The Odyssey: Every Difference Between Homer and Christopher Nolan
By Donna
Matt Damon spends a good chunk of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey looking like a man who would very much like to go home and lie down. That is not the Odysseus most of us met in school. Homer’s Odysseus is a liar, a schemer, and a champion boaster who gets most of his crew killed because he couldn’t resist shouting his own name at a Cyclops.
As Rebekah put it on the episode, Nolan “gave us a guilt-ridden Matt Damon desperately trying to get home.” Whether that’s an improvement split our family right down the middle (literally: two votes book, two votes movie).
We also read four different translations between us, which matters more than you’d think. Tim read Fitzgerald, I read Fagles, Rebekah read Lombardo, and Josiah read Emily Wilson. Same poem, four slightly different men named Odysseus.
Spoilers for the movie and a 2,700-year-old poem ahead.
1. Characterization
Odysseus lost his cunning and gained a conscience.
In the poem he’s the “man of twists and turns.” He lies for fun, he brags, he schemes. Nolan’s Odysseus is a modest trauma survivor, haunted by what happened at Troy, and most of the trickery is gone. Emily Wilson (whose translation Josiah read) was not a fan, and told NPR that Nolan should have hired a scriptwriter (NPR). She still said the movie is worth seeing. So do we.
He’s faithful now.
Book Odysseus spends about a year as Circe’s willing lover and seven years with Calypso. Movie Odysseus is loyal to Penelope the whole way. There’s no romance with Circe at all, and the Calypso years become drugged captivity. It makes him easier to root for. It also makes him a different man.
No gods on screen.
This is the big one. The poem is full of Olympians meddling in everything. The movie has none on screen: Poseidon is the sea itself, Zeus is a flash of lightning, and Hermes is cut entirely (so no magic herb to protect him from Circe). The monsters are still real, though. No gods, yes monsters.
Josiah was thrilled. “Well, first of all, I hate the gods as a concept,” he said. “Why am I watching a story where it’s all deus ex machina?” Rebekah wanted them back. She thought leaving them out “added to the vibe of nothing is really magical.”
Athena is a ghost with the wrong face.
In the book, Athena does half the work: disguising Odysseus, guiding Telemachus, deflecting spears, and ending the final feud. In the movie she shows up only in visions, wearing the face of a Trojan priestess his men beheaded. Is it a goddess or a guilt hallucination? The movie won’t say. She’s absent from the homecoming completely.
Penelope gets a speech.
Movie Penelope is indignant that anyone objects to her sitting the throne, and she’s slower to accept that her husband is really back. Book Penelope gets no girl-power speech and needs no convincing at the end. I think Anne Hathaway did an amazing job, and Rebekah liked her portrayal for the most part. I’ll also stand by what I said on the episode: if Penelope were sitting on the throne, those suitors wouldn’t have been eating through her house for years.
Telemachus gets a crown (and a casting debate).
In the book, Telemachus fights beside his father and is never crowned. In the movie, his father rescues him, he kills the traitor Melanthius, and he’s king by the end. Tim thought Tom Holland was miscast: “He seemed very childlike. He needed a harsher edge.”
Circe and Calypso trade places, sort of.
Book Circe is a seductive goddess. Movie Circe is a wary, world-weary witch, and Odysseus stays about a day instead of a year. Eurylochus also gets the pig treatment in the movie, when in the book he’s the one who escapes it. Fun fact: there was no CGI in the pig scene. They did it with a specially developed sculpting clay. I loved this performance, and Rebekah called the scene “one of my favorite parts of the film.”
Calypso goes the other way. The poem’s Calypso is a goddess offering immortality, and Odysseus sits weeping on her shore until Zeus orders her to let him go. The movie’s Calypso seems mortal, keeps an amnesiac Odysseus docile with lotus flowers (the Lotus-Eaters got folded in here), and frees him herself.
Two new villains.
Antinous is just the worst of 108 suitors in the book. He has no history with Odysseus and dies first. The movie gives him a backstory: he dodged the Trojan War by sending a man named Sinon in his place, he plots to murder Telemachus, and he dies last. Sinon himself (played by Elliot Page) is invented for the movie. He’s actually from Virgil’s Aeneid, not Homer. He dies at the horse, turns up in the Underworld, and Odysseus borrows his name as a beggar alias.
Helen and Clytemnestra are twins.
Both played by Lupita Nyong’o. In the book they’re half-sisters and Helen ends up serenely back at Sparta. The movie scars Helen’s face (courtesy of an abusive Menelaus) and recasts the war as being about trade, not about her.
A long list of people who didn’t make the boat.
Gone from the movie: Nausicaa and the Phaeacians, Laertes, Eurycleia the nurse, Nestor, Hermes, Aeolus, and (in the Underworld) Achilles, Elpenor, and Odysseus’s mother.
2. Setting
A world that might not be magic.
Nolan’s world is “a time of apparent magic.” Divine action shows up as natural events that could be chance, and there’s no Olympus. Homer’s world is enchanted, full stop.
