Fireside Friday, July 31, 2026 (On The Odyssey)

Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote a review of it for Foreign Policy (alas, paywalled, I assume), although by far the most discussed review has been that of Emily Wilson, noted translator of Homer. I have a few scattered thoughts about the film that either didn’t fit into the FP piece or have been occasioned since then, which I thought I’d put here. Spoiler warnings, I suppose – Nolan does actually have a surprise or two (he is willing to bend the poem a bit to get it) – so if you don’t want that, skip to the second cat picture to get to recommendations.

Percy hard at work helping me plan out my Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron series.

First off as level setting, my general impression of the film: it was good. It aims to evoke emotions and largely does so. The actors are very skilled and it shows. Christopher Nolan does not like dialogue and that…also shows. As I said in my review, however, this is a ‘remix’ not a cover; Nolan feels perfectly free to put his own spin on the story, to shift themes around and so on. And that’s fine, people have been remixing the Odyssey since forever.1

I think this is one place where Wilson and I part ways in our review. As a Homerist, Wilson sees everything missing in Nolan’s film, which is fine to point out but at the same time of course there is no way that anyone was going to fit all of the subtly and themes of 12,000 lines of Greek into a film that needs to run a bit under three hours. At the same time, Wilson has written her review quite sharply, with some lines that come off more cutting than necessary given that, while The Odyssey might not have been the film of Wilson’s dreams, it is evidently a ‘good’ film to judge by audience reactions.

More broadly, I can’t help but think that, in a moment where the field of Classics is quite evidently sinking, it would have…