On a Tuesday in late July, my daughter Sarah and I went to the North Fork Arts Center in the village of Greenport, New York, to see The Odyssey. About 40 other people were there. Given the time and place, this number is a local signifier of the movie’s huge global appeal.

As far as I could tell, everyone stayed for the whole thing. When it was over, I felt a bit battered and went for a walk to regain my balance. After dinner was eaten and the kitchen was clean, I sat down with Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey itself, in Emily Wilson’s vivid contemporary translation.

Of course, the poem is more complicated and terrible and magical than Christopher Nolan’s movie. The poem has survived for three millennia because it is so huge. Both individuals and epochs can see what they want, rummage where they want, take what they want, change what they want, revere what they want.

At times, putting one leg over another and back again,  I thought, “This is a really awful movie.” Some lines will seem campy in a few years. Some visual effects, perhaps most especially those of the man-munching, one-eyed Cyclops, seem cartoonish. However, Nolan is a brilliant film-maker, in command of the artistic technology of his time. I was grateful for a Major Motion Picture that reminds us that Ye Olde Greece was a slave society, and that captives in war could become enslaved people, the spoils of war.

The movie also begins to interrogate any dominant association of masculinity with being a warrior; any reveling in the lustful lethality of a Pete Hegseth;  any faked warrior swagger of a draft-dodging Trump. Odysseus, our hero, survives his wars and ordeals. He goes into a peaceful exile with his beautiful wife aboard what looks like a private cruise ship. Telemachus, their son, promises to be a virtuous king. 

I wondered if Matt Damon, as Odysseus, was perhaps too clunky. I could see him as an aging high school or college football player, with photos of his younger self in shoulder pads and football pants. However, the casting of Damon is the point. American guys like him can be victorious warriors, but they can evolve to become virtuous warriors as well. They develop a moral compass. Its true North is to take care of the “men” under their command, to show some respect for the women whom they encounter, to feel guilt over the death and destruction they have caused, and, if possible, to make some amends. Of post-1945 American warriors, think of George C. Marshall or President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The great villain is the swaggering Agamemnon, all in black, who “sacrifices” his little daughter in his quest to summon up the trade winds that will enable him to destroy Troy and control the trade routes. Think the Straits of Hormuz.  

The scenes with Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy are important— no matter how brief. Her husband, Menelaus, has brought her back from Troy. Her face is badly scarred. Has she been beaten by him as a punishment for going to Troy in the first place? Or is this what happens to women’s bodies when men stake their primal identity on being lethal warriors and go to war? She whispers to Telemachus, at the court of Menelaus to search for his father, and asks him to tell the world how much she regrets her name being used to justify the death-dealing of Greek men.

After I got home and back from my walk, I  texted Sarah and told her that I had not been able to formulate what is so wrong with the film. Now I suggest two problems that are old, old, old, but not yet cold. The film questions the equation of virility and violence, and asks us to do so. However, the violence is so aesthetically compelling—the flames, the towers falling into the flames, the artistry of the swords—that it keeps us in our seats.  

Next, if the film asks for a new definition of the hero, it flattens older definitions of the heroine. The poem is not afraid powerful female figures.  The movie looks askance at them. Not at Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, tough and crafty in her defense of her home and his kingdom, angry of his absence of 20 years. Ten might be understandable, but twenty is suspicious—without a believable death notice. I wondered what one of the great British actors—Vanessa Redgrave from another generation, Jessie Buckley from a newer generation—would have made of the role. 

However, the sorceress Circe is a grotesque, living in a shack near the sea. The film does sympathetically imply that she is a victim of raping, marauding warriors, but a viewer should compare “its Circe” with a 17th century painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum, “Ulysses at the Palace of Circe.” (Ulysses is the Latin version of Odysseus.) Odysseus spends 7 haunted but happy years with the goddess Calypso. She talks soothingly, like a TV therapist who takes patients to the beach and administers a therapeutic pharmacology. Perhaps worst of all, Athena, the greatest of goddesses, a genius, is a travesty. From time to time, she appears, to counsel Odysseus, clad in white leisure wear.  

In contrast, her uncle Poseidon, the sea god, father of the Cyclops, gets to stir and whip up all those wild storms that Odysseus and his crew barely survive.

Athena, take note.

The rest of us, we mