The Odyssey (2026) has a language problem.
This isn’t some esoteric issue buried in the script, nor even a fault of the filmmakers. Rather, it arose before the idea of a new Homeric adaptation crossed Christopher Nolan’s mind and is a consequence of a long tradition of romanticizing ancient literature.
With The Odyssey, this runs so deep that the word “odyssey” has taken on a meaning disconnected from the capital-O Odyssey, as a catch-all for a sweeping adventure. This has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Homer’s Odyssey rooted in our vocabulary, fating Nolan’s film to thematic flatness from the start.
“Odyssey” was first used as a common noun in Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886), when the protagonist’s adventures are called “a great Odyssey.” The proper noun would later become a common noun that typecast a complex narrative into a generalized hallucination of itself. “Odyssey” no longer described what happened to Odysseus but rather what we expect to happen to the Odysseus figure. “Odyssey” became generic because of its distinctiveness.
Semantically diluting a title into a common noun degrades the source’s complexity in the cultural consciousness. “Odyssey” dilutes The Odyssey to its most superficial characteristic and discounts the deeper human questions fundamental to a modern retelling.
Much has already been said about Nolan’s film’s faithfulness, or lack thereof. But within the context of the semantic dilution of The Odyssey into “odyssey,” the question is not whether Nolan’s adaptation is accurate to the “original” story; it is whether a modern adaptation can recover the cultural nuance of a story whose very title has been appropriated by a vague concept of adventure.
Homer’s The Odyssey is a man’s pursuit of nostos, or homecoming, but achieving nostos requires him to face what he has spent the journey trying to escape. The destination and departure govern the significance of his journey. An “odyssey,” like Nolan’s, however, focuses on the events between departure and destination, placing emphasis instead on kleos, or war-won glory, with nostos being secondary.
Nolan flattens these episodes into miniature, morally neutral adventures. Homer’s Odysseus exhibits his self-destructive hubris in his confrontation with Polyphemus, but Nolan’s Odysseus does not boast of his name. In Homer, Odysseus’s encounter with Achilles in the Underworld instills doubt about valuing kleos over domestic happiness; Nolan cuts this entirely. Calypso offers Odysseus a painless alternative to returning to Ithaca; in Nolan’s film, this feels out of place after a lack of attention to what truly stands between Odysseus and nostos: not an external threat, but his own altered personhood.
Through his trials, Odysseus continues pressing for Ithaca, despite knowing the journey and the return will cause him anguish. This directly contradicts the modern “odyssey.” Odysseus’s voyage in Homer is an obstacle, not an adventure. The journey allows him to realize precisely how important nostos is despite the loss, trauma, and identity crises he suffers. Nostos becomes an introspective consideration of whether one truly wishes to return to a home that is fundamentally different from the one he left—and as a fundamentally different man, himself. The notion of kleos that the “odyssey” glorifies stands in direct opposition to this.
Why this shift from the Odyssey as a personal journey to an “odyssey” as a geographic one? It is easier to romanticize adventure than to address its consequences. The modern construction of the hero demands a dulling of moral ambiguity. Odysseus must be portrayed sympathetically to be accepted as the hero by a modern audience. Homer’s Odysseus is a far cry from the homesick husband of modern imagination. In ancient Hellas, kleos made a hero, regardless of how it was won. Today, heroism has taken on a moral connotation incompatible with the Homeric hērōs.
If it seems impossible to reconcile this ethical disconnect, why do we always return to Classics? People continue to claim mythological stories as their own because they excite and fascinate us; deeper, they make us feel connected to mythical worlds, traditions, and figures greater than anything we can tangibly experience. Yet, in brute-forcing that connection, the story’s nuance becomes collateral damage.
This problem is not unique to The Odyssey. Any text so distant from the reinterpreter will undergo thematic adaptation to make it more palatable to a new audience. To some extent, this is necessary, but there is an acute difference between the changing and the reframing of a story’s facts to do so. The former attempts to erase the source’s unsavory implications, while the latter addresses them to provide contemporary audiences a constructive perspective of the source and its implications for today.
I am not suggesting that we should stop retelling ancient stories. However, when doing so, one must recognize how their reinterpretation has been influenced by shifting cultural values and, in the case of The Odyssey, by language itself: we have already decided what an “odyssey” is. Furthermore, the interpreter must be willing to confront the ancient story’s most uncomfortable elements and to reconcile them with the present through acknowledgment, not erasure. It is in this, not in the mere retelling of a story, that the adapter’s role lies.
Christopher Nolan is not to blame for the philosophical flattening of his Odyssey; his film is only the latest in a long series of moral oversimplifications of Homeric legend that have arisen through the semantic dilution of the title. But the fact that The Odyssey, a story about the consequences of an unjust war on those unwillingly drawn into it, was adapted in 2026 shows that we are approaching the correct way of retelling ancient stories.
And if there is one lesson that ought to resonate with audiences across space and time, it is this: Odysseus doesn’t want his adventures. He wants to go home.
