Tag: adaptation

  • Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Review

    Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Review

    Rating: 4½ out of 5 stars (9/10)

    Walking into this movie, I had heard a lot of people talking about how heavily Nolan used the gods. After watching it, I do not really agree with that assessment. Athena appears throughout much of the movie as a beautiful woman whom Odysseus speaks to and calls by name, but she never tells him anything he could not already know. She points him toward decisions that, somewhere inside himself, he has already made. For the first two thirds of the movie, I was willing to accept that she might simply be Athena, although I was already beginning to suspect that something else was happening.

    That interpretation finally came together for me while Odysseus was with Calypso. She is portrayed as a lone Lotus Eater, caring for Odysseus after his shipwreck. The lotus flower serves as an analogue for opiates. It soothes pain while keeping memory cloaked from conscious awareness. She had fallen in love with him, but she also understood that loving him meant eventually helping him remember who he was and allowing him to leave. As she encouraged him to tell her about his life, he experienced the sack of Troy again as a flashback. He remembered watching Greek soldiers behead a young Trojan girl while other soldiers toppled the head from Athena’s statue. He did not kill the girl or desecrate the statue himself. He simply witnessed both acts and carried them with him. The young girl had the same face as the Athena who had been appearing to him throughout the movie.

    That was the point where my interpretation of Athena as a manifestation of PTSD became much more than a vague possibility. Odysseus had taken the face of an atrocity he witnessed and given it to the goddess he prayed to for wisdom and guidance. Athena became the person through whom he explained his own choices to himself. She could still be the literal goddess, appearing in the form that would affect him most deeply, but the psychological reading no longer felt accidental.

    The word that kept coming back to me while watching was verisimilitude. Nolan changes quite a bit from Homer, but once he establishes the rules of his version of the story, he never cheats them. Everything fits together. The gods, the monsters, the symbolism, and the emotional beats all belong to the same world. Whether you agree with every change is almost beside the point because the movie remains true to itself.

    One of the biggest surprises was the expanded role of Sinon. Rather than simply being the man left behind with the Trojan Horse, he becomes a tragic figure whose fate weighs heavily on Odysseus throughout the film. It gives the story an emotional thread that carries all the way to the end and reinforces the idea that Odysseus is haunted as much by the people he could not save as by the enemies he defeated.

    The Trojan Horse sequence was probably my favorite part of the movie. It felt far more believable than the version most people have in their heads. The Greeks spend what feels like days trapped inside the horse. There are moments where discovery seems inevitable. A soldier probing between the planks even wounds one of the hidden Greeks, who has to be physically restrained to keep from crying out. The tension never lets up. It turns a famous legend into something that feels like an actual military operation.

    The last scene between Odysseus and Athena also worked well for me. After Odysseus finally spoke openly about his trauma with Penelope, who listened from behind a screen, he sat separated from Athena on the stoop and reached out his hand. Athena took it. Then he blinked, and she was gone, while his hand remained suspended in the air. I read that as the moment he realized he no longer needed her to exist outside himself. Not that every wound had suddenly vanished, but that he had finally begun to understand and accept what his mind had been doing to keep him alive.

    The climax in Ithaca is just as satisfying. Penelope’s bow challenge feels earned, and when the disguised beggar finally strings the bow and sends an arrow cleanly through the line of axe heads, everyone in the hall realizes exactly who is standing before them. From that point forward, the fight is brutal without ever feeling like empty spectacle. I also appreciated Telemachus’s arc. He spends much of the film learning how to become a man, and when the fighting finally begins, he has to put those lessons into practice. His duel in the armory and the moment where he throws his father a sword are some of the most satisfying moments in the film because they complete his journey.

    The ending also worked for me. Rather than pretending everything is magically fixed once Odysseus gets home, the film acknowledges that twenty years of war and loss leave scars. He survives, he reconciles with Penelope, and Telemachus is ready to inherit the kingdom, but Odysseus still has one final obligation to fulfill in honor of the men who never made it home. It felt like an honest ending instead of a fairy tale.

    My biggest criticism is the design of the Cyclops. I understand what Nolan was trying to do by giving Polyphemus a twisted face with a single eye instead of the classic giant with one eye in the middle of his forehead, but it never quite worked for me. Rather than making Polyphemus more believable, it made the face visually confusing. That is one of the few moments where I felt the movie overthought something that did not need to be reinvented.

    Overall, I think Christopher Nolan accomplished something difficult. He did not make a literal adaptation of Homer, and he never seemed interested in doing so. Instead, he made a film about trauma, duty, promises, survival, and finally coming home after becoming someone you barely recognize. Whether you choose to see the gods as real or as reflections of Odysseus’s inner life, the movie supports both readings without contradicting itself.

    That is why I walked out of the theater giving it a 4½ out of 5 stars. It is not perfect, but it is one of the most thoughtful and emotionally satisfying adaptations of a classic myth that I have seen in a long time.

    The Odyssey (2026)

    Written and directed by Christopher Nolan
    Based on The Odyssey by Homer

    Odysseus: Matt Damon
    Athena: Zendaya
    Calypso: Charlize Theron
    Sinon: Elliot Page
    Penelope: Anne Hathaway
    Telemachus: Tom Holland
    Polyphemus: Bill Irwin

  • I was born a poor blue child.

    I was born a poor blue child.

    Born into a quiet that a child feels when he discovers he can walk on his own, but doesn’t feel ready.

    Not literally blue. Not technically poor. But in the way that a child can be poor even in a house with food, and blue even in a room full of laughter.

