Movies and Stories Feature
How a Greek hero born three thousand years ago became the most enduring character in Western storytelling, and why Christopher Nolan is betting his biggest film on him.
There is a moment in the story of Odysseus that says more about the human condition than most novels manage in three hundred pages. He has been offered immortality. A goddess named Calypso, who is in love with him and has kept him on her enchanted island for seven years, tells him plainly: stay here with me, never grow old, never die, and you can have everything. Odysseus, the man who once outwitted a god, looks out at the sea and weeps.
He chooses to go home.
Not to victory. Not to eternal life. Not to ease or comfort or divine company. Home, which in his case means an island kingdom, a wife under siege from aggressive suitors, a son who grew up without a father, and a very old dog who has waited faithfully for his return. The dog’s name is Argos, and what Argos does when Odysseus finally arrives has been making readers cry for roughly twenty-eight centuries.
That is the power sitting at the center of one of the oldest adventure stories in Western literature. And this summer, Christopher Nolan, the director who made a three-hour film about the invention of the atomic bomb feel like a thriller, is bringing it to IMAX screens worldwide.
Before the Gods, Before the Greeks
To appreciate why Odysseus matters, it helps to understand the world his story comes from. Greek mythology is not a single book or a unified religion in the way a modern reader might expect. It is a vast, sprawling, living tradition that accumulated over centuries, told and retold by poets, playwrights, and storytellers across a civilization that stretched from present-day Turkey to the coast of Spain.
At its center was a pantheon of gods who were nothing like the serene, beneficent deities of other traditions. The Greek gods were vain, petty, lustful, jealous, and magnificent. Zeus, the king of the gods, was a serial philanderer whose dalliances with mortal women produced a generation of demigod children caught between two worlds. Hera, his wife, spent much of her divine energy punishing those children for the crime of existing. Poseidon held grudges. Athena played favorites. Ares delighted in carnage. Apollo could inspire a poet one morning and destroy him by afternoon.
These were gods you could bargain with, outwit, and occasionally infuriate. They were, in other words, recognizably human, which is precisely what made the tradition so durable. Greek mythology did not ask you to believe in perfection. It asked you to recognize yourself in the mess.
The stories that emerged from this tradition covered everything from the creation of the world to the origins of the seasons to the reason fire exists. But the ones that lasted longest, the ones that became foundational texts of Western civilization, were the two epic poems attributed to the poet Homer: the Iliad, which tells the story of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, which tells the story of what happens after.
The Trojan War: Where It All Begins
The Trojan War is the backstory you need to understand Odysseus. It began, as Greek mythology suggests many things began, with a wedding where someone was not invited.
The goddess of discord, Eris, was excluded from the marriage of the sea nymph Thetis and the mortal king Peleus. In retaliation, she threw a golden apple inscribed with the word meaning “for the fairest” into the gathering. Three goddesses claimed it: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Zeus, sensibly refusing to adjudicate a beauty contest among his wife and daughters, delegated the judgment to a Trojan prince named Paris.
Each goddess offered Paris a bribe. Hera offered power. Athena offered wisdom. Aphrodite offered the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Aphrodite’s gift. The most beautiful woman in the world was Helen, who was already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Paris sailed to Sparta, was welcomed as a guest, and then sailed home with his host’s wife.
What followed was ten years of war. The Greeks assembled a vast coalition army. Their forces included Achilles, the greatest warrior of his generation; Agamemnon, the high king who held the alliance together through sheer authority; Ajax, a fighter of extraordinary size and strength; and Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, who was not the strongest man in the room but was almost certainly the smartest.
The war ended through Odysseus’s most famous invention: the wooden horse. After a decade of siege, the Greeks feigned retreat and left a massive wooden horse on the beach as a supposed offering to the gods. The Trojans dragged it inside their walls. Inside it, hiding in the dark, was a select team of Greek soldiers including Odysseus himself. That night, they opened the gates. The city burned.
The Iliad ends more or less here. The Odyssey begins with the question that follows every war: now what?
The Man Himself
Odysseus is not the hero of Greek mythology that most people would pick first. Achilles is more beautiful and more deadly. Hercules is stronger. Perseus is perhaps more conventionally heroic. Odysseus has none of their exceptional physical gifts. What he has instead is a restless, relentless mind that is always three moves ahead of everyone else in the room.
The Greeks called this quality metis, which roughly translates as cunning intelligence: the kind of thinking that involves not just solving a problem but recognizing what the problem actually is before anyone else has noticed there is one. Odysseus has it in abundance, and it is what makes him both admirable and, to certain of the gods, profoundly irritating.
