To spend one’s days in the company of the ancients is to become acutely sensitive to the ripples they leave in contemporary culture. These reflections arose not from any desire to participate in the ordinary commerce of cinematic anticipation, but from a simpler and more pressing occasion: the questions of students. Several of those I teach at boarding schools on the American East Coast — whose academic years conclude earlier than most, and who arrive to lessons with opinions already formed — have been asking, with increasing insistence, what I make of Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of the Odyssey. The film is scheduled for release on July 17, 2026. A trailer has been circulating since December. And since our current studies in advanced Latin poetry are organized almost entirely around Vergil — who spent his working life in conscious, devoted emulation of Homer, the very architect of the poem Nolan has undertaken — the question felt less like a digression than a natural extension of the classroom.
What follows is an attempt to answer it with the seriousness it deserves.
The Odyssey is the founding document of Western narrative literature. It predates our oldest prose by centuries. It established the terms — the wandering hero, the longing for home, the interplay of divine will and mortal cunning — that every subsequent epic, from Vergil’s Aeneid to Milton’s Paradise Lost, would negotiate and revise. Homer’s Odysseus is not simply a soldier trying to get home. He is the embodiment of mētis — the specifically Greek virtue of cunning intelligence, practical wisdom, the capacity to navigate a world that does not cooperate. It is this quality, not his strength or his beauty, that defines him: the ability to survive by thinking, to transform himself as the situation demands, to find his way through a universe indifferent to human suffering by being, above all, polytropos — the man of many turnings.
Nolan himself, to his credit, seems to understand this. He has spoken publicly about what drew him to the material — not the monsters, not the spectacle, but the character: the cleverness, the inventiveness, the strategic mind behind the soldier’s armor. One is inclined to believe him. His filmography suggests a genuine preoccupation with the architecture of intelligence: the puzzle-box plots of Memento and Inception, the moral geometry of The Dark Knight, the layered temporalities of Dunkirk and Tenet. Even his titles betray a latinate sensibility: Memento, Inception, Interstellar, Tenet — each drawn from the lexicon of memory, beginning, stars, and holding. A director who names his films from Latin roots is not, one hopes, entirely insensible to the demands of classical material.
The production is formidable in its ambitions. Shot on location across Greece, Italy, Iceland, Morocco, and Scotland, it is the first Hollywood feature filmed entirely on 65mm IMAX cameras — a technical undertaking of considerable audacity. Ludwig Göransson, whose score for Oppenheimer was one of that film’s genuine achievements, returns to compose. The cinematographer is Hoyte van Hoytema, whose collaboration with Nolan has produced some of the most visually commanding images in recent studio cinema. On the sheer question of formal ambition, the film deserves to be taken seriously.
The cast assembled around Matt Damon’s Odysseus is, by any measure, extraordinary: Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Robert Pattinson among the suitors. Nolan has spoken about the structure of the Odyssey — its interlocking temporalities, the retrospective narration, the way the poem folds time back on itself — and one can see why a director who has spent his career investigating the phenomenology of time would find in Homer a kindred spirit. Saint Augustine’s distentio animi — the idea that time is not an objective flow but a subjective stretching of the mind, in which the past is memory, the present is attention, and the future is expectation — describes the psychological condition of Odysseus with almost uncanny precision. For an itinerant hero condemned to a decade of wandering, time is not a medium through which he moves. It is a burden he carries.
There is, in other words, every reason to hope that this film might be something genuinely remarkable. The material is inexhaustible. The director has the technical means and the intellectual disposition for it. And yet the trailer gives one pause.
The questions raised by two minutes of carefully selected footage are not, in themselves, conclusive. A trailer is a commercial document, not a critical edition. It is designed to sell the broadest possible audience on the broadest possible version of the film’s appeal. One ought not to demand that it conduct itself like a seminar. And yet even allowing for this, certain choices in the preview invite scrutiny that will not wait for the July release.