The Greeks as the Sea Peoples.
The movie hints that the returning Greeks are the historical Sea Peoples who wrecked Bronze Age civilization. That’s not in Homer at all, but it ties neatly into the movie’s interest in hospitality and who breaks it.
Troy is on screen.
The poem opens after the war is over, and the horse gets only brief secondhand mentions. The movie shows Troy over and over, in a prologue and flashbacks, and the sack is filmed as an atrocity.
The Underworld is a beach.
In the book it’s a mythic realm at the edge of the world. In the movie it’s a physical place “where fire meets ice” (Iceland’s black-sand coast), with hands rising out of the sand.
3. Plot and timeline
The story is told differently.
Homer starts in the middle and lets Odysseus narrate his own adventures at the Phaeacian court. The movie cuts the court entirely and braids three timelines together through a bard’s interrupted song and memories Odysseus recovers on Calypso’s island.
No “Nobody.”
The Cyclops scene loses the wine trick, the “Nobody” wordplay, and the escape under the sheep. Polyphemus is blinded in his sleep, Odysseus fires off a parting arrow and a taunt, and the men escape under straw. Critics missed the “Nobody” joke more than anything else in the movie. Rebekah found the whole scene “confusing and a little bit immersion breaking.”
Some monsters got cut or redone.
Aeolus and his bag of winds are gone. The Laestrygonians become giant armored warriors in a shifting forest instead of cannibals, and the fleet is three ships instead of twelve.
Tiresias does all the warning.
In the Underworld, Odysseus meets only Tiresias, Agamemnon, and Sinon’s ghost, and Tiresias delivers every warning (the cattle, the Sirens, Scylla). In the book, Circe gives the Sirens and Scylla warnings.
The Sirens get personal.
Homer’s Sirens promise knowledge of Troy, the beeswax works, and nobody dies. Nolan’s Sirens tell Odysseus he doesn’t really want to go home, and one crewman is lost. Rebekah’s favorite thing the movie kept was Odysseus tied to the mast.
The reunions changed.
In the book, Athena reveals Odysseus to Telemachus at Eumaeus’s hut. In the movie, a disguised Odysseus saves his son from an ambush at a temple, and that rescue is the reunion. Argos’s tail-wag confirms it later. (We’re still mad about who kicked that dog.) Penelope recognizes him by a keepsake pin, so the famous olive-tree bed test is cut, along with Laertes’s orchard.
The slaughter, with survivors.
In the book, Athena helps Odysseus kill the suitors and all 108 of them die. In the movie, Penelope knowingly stages the bow contest, Odysseus takes arrows in the back, Telemachus joins late, some suitors surrender, and Antinous cowers and dies last.
The maids are not hanged.
At the end of the poem, Telemachus hangs twelve enslaved women. The movie leaves that out. Melantho’s fate is ambiguous, and Telemachus kills Melanthius instead. Nolan called the poem’s ending “so grim and so misogynistic” (GeekTyrant). I’m not sorry they left it out.
The ending is brand new.
In the book, Odysseus takes back his kingdom, the suitors’ families rise up, and Athena imposes peace. In the movie, killing guests in his own hall breaks Zeus’s law, so Odysseus gives up the throne and sails west into exile with Penelope while Telemachus is crowned. The sailing is intercut with Odysseus bleeding out from his arrow wounds in Penelope’s arms. Real exile, or a dying dream? The movie leaves it open. Tim didn’t think it was ambiguous at all.
So… is the book better?
We tied. Rebekah and Tim said the book (8.5 and 8.1 for Homer, 8 and about 7.9 for Nolan). Josiah and I said the movie. I gave the book a 7 and the movie an 8. Josiah gave the book a 7.9 for enjoyment (and a 9.5 to 10 for its place in history, because of course he did) and the movie an 8.9.
Honestly, this is a movie that made a 2,700-year-old poem easier to like and a little less like itself. You’ll have to decide which of those matters more to you.
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Quick facts
- Book: The Odyssey, attributed to Homer, composed around the 8th century BC. Translations our family read: Fitzgerald (1961), Fagles (1996), Lombardo (2000), Wilson (2017)
- Movie: July 17, 2026 (US and UK) · rated R · directed and written by Christopher Nolan
- Cast: Matt Damon (Odysseus), Anne Hathaway (Penelope), Tom Holland (Telemachus), Lupita Nyong’o (Helen and Clytemnestra), Elliot Page (Sinon)
- Budget: $250 million · Worldwide box office: $722 million at the time we recorded
- Ratings when we recorded: 94% Rotten Tomatoes critics · 97% audience · 8.5 IMDb
- Filmed in: Morocco, Western Sahara, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and the US
- Trivia: the first film ever to start ticket pre-sales a full year early (July 17, 2025)
We’re The Book Is Better Podcast, a family of four comparing book-to-film adaptations, one argument at a time. New episodes every other Thursday. Find us wherever you listen, or come argue with us on Discord.