Reinventing a Three-Thousand-Year-Old Tale
Every summer there seems to be two highly contrasting, highly championed blockbuster movies fighting for dominance in the cultural imagination. In 2023 it was Barbie and Oppenheimer, a set of aesthetics so different you couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the spectrum of 21st-century values. In 2026 it was the highly anticipated Spiderman sequel Brand New Day, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
The Odyssey and the Spiderman franchise are built on the mythic reputations of ordinary people becoming heroes (and sometimes villains). This seemingly inexhaustible trope appears to be a “low risk, high reward” approach to modern cinema—at least, as far as Hollywood and its producers are concerned.
Of course, the hero’s journey is nothing new. The concept of “person goes on an adventure and discovers their inner courage” has been around since there was even written language. Early mythology often segregates the universe into humans, or mortals, and the divine. Hero’s Journey-type tales bridged the divide between these spaces. They showcase heroes that aren’t quite gods, yet are built of stronger stuff than the average person. These figures could be inspirational, aspirational, comic, tragic, or a combination of all these things. They’re larger than life and true to life at the same time.
It’s from this mythic cloth that The Odyssey emerges.
The Odyssey was is first attested to around the late 8th century BCE—almost three thousand years ago! But before it was written down, it was passed orally from one storyteller to another.
It’s impossible to overstate the value of this little historical fact, because it plays a major role in establishing the validity of a creative interpretation. We’ll get to that a bit later.
If you’ve yet to encounter The Odyssey, the plot goes like this: Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, heads home in the aftermath of the Trojan War. On his way home he encounters various antagonists and challenges which make up the bulk of the story.
When Odysseus arrives, he doesn’t find Penelope, his wife, waiting for him with open arms. Instead she’s surrounded by men trying to woo her and claim his kingdom.
How Penelope feels about this whole situation varies from one storyteller to another. But this isn’t her story—it’s his. And so from the perspective of the husband and ruler, a happy ending involves slaughtering all of these strapping interlopers and reuniting with his family. This climactic scene highlights one of the deepest fears of men at this time: that should they go off to battle, the life they knew may not still be there waiting for them when they return.
The treatment of women throughout The Odyssey has long been an area of contention among 20th- and 21st-century critics; and the epic has no shortage of powerful women, between Penelope’s quiet strength, Circe’s enchantment of a party of volatile men, Helen’s sensuality and cunning, and a few others which we’ll encounter below.
This means that any modern adaptation of the story is inevitably going to be judged in part by how it approaches its female characters. Intentional or not, these portrayals become a sort of political statement. In Nolan’s interpretation, Helen—the most beautiful woman in the world—is less a prize than a cog in the larger machine. While Nolan has been criticized for stripping the film of its love story element, this approach is in fact more consistent with the original myth.
The Odyssey entirely skips over the inception of the Trojan War, which was started by a woman. And not Helen, the forbidden love of the prince of Troy, as one might think, but by a fascinating tertiary figure with a history of being overlooked: Eris, the goddess of discord.
The seeds of war are first sown when Eris learns she wasn’t invited to a royal wedding—apparently she had a habit of causing trouble—so she decides to crash the affair with style. If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it’s remarkably similar to the setup of “Sleeping Beauty.” In that fairy tale, twelve fairies are invited to the christening of a newborn princess. The thirteenth, furious at being left out, arrives and curses the princess to prick her finger on a spindle and die.
Eris takes a slightly different approach. She tosses in an apple (another classic fairy tale motif) inscribed with “To the fairest.” Paris, the young prince, finds the apple. Three goddesses in attendance—Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera—all assume the apple was meant for them. You can imagine how Paris must have felt standing before these three powerful, deadly women, all waiting for him to choose between them! There’s no way for him to emerge from this encounter unscathed, and Eris gets to sit back and watch it all fall apart.
Paris ultimately offers the apple to Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty (that’s teenage boys for you). And as a reward, Aphrodite gifts him… are you ready? Helen of Troy.
So although various storytellers and creators have framed her elopement with Paris as a forbidden romance, she was really offered as a prize from the beginning. And this minor event led to a decade-long war that claimed countless lives. Did Eris know how far her little prank would go? It’s impossible to know for sure.
So really, Nolan’s portrayal of Helen’s passive role in the whole debacle is more authentic than many others in the past. The love story between Helen and Paris likely emerged because the idea of a woman being offered up as a reward—by another woman, no less—is a little uncomfortable.
They were portrayed as being romantically involved for the same reason that Disney’s Sleeping Beauty was woken by a kiss and not, as in the original fairy tale, by being sexually assaulted in her sleep. Perhaps paradoxically, critics have criticized Nolan for sloughing away the santization that past creators had imposed.
Of course, we can’t entirely discount the family-friendly nature that some aspects of the myth have taken on. Would the average reader know of Sleeping Beauty today if she hadn’t been reimagined by Walt Disney? Would The Odyssey still exist if it hadn’t mutated and adapted to fit the culture of subsequent generations?
That mutability is inseparable from the longevity of stories like The Odyssey. And what many vocal detractors don’t realise is that it was already mutating when Homer wrote it all down back in the 8th century BCE.
To argue that Nolan and his Oscar-winning cast got certain things “right” or “wrong” implies that there is an objectively correct version to measure it against. But these myths existed before Homer—himself a figure whose very existence has been a source of fevered debate. They were already being passed from place to place, embellished, expanded, with each storyteller adding their own values and flavor. Homer and Nolan both occupy an important space in the history of the story, but neither one is its beginning or its end.
Past scholars of oral folklore were fascinated by “original” stories, digging ever deeper in search of the most authentic, real version. But scholars today are more interested in what each version of a story reveals about those who told it. Today’s audience may take issue with Nolan’s inconsistent ethics around violence, or his interpretation of beauty, or his juxtaposition of historical accuracy against contemporary morals. But future generations may look back and see the film as a mirror for the conversations dominating society at this time.
The Odyssey is at heart an adventure story, but it can be many other things as well: a cautionary tale about the horrors of war, a feminist anthem in oppressive times, a celebration of courage and survival, or a political allegory. James Joyce reimagined the poem as a day in Dublin city, a move that caused uproar around the world and led to a highly publicized lawsuit. Decades later, authors like Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes explored the perspective of the unsung women of the myth. Those who argue that any of these interpretations are inherently incorrect are, perhaps, missing the point.