The first is the matter of language. Homer’s poem is saturated with a specific quality of address — the formal, hierarchical, piety-laden language of a world in which words carry the weight of cosmic order. A Roman son would address his father as pater; a Greek son would use pāter — cognate, but Greek, and equally saturated with legal authority, religious reverence, and the full ceremonial weight of the household. Neither term is domestic. Neither is casual. The relationship between Telemachus and Odysseus in the Odyssey is among the poem’s most carefully constructed emotional threads: a son who has grown to manhood without a father, who has held an impossible household together against impossible odds, who must learn to recognize and then to trust a stranger who is also his parent. It is a relationship of enormous formal gravity. To have Tom Holland address Matt Damon as “dad” — the flat, affectionate, resolutely suburban American diminutive — is to collapse that gravity into the register of a family comedy. It is not that the word is wrong in isolation. It is that it arrives in the wrong universe.
The same difficulty attaches to Damon’s “Let’s go” as he leads soldiers into battle. The defenders of this choice will argue, not without intelligence, that no English phrase is authentically Homeric — that “Forward!” or “To me!” would be equally arbitrary translations of what a Mycenaean commander might actually have shouted. This is true as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. The Odyssey is not a historical reconstruction. It is an epic poem, and epic poetry operates within a register of heightened language that signals to its audience: what happens here has mythic weight. “Let’s go” signals something else entirely. It signals that the film is speaking in our register, not Homer’s — that it has decided to meet the contemporary audience where they are rather than to elevate them toward the poem.
The most thrilling thing in the Odyssey was never the size of the monsters. It was always the size of the mind trying to find its way home.
This is a choice with consequences. An adaptation that pitches its language at the level of contemporary idiom has already surrendered the most powerful instrument available to it. Homer’s poem has survived not because Polyphemus is frightening — though he is — but because the language in which Odysseus encounters him is magnificent. The words are the myth. When the words become casual, the myth becomes merely a plot.
The trailer raises further concerns that are not merely linguistic. There is a sequence in which a Laestrygonian — one of the giant cannibals Odysseus encounters in Book X — hurls a soldier against a tree with sufficient force to shatter the trunk cleanly into three sections. Nolan is of course entitled to poetic license; this encounter does not occur in Homer’s text, and the Laestrygonians are described in the poem as of monstrous scale. The difficulty is not mythological but cinematic. A director whose reputation rests on practical effects, physical weight, and a principled resistance to the purely digital has here produced an image indistinguishable from any contemporary superhero action sequence. The Laestrygonians in Homer are terrifying not because of spectacle but because of proportion: they hurl rocks from the clifftops, smash ships to timber, spear the drowning men like fish. The horror is in the scale of the helplessness, not the visual grammar of the impact. When a film replaces that with the clean, weightless fragmentation of a digital prop, it does not intensify the myth. It domesticates it into a genre the audience has already seen a hundred times and learned not to fear.
The casting choices are harder to assess from a two-minute preview, and one ought to be careful here. Actors surprise. A performance that seems misaligned in a trailer can reveal itself, in the full film, as precisely right. That said, certain reservations are not unreasonable to name. Matt Damon is an actor of real talent within his proper register — the intelligent everyman, the competent professional under pressure, the self-deprecating wit. What the role of Odysseus demands is something different: the worn, mercurial, dangerous interior of a man who has been a god’s lover and a monster’s prisoner, who has seen his companions eaten, drowned, and transformed into animals, and who has survived all of it by thinking faster than the world around him. It is a role that calls for a performance that leaves a residue — something in the eyes that does not entirely resolve. Whether Damon can inhabit that register is a genuine question the trailer does not answer. Robert Pattinson’s suitor, meanwhile, speaks in a flat American accent that serves no obvious interpretive purpose — neither signaling the world’s antiquity nor anchoring the character in any coherent conception of what Ithaca’s court sounds like. The linguistic landscape of the household feels assembled rather than imagined.
