.
Penelope requires more than instinct.
She tests the stranger by ordering that their marriage bed be moved. Odysseus reacts with anger because he built the bed around the trunk of a living olive tree. It cannot be moved without destroying it.
Only the real Odysseus would know this.
The proof of his identity is not his face, his strength or his public reputation.
It is a shared memory.
Perhaps identity is never entirely private. We become ourselves partly through the people who remember us accurately.
After twenty years of war and wandering, Odysseus needs someone who knows not merely what he has done, but who he was before he did it.
The violence of homecoming
The return is not gentle.
Odysseus kills Penelope’s suitors. Servants accused of betrayal are brutally punished. The restoration of order becomes a massacre.
It is tempting to describe this as justice: the rightful king returns and removes those who have violated his household.
But The Odyssey leaves us with a more difficult image.
The man who wanted only to return home must fill that home with blood before he can reclaim it.
This is another reason the poem survives. It does not give us a clean moral hero.
Odysseus returns, but he does not return innocent.
War has followed him home.
The ancient Greeks did not separate love neatly from possession, justice from vengeance, or civilisation from violence. They understood that a person can restore order and commit an atrocity in the same act.
That is uncomfortable.
It is also recognisable.
Why the story remains
It would be an exaggeration to call The Odyssey the source of every story. Other cultures possess their own ancient narratives of exile, trial, transformation and return.
But it is one of the great sources of the Western imagination.
Its influence survives not because later writers keep copying its monsters, but because its central desires remain intact.
We want to return.
We want to be recognised.
We want to know whether the people and places we left behind still have room for us.
We want our suffering to have changed us without making us unrecognisable.
And we want to believe that somewhere, someone remembers who we were before the journey began.
This is why the poem can become a novel, a war story, a space voyage or a Christopher Nolan film. The ships and monsters can change because they are not the deepest structure.
The deepest structure is human.
I once thought the miracle of The Odyssey was that the ancient Greeks had already discovered so many of the devices modern storytellers still use.
Now I think the greater miracle is simpler.
They understood that human beings are divided creatures: clever and foolish, loving and violent, hungry for adventure and desperate for home.
Some stories survive because they explain the world.
The Odyssey survives because it explains us. ◾️
Reference:
Join Tom and Dominic as they unravel the legendary story of Homer’s Odyssey, and its historical precedents.
https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/the-rest-is-history/id1537788786?i=1000775966069
https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/the-rest-is-history/id1537788786?i=1000775966354
First published on Substack on Jul 18, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/the-odyssey-the-oldest-story-was
Cover image: Herbert James Draper, “Ulysses and the Sirens” (1909) (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons — source)