His journey home from Troy lasts ten years and covers waters that make his original voyage look like a commute. He lands on the island where the Cyclopes live, a race of one-eyed giants, and is trapped with several of his men inside a cave by Polyphemus, a son of the sea god Poseidon. His escape involves blinding the Cyclops and, in a moment of characteristic cunning, telling Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody.” When the blinded giant screams for help from his fellow Cyclopes and they ask who has hurt him, all he can howl back is that nobody has. They leave him alone. Odysseus escapes.
But the blinding of Polyphemus enrages Poseidon, whose grudge against Odysseus then compounds every subsequent misfortune of the voyage. It is worth noting that Odysseus, having successfully escaped the cave, ruins it at the last moment by shouting his real name back to the blinded Cyclops from his departing ship. Three thousand years later, this still reads as deeply, recognizably human: the irresistible temptation to get credit for your own cleverness, even when silence is the wiser choice.
He encounters Circe, a sorceress who turns men into pigs. He sails past the Sirens, creatures whose song is so irresistibly beautiful that sailors who hear it throw themselves into the sea. Odysseus, determined to hear the song without dying, has himself lashed to the mast of his ship with orders that no one is to release him no matter what he begs, while his crew, ears stopped with beeswax, rows them safely past. He loses men to the six-headed monster Scylla and to the whirlpool Charybdis. He descends to the land of the dead to seek counsel from a prophet. He spends seven years on Calypso’s island and turns down immortality.
When he finally reaches Ithaca, after all of this, his house is overrun by men competing to marry his wife and consume his stores. He is in disguise and alone. His son Telemachus, who was a baby when he left, is now a young man old enough to fight alongside him. And he still has to solve the problem of the suitors.
He does. He wins. He gets home.
Why the Story Has Never Stopped Being Told
The Odyssey is not primarily a story about monsters. The monsters are vivid and memorable, but they are not what the poem is about. What it is about is time, and identity, and the question of whether a person is still themselves after everything that has happened to them.
Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years, ten at war and ten at sea. He is a different man than the one who left. His wife Penelope, who has held his kingdom together through years of pressure and harassment, is a different woman. His son, who has no memory of his father, is a different person than he would have been. The reunion, when it comes, involves not just recognition but a kind of negotiation over whether these people can become, together, something new.
This is the theme that has made the Odyssey a permanent fixture of the human imagination. It has influenced everything from the structure of the novel to the shape of modern screenwriting. James Joyce built his Ulysses, one of the most ambitious works of twentieth-century literature, around a single day in Dublin mapped chapter by chapter onto the journey of Odysseus. The Coen Brothers transplanted the whole arc to Depression-era Mississippi in O Brother, Where Art Thou? The word “odyssey” has become so thoroughly embedded in the language that it is now used by people who have never read the poem and may not know where it came from.
Greek Mythology at the Movies
Hollywood’s relationship with Greek mythology goes back almost to the beginning of cinema, and it has been wildly uneven. At its best, the genre produces genuinely thrilling spectacle grounded in stories that have been honed by centuries of telling. At its worst, it produces men in tunics shouting at obvious blue screens.
The most significant adaptation of the Trojan War cycle is Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy from 2004, which stripped the gods from Homer’s Iliad and told the story as muscular historical drama. Brad Pitt’s Achilles is a performance worth watching regardless of your feelings about the genre, and the film has a visual grandeur that holds up well. Its weakness is that removing the divine dimension of the story flattens what is, in Homer, a complex meditation on fate and glory into something closer to a very expensive action film.
The 1981 Clash of the Titans, directed by Desmond Davis with stop-motion creature effects created and produced by Ray Harryhausen, remains a particular kind of pleasure. It takes significant liberties with the myth of Perseus, but there is a warmth and craft to it that many of its successors have lacked. Harryhausen’s Medusa sequence, in which Perseus navigates a ruined temple in near-darkness to face a creature whose gaze turns men to stone, still holds genuine tension. Harryhausen himself has noted it was among his most technically demanding pieces of work.
Disney’s animated Hercules from 1997 did something interesting with the mythology, transplanting it into a cheerful contemporary register while retaining enough of the emotional core of the Heracles myth to produce something genuinely affecting. It is not faithful to the ancient sources in any scholarly sense, but it is not trying to be, and within its own terms it succeeds handsomely.
The Percy Jackson series, adapted from Rick Riordan’s novels, imagined Greek mythology as a living reality beneath the surface of modern America. The two films, released in 2010 and 2013, were imperfect adaptations of novels that their fans loved intensely, but they introduced an enormous new audience to the stories and characters of the tradition. The more recent Disney Plus television series has been received more warmly by readers of the books, who felt the films compressed too much.