A word about the material culture visible in the trailer, since this too bears on whether the film has genuinely inhabited its world or merely dressed up in it. The ships are not quite right: their hulls carry the wrong profile for Bronze Age Mediterranean vessels, lacking the low, aggressive draft of the penteconter and sitting in the water with a heaviness that belongs to a later century. The soldiers’ armor is leather rather than bronze — not indefensible for a mythic treatment, since Homer’s world already exists at several removes from strict archaeological precision — but the specific designs read less like a considered interpretation of Mycenaean martial culture than like the costume department of a mid-budget fantasy series. One misses the precision that distinguishes a world that has been researched from one that has been imagined loosely. Homer’s Odyssey is full of specific, concrete, tactile detail: the greaves of bronze, the ships drawn up like a city of black hulls on the shore, the wine-dark sea. It is not an atmospheric ancient world. It is a particular one. When a film’s visual texture suggests instead a generic antiquity — gritty and desaturated in the manner that contemporary cinema has come to confuse with seriousness — it signals that the production has aimed at mood rather than truth.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the translation question. Nolan has acknowledged in interviews that Emily Wilson’s 2017 rendering of the Odyssey was a formative influence on his approach to the material. Wilson is a serious classicist — the first woman to publish a complete English translation of the poem — and her work has genuine virtues: it is metrically disciplined, scrupulously attentive to the Greek, and alert to nuances that earlier translators smoothed over. It has done real pedagogical service, bringing Homer to readers who might otherwise have encountered him only in the more grandiose idiom of Lattimore or Fagles.
But there is a difference between a translation that serves as a classroom introduction and one that serves as the foundation for a mythic epic film. The difference is visible in the poem’s first line. Where Lattimore renders it “Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide,” and Fagles gives us “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course,” Wilson opens with “Tell me about a complicated man.” The phrase is accurate, in its way. Polytropos does mean something like “many-turning,” and “complicated” captures a shadow of that meaning. But it does so by reaching for the vocabulary of contemporary psychology — the language of self-help and therapeutic reflection — rather than the language of mythic invocation. A complicated man is what one discusses in a session or a seminar. The man of many turnings is what one sings about under the night sky, with the gods listening.
If this distinction guided the screenplay’s register — and the trailer suggests it did — then the film may have traded Homer’s cosmos for something considerably more modest: a story about a complicated man finding his way home. Which is not nothing. But it is very far from what the poem is.
A word, finally, about what the Odyssey is actually about — since this seems to be where the deepest risk lies.
The poem is not primarily a narrative of adventure, though it contains the greatest adventures in Western literature. It is a meditation on the relationship between order and chaos, between mētis and brute force, between the patient, watchful intelligence of a man who has learned to endure and the violent, appetitive disorder of a world that has forgotten him. Odysseus spends twenty years trying to restore order — to reclaim his kingdom, his wife, his son, his identity — against forces that are literally and metaphorically monstrous. The monsters of the Odyssey — the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis — are not obstacles in an action sequence. They are embodiments of the chaos against which human civilization and human intelligence must perpetually contend.
A film that foregrounds the monsters at the expense of the mind that outwits them has misread its source. And from the trailer, one cannot entirely suppress the anxiety that this is precisely what has happened — that the visual grammar of contemporary action cinema, with its appetite for spectacle and its impatience with the interior life, has colonized a poem whose deepest action is always cognitive, always ethical, always a matter of what a man thinks and chooses and endures rather than what he destroys.
Nolan is capable of better than this. His best films are films of the mind, not films of the fist. One hopes — genuinely hopes — that the trailer has misrepresented the film in the way that trailers sometimes do: by selecting for impact and velocity, by sacrificing nuance for excitement, by showing the surface rather than the depth. The technical ambition is real. The director’s intelligence is real. The source material is inexhaustible.
Whether the film that arrives in July honors that inheritance or merely borrows its scenery is a question that cannot yet be answered. Emerson Latin will continue its daily work in the meantime — reading the actual Vergil, attending to the actual hexameters — secure in the knowledge that whatever the cinema makes of Homer, the poem itself will not be diminished by it. It has survived two and a half millennia. It will survive the summer blockbuster season.