An Ancient Poem, a Modern Director, and a Very Old Argument
Christopher Nolan is adapting Homer’s Odyssey, and the internet has already decided it’s a crime against antiquity.
The Charge Against Nolan
The accusation circulating in comment sections and opinion columns is specific: Nolan is “woke-ifying” Homer’s epic. The precise nature of that alleged offense tends to shift depending on who’s making the argument, but the underlying anxiety is consistent. Some audiences treat ancient texts as fixed objects – artifacts sealed in amber, whose meaning was determined once, by one culture, in one historical moment, and should not be disturbed. On that reading, any contemporary filmmaker who brings a modern sensibility to Homer is committing a kind of vandalism.
This position sounds like reverence. It isn’t. It mistakes preservation for understanding, and familiarity for fidelity. The Odyssey has never had a stable, singular form – not in the ancient world, not in the medieval transmission of Greek texts through Arabic scholarship, not in the Renaissance rediscoveries that gave European literature its classical obsessions. What Nolan’s critics are defending isn’t Homer. It’s a particular modern idea of Homer, itself a product of translation, selection, and cultural framing.
The accusation of “woke-ifying” is also doing a lot of unexamined work. It implies that Homer’s original audience held values broadly aligned with a certain contemporary conservatism – that the epic, read correctly and without interference, naturally endorses a worldview hostile to the concerns his critics associate with that word. This is a curious claim to make about a poem whose central figure spends ten years crying on a beach, navigating relationships with powerful women, and repeatedly surviving through deception rather than brute force.
Odysseus is not, by any conventional measure, a triumphalist hero. He weeps. He lies. He depends on Athena, Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, and Penelope at nearly every stage of his journey. The Odyssey is already a text about vulnerability, cunning, and the cost of long absence – which makes it strange territory for those who want it to stand as a monument to uncomplicated heroism.
Translation Is Interpretation, Always
The deeper issue here isn’t Nolan specifically. It’s what translation actually is and what it demands of the people doing it. Finding new resonance in ancient texts isn’t a distortion of those texts – it’s the mechanism by which they survive at all. Every translator of the Odyssey has made choices that reflect the cultural moment of the translation as much as the Greek original. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, the first into English by a woman, drew attention for restoring precision where earlier versions had added male-coded dignity to descriptions of female characters. Richmond Lattimore’s 1965 version carries the austere grandeur of mid-century American literary taste. Alexander Pope’s 1726 rendering is soaked in the rhetorical values of Augustan English verse. All of them are interpretations. None of them is Homer.
This isn’t a failure of translation. It’s the condition of translation. Ancient Greek, for reasons that have nothing to do with ideology, does not map cleanly onto modern English. Word choices carry different social weights, characters are described in terms that ancient audiences read through frameworks of class and gender that don’t have direct modern equivalents, and the narrative conventions of oral epic – formulaic epithets, ring composition, extended similes – create effects in performance that written translations can only approximate. Every translator has to make calls. Every call reflects something.
What Wilson’s translation made visible, by choosing precision over tradition, was how much earlier translators had quietly editorialized in favor of male authority. The servant women Odysseus has hanged at the end of the poem – women who had slept with the suitors during his absence – were routinely described in earlier translations with terms like “sluttish” or “disloyal.” Wilson’s translation restored a more neutral Greek term: doulai, meaning female slaves. They were enslaved women with no agency over whom they slept with. That isn’t woke-ifying Homer. That’s reading him.
Nolan’s project, whatever shape it ultimately takes, exists inside this same tradition of interpretive adaptation. Film is not a translation in the same sense that a book is, but the act of selecting which elements of an ancient story to foreground, which characters to develop, and which emotional throughlines to follow is structurally identical to the choices a translator makes. Every filmmaker who has touched Greek myth has done this. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now read Heart of Darkness through Vietnam. The Coen Brothers read Homer through 1930s Mississippi in O Brother, Where Art Thou? – a film that took enormous liberties with the source material and is nonetheless widely loved, including by people who would consider themselves classicists.
The selectivity of outrage matters here. O Brother, Where Art Thou? changed nearly everything about the Odyssey – the setting, the characters, the stakes, the register – and received no comparable accusation of desecration. The difference between that film’s reception and the preemptive hostility toward Nolan’s project is not obviously about fidelity to Homer. It appears to be about something else.
What We’re Actually Arguing About
Arguments about ancient texts are rarely just about ancient texts. The battle over who owns the Odyssey – who gets to adapt it, in what spirit, with what assumptions about its characters – is a proxy for a broader argument about cultural authority: who decides what the past means, whose interpretive instincts are treated as neutral versus political, and which contemporary values get to claim the legitimacy of classical precedent. Nolan hasn’t released his film. The argument is already about something other than the film.
Emily Wilson, whose translation reignited many of these debates before Nolan was involved, has noted that the poem’s hero is defined less by conquest than by endurance and longing. Odysseus wants to go home. The war is over. The violence he enacts on his return is excessive in ways the text itself marks as troubling – Athena has to physically restrain further bloodshed at the poem’s end. That’s the text Nolan is working with. It has never been simple, and anyone claiming to defend its simplicity is defending a version of Homer that Homer didn’t write.
Which brings the argument back to its actual pressure point: not whether Nolan will be faithful to Homer, but whether audiences can tolerate an Odyssey that takes seriously what the poem actually contains – the grief, the dependence, the moral ambiguity, the enslaved women, the hero who survives by being smaller than his legend. That’s a harder story to tell than the one his critics seem to want. Whether Nolan tells it well is a question that will have to wait for the film itself. But the hostility directed at him now, before a frame has been shot, suggests the real anxiety isn’t about Hollywood getting Homer wrong. It’s about Hollywood getting him right.
