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For his latest IMAX extravaganza, the filmmaker Christopher Nolan has turned from the comic book operatics of The Dark Knight and the elaborate narrative convolutions of Inception and Interstellar to Homer’s Odyssey, a story that anticipated the need for wide screens by nearly three thousand years. For our August 20 issue, Daniel Mendelsohn, the magazine’s editor-at-large and an expert in Ancient Greek literature—his translation of the Odyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025—reviews Nolan’s adaptation:
Since Nolan started dropping trailers, the Internet has been aflame with discussions of the “accuracy” of the costumes, ships, armor, and diction of the movie, but the most authentic thing about this Odyssey may well be its densely braided narrative textures, which succeed in replicating Homer’s artful weaving.
But Nolan’s talent for intricate plotting is undercut by his preoccupation with tortured antiheroes:
This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways.
Below, alongside Mendelsohn’s review, we have collected an excerpt from his translation of the Odyssey, an interview about the translation, a memoir about his relationship with the epic, his review of the movie Troy—an adaptation of the Iliad—and an episode of our podcast Private Life, in which Mendelsohn and Jarrett Earnest talk all things Homer.
The most authentic thing about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is its densely braided narrative, but its tormented hero sounds like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies.
“The Odyssey is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can.”
—interviewed by Lauren Kane,
May 10, 2025
I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem.
—September 7, 2020
“Fueled, no doubt, by a desire to expunge the vaguest hint of homoeroticism from the proceedings—by classical times, the debate wasn’t so much whether Achilles and his beloved Patroclus were doing it, as rather, as in Plato’s Symposium, who was doing just what to whom—[the movie Troy] makes Patroclus Achilles’ “cousin,” a bizarre choice that…has increasingly hilarious results as the action progresses. Watching Troy, you’d think that there was no higher value for the Bronze Age Greeks than cousinage.”
—June 24, 2004
Private Life: A New York Review Podcast
In this episode of Private Life, Daniel Mendelsohn joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his 2025 translation of Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation. They discuss the debate surrounding the film’s casting, the significance of descriptive language in translations, and the enduring place of Greek literature, history, and aesthetics in gay cultural and intellectual life.
Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed online seminars on Homer’s masterpiece, from autumn 2025, are now available for purchase. Gain complete access to the six seminar sessions, including Mendelsohn’s introductory lectures and the lively seminar discussions.
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