For television, the 1997 NBC miniseries The Odyssey, starring Armand Assante, remains the closest prior screen adaptation of Homer’s poem: a largely faithful retelling that benefited from creature work by Jim Henson’s studio. It is modest by current production standards, but it has the ambition to include nearly everything the poem contains.
Nolan’s Bet
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17, 2026, and it is by any measure one of the most anticipated films in years. Nolan, who followed his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer with this project, shot the film over 91 days on location around the world, including stretches at sea off Greece, Morocco, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, and the Western Sahara. He used more than two million feet of newly developed IMAX film stock, a figure he has described in interviews as a deliberate attempt to capture something that had never been done before at this scale.
The casting alone communicates the scope of the ambition. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, Tom Holland plays his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway plays his wife Penelope, and Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, the most aggressive of the suitors competing for Penelope and the throne. Zendaya takes on the role of Athena, divine protector of Odysseus throughout the poem, and Charlize Theron plays Circe, the sorceress Odysseus encounters during his wanderings. The cast also includes Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Mia Goth, Himesh Patel, and Elliot Page, among many others.
It is worth noting that Nolan nearly came to this material two decades earlier. He was reportedly in consideration to direct Troy in 2004, the Wolfgang Petersen film that ultimately starred Brad Pitt. Instead, he made Batman Begins, and the Trojan War went to someone else. The Odyssey is, in some ways, a twenty-year detour finally completed.
Speaking on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ahead of the film’s release, Nolan drew an unexpected parallel between Homer and the modern entertainment landscape. He described the Homeric epics as the superhero stories of the ancient world: the desire to feel or believe that gods could walk among us, expressed in the grandest narrative form available. He also pointed out, with some amusement, that the film’s cast includes actors who have played Spider-Man, Batman, and Catwoman in recent franchise films, and that there is something fitting about that.
On why he was drawn to the poem itself, Nolan has been characteristically direct. In an interview with Empire, he explained that he had grown up watching Ray Harryhausen’s mythological films, the stop-motion creature epics that defined the genre for a generation of filmmakers, and had always wanted to see what that material could look like done with the weight and credibility that a major IMAX production could bring. He said he saw a gap in cinematic culture that nobody had filled, and he wanted to fill it.
He also offered a more personal reason on the Colbert show. The major thread in the poem about Odysseus’s dog, he said, was one of the things that first hooked him. As a new dog owner who had never had a dog when his children were growing up, he found the story of Argos uniquely moving.
The dog is Argos. He is mentioned in a single passage near the end of the poem. Odysseus has returned to Ithaca in disguise, and as he approaches his old home he sees his dog, ancient now and lying on a heap of refuse, too old to rise. Argos recognizes his master through the disguise. He lifts his head, wags his tail once, and dies. He has been waiting twenty years.
It is one short passage in a work of thousands of lines. That a filmmaker of Nolan’s stature, having just made a film about the Manhattan Project, spent serious time thinking about whether that dog could be rendered with credibility on screen, says something about the nature of this particular story. The Odyssey gets into people. It finds the personal thing.
What to Know Before You Go
For those approaching this story for the first time through Nolan’s film, a few things are worth keeping in mind. The gods in this story are not distant or abstract. They have opinions about Odysseus, they act on those opinions, and the consequences are immediate. Athena is on his side and intervenes at several crucial moments. Poseidon is not, and makes the sea a continuous obstacle for a decade. Both operate as active participants, not as background symbolism.
Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, is not merely a woman waiting. She is a strategist in her own right, who has kept the suitors at bay for years through a famous act of sustained deception: promising to choose a husband once she finishes weaving a funeral shroud, and then secretly unraveling her progress each night to begin again. She has been buying time for years, holding the kingdom together through nothing but her own wit and composure.
Telemachus, their son, spends much of the poem becoming a man capable of standing beside his father. Tom Holland, in what sounds like carefully considered casting, will be playing a character whose central journey is the transition from the boy he was to the son the moment requires him to be.
And Odysseus himself is not, despite all the cunning and the glory and the decade of extraordinary survival, entirely sympathetic. He makes choices that cost his men their lives. He lingers in some places longer than necessary. The poem does not flinch from the cost of his particular kind of intelligence, which sometimes runs ahead of his wisdom. He is, to use the term of the tradition, a hero: a category that in the Greek sense did not mean simply good, but meant someone whose extraordinary qualities set them apart from ordinary human life in ways that were as dangerous as they were magnificent.
