“The songs are all we have to remember.” With these words, the hero Odysseus brings Christopher Nolan’s new, three-hour-long, star-studded, all-IMAX blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey to an end. Given its own epic scale, this closing nod to Homer, whose twin epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey—or “songs,” as the ancients called them—are the foundation on which Western literature rests, is all the more touching. It’s as if Nolan is saying that, however “epic” his or anyone else’s work may be, and whatever new media or technologies we may deploy to retell those old tales, in the end, we owe it all to Homer and his poems.
As indeed we do. To be sure, the frenzy over Nolan’s new movie—which began at the end of 2023 when he announced the project, and has been mounting steadily ever since, as each tantalizing trailer has been released—owes something to the director’s own popularity. (His Dark Knight Batman trilogy alone has earned nearly two and a half billion dollars worldwide.) But Nolan’s film is, in fact, the second Odyssey movie to appear in the space of just a few years (The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, came out just weeks after Nolan announced his version). And those are just two of nearly 30 new adaptations and translations of the epic, including my own, that have appeared since 2000 alone.
That, together with the centuries-long list of literary adaptations, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Derek Walcott’s Afro-Caribbean riff Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s feminist Penelopiad, reminds you that, perhaps more than any other work of antiquity, the story of Odysseus has never stopped speaking to us.
Why?
