Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s *Odyssey* has been hailed by critics as “a filmmaking feast”, with the nearly three-hour epic boasting a star-studded cast, a $250 million budget and IMAX spectacle. The Oscar-winning *Oppenheimer* director, who has wanted to make a grand swords-and-sandals movie for more than two decades – since he was briefly attached to direct Brad Pitt in *Troy* – returns to ancient Greece after conquering Hollywood with his Batman trilogy, *Inception* and *Interstellar*.
But as audiences flood cinemas, one of the poem’s most celebrated translators argues there is more to the story than heroism. Daniel Mendelsohn, whose rendering of the *Odyssey* was recently published in the UK by Penguin Classics, calls the epic “a blueprint for all comedy”. The American literary polymath – a memoirist, critic and editor at the New York Review of Books who teaches at Bard College – is known for his threads on translating Homeric epithets and his award-winning Holocaust book *The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million*. His remark, made in the New Statesman, positions Nolan’s blockbuster within a tradition that reaches beyond tragedy into laughter.
“Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey gets rave reviews as translator Daniel Mendelsohn calls it comedy blueprint.”
For viewers hungry for more myths after the Oscar-hopeful, Kevin E G Perry of *The Independent* rounds up six of the best film adaptations. Among them is Uberto Pasolini’s *The Return* (2024), which focuses on the second half of the *Odyssey* and stars Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. The film earned praise for its realistic examination of trauma and the ravages of war, but *The Independent*’s critic Clarisse Loughrey gave it a two-star review, arguing that “not only does *The Return* root out any and all mentions of the supernatural, but it does away with the emotions that power what is one of the most influential yet…”
Nolan, who told *The Independent* he has wanted to make such a film for over two decades, may have found in the ancient text a story that balances gravity with wit. As Mendelsohn suggests, the *Odyssey* is not merely a foundation of Western storytelling but a source of enduring comic structure – a reading that may deepen audiences’ appreciation of Nolan’s epic.