That ambiguity is almost certainly why the story has lasted as long as it has. And why this summer, in a darkened IMAX theater, millions of people who have never read a line of Homer are about to find out what it feels like to come home after twenty years.
Argos has been waiting.
Essential Viewing: Greek Mythology and Ancient World Films Worth Your Time
Whether you want to prepare for Nolan’s film, revisit the genre, or simply spend a weekend in the company of gods and heroes, the following films and series are the best the genre has produced. They are arranged roughly by theme, not ranked.
The Trojan War and Odysseus
Troy (2004) — Wolfgang Petersen’s epic retelling of the Iliad strips out the gods and tells the fall of Troy as muscular historical drama. Brad Pitt’s Achilles is a genuinely compelling performance, and the film’s scale and visual craft hold up. A director’s cut adds nearly thirty minutes of additional footage. Required viewing before Nolan’s film.
The Odyssey (1997, TV miniseries) — An NBC two-part miniseries starring Armand Assante as Odysseus, this remains the most faithful prior screen adaptation of Homer’s poem. Creature effects by Jim Henson’s studio give it a handmade warmth that more expensive productions have rarely matched. Long and modest in budget, but genuinely committed to the source.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) — The Coen Brothers’ Depression-era Mississippi road movie is a loose and inventive retelling of the Odyssey, complete with a Cyclops, Sirens, and a man trying to get home. Funny, melancholic, and beautifully shot. One of the great American films of its decade.
Perseus and the Creatures of Myth
Clash of the Titans (1981) — Desmond Davis’s film, with stop-motion creature effects by the legendary Ray Harryhausen, tells the story of Perseus and the rescue of Princess Andromeda. Dated in some respects, but Harryhausen’s Medusa sequence remains one of the finest pieces of practical creature work in cinema history. Nolan himself has cited Harryhausen as a foundational influence on his approach to The Odyssey.
Hercules
Hercules (Disney, 1997) — A cheerful, affectionate reimagining of the Heracles myth transplanted into a Broadway-inflected register. Not accurate to the ancient sources, but genuinely entertaining, emotionally warm, and featuring one of Alan Menken’s best scores. Ideal for younger viewers and for anyone who wants their mythology with a light touch.
The Wider Greek World
300 (2006) — Zack Snyder’s highly stylized retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, in which three hundred Spartan soldiers held a mountain pass against a massive Persian army. Based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel rather than directly on history, so it takes significant liberties with the facts, but as a piece of visual spectacle it is genuinely striking. Greek history rather than mythology proper.
Immortals (2011) — Tarsem Singh’s visually extravagant film casts Henry Cavill as Theseus, a mortal chosen by Zeus to fight a tyrannical king who seeks to release the imprisoned Titans. Loosely based on the myths of Theseus and the Minotaur. Beautiful to look at; the mythology is handled liberally.
Jason and the Argonauts (1963) — An older production, but one of the finest myth adaptations ever made. The story of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, with iconic stop-motion work by Ray Harryhausen including the famous sequence in which bronze skeleton warriors rise from the earth. A joyful, inventive film that holds up remarkably well.
Percy Jackson
Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Disney+, 2023, series) — The television adaptation of Rick Riordan’s novels, in which a modern American teenager discovers he is the son of Poseidon and is drawn into the ongoing conflicts of the Greek gods. More faithful to the books than the earlier films, and far better received. A good entry point for younger audiences and a warm, inventive reimagining of the tradition.
Ancient World Adjacent: Roman Epic
Gladiator (2000) — Roman, not Greek, but set in an ancient world that drew directly from the mythology and values of the Greek tradition. Ridley Scott’s film follows a Roman general enslaved and forced to fight as a gladiator, seeking vengeance against the emperor who murdered his family. A masterpiece of the epic genre, with a performance by Russell Crowe that anchors one of the most satisfying revenge narratives in cinema history. Watch it in the same spirit as the mythological films: a great story told on a grand scale about honor, fate, and the cost of power.
Streaming: Television for Greek Mythology Enthusiasts
Blood of Zeus (Netflix, 2020, animated series) — An original animated series set in the world of Greek mythology, following a mortal who discovers his divine heritage as a war between gods and demons escalates. Well-written and beautifully produced, with a genuine understanding of the mythological tradition. Both seasons are available on Netflix.
Kaos (Netflix, 2024, series) — A contemporary black comedy that reimagines the Greek gods as living, neurotic figures in a modern world. Jeff Goldblum plays Zeus. Irreverent, inventive, and quietly melancholic beneath the comedy. Not a faithful rendering of the myths, but a genuinely interesting use of them.
Disclaimer: This article is intended for general informational and entertainment purposes only. Film and cast details are subject to change.