    I was born into that kind of quiet.

    It’s hard to explain to people who grew up inside a steady world. People who grew up with parents that were… consistent. People who grew up with rules that made sense. People who grew up with love that didn’t have conditions attached like price tags.

    Because when you grow up in a world that shifts under your feet, you become a person who is always bracing for impact.

    You become a person who listens more than you speak.

    You become a person who watches faces for weather.

    You become a person who learns early that silence can be safer than honesty.

    I was a child who learned to read a room like a map.

    I learned what footsteps meant.

    I learned what a door closing meant.

    I learned what a sigh meant.

    I learned what the tone of a voice meant.

    I learned what it meant when the TV got turned up loud.

    I learned what it meant when the house got too quiet.

    I learned what it meant when someone was cleaning something that didn’t need cleaning.

    I learned what it meant when someone was suddenly being nice.

    I learned what it meant when someone was suddenly not.

    And I learned that I could not change any of it.

    So I adapted.

    I became a kid who could disappear while still being present.

    I became a kid who could be in trouble without knowing why.

    I became a kid who could feel guilty without being guilty.

    I became a kid who could feel like I owed something, even when I didn’t know what the debt was.

    I became a kid who learned to make himself smaller.

    Because small is less noticeable.

    Small is less target.

    Small is less… problem.

    I didn’t have language for any of this at the time, of course.

    At the time, it was just… life.

    At the time, it was just… normal.

    At the time, my feelings didn’t feel like feelings. They felt like facts.

    I didn’t think “I am anxious.”

    I thought “This is how the world is.”

    I didn’t think “I am lonely.”

    I thought “This is what it means to be me.”

    I didn’t think “I am sad.”

    I thought “This is the baseline.”

    And when sadness is baseline, you don’t notice it as sadness.

    You notice it as gravity.

    That’s what I mean by poor.

    Poor isn’t just money. Poor is absence.

    Poor is what you don’t have and don’t even realize you’re missing, because no one ever showed it to you.

    Poor is safety.
    Poor is stability.
    Poor is being able to relax.
    Poor is knowing that the rules will be the same tomorrow as they are today.

    Poor is knowing that love isn’t a bargaining chip.

    And blue…

    Blue is the color of looking out a window too long.

    Blue is the color of being awake when you shouldn’t be.

    Blue is the color of knowing things you didn’t ask to know.

    Blue is the color of a child who learns too early that adults are not always safe.

    Blue is the color of learning to laugh at things you don’t find funny, because laughter is camouflage.

    Blue is the color of becoming “mature” too young, which is just a polite way of saying “damaged in an efficient way.”

    I was born a poor blue child.

    And I grew up into a poor blue teenager.

    And then a poor blue adult.

    And I carried that blueness into places where it didn’t belong.

    I carried it into friendships.

    I carried it into relationships.

    I carried it into jobs.

    I carried it into rooms where everyone else seemed to be living with their feet flat on the ground, while I was still balanced on the edge of a cliff.

    Because when you grow up braced for impact, peace feels suspicious.

    Calm feels like the moment before something breaks.

    Kindness feels like a setup.

    Compliments feel like a trick.

    Love feels like a test.

    And you don’t even notice you’re doing it.

    You just… react.

    You pull away.

    You make jokes.

    You get defensive.

    You get cold.

    You get loud.

    You self-sabotage.

    You leave first.

    Because leaving first feels like control.

    And control feels like safety.

    And safety feels like…

    Well.

    Safety feels like something you never had enough of.

    So you try to build it out of the materials you have.

    And sometimes the materials you have are not good.

    Sometimes they are fear.

    Sometimes they are anger.

    Sometimes they are pride.

    Sometimes they are numbness.

    Sometimes they are distance.

    Sometimes they are addiction.

    Sometimes they are avoidance.

    And you build a life out of that, and it kind of works.

    Until it doesn’t.

    Until something happens that makes you realize you’ve been living inside your own defense mechanisms.

    Until something happens that makes you realize you’ve been surviving, not living.

    And then you have a choice.

    You can keep being the person who learned all those patterns, or you can become the person who unlearns them.

    And unlearning is harder than learning, because learning is addition.

    Unlearning is removal.

    Unlearning is telling your nervous system that it doesn’t have to live at red alert.

    Unlearning is telling your brain that it doesn’t have to scan for threats that aren’t there.

    Unlearning is telling your heart that it can stop flinching.

    Unlearning is teaching yourself what safety actually feels like.

    And the hardest part is that safety feels boring at first.

    Safety feels empty.

    Safety feels like a room without noise.

    Safety feels like standing still.

    And if you grew up running, standing still feels like death.

    So you create drama, not because you want drama, but because drama feels familiar.

    Drama feels like home.

    Pain feels like home.

    And it takes a long time to make peace feel like home.

    I was born a poor blue child.

    And I am trying, even now, to stop being poor and blue.

    Not in the sense of money.

    Not in the sense of sadness.

    But in the sense of what those things really mean.

    Absence.

    Gravity.

    The weight of old weather.

    I am trying to learn that I can exist without bracing.

    I am trying to learn that I can be loved without earning it.

    I am trying to learn that I can relax without being punished for it.

    I am trying to learn that I can be safe.

    And if that sounds simple, it’s because you didn’t grow up poor and blue.

    If it sounds dramatic, it’s because you didn’t have to build your whole personality out of adaptation.

    If it sounds familiar…

    Then maybe you did.

    And maybe you’re still trying, too.

    The lived version of this story appears in the book chapter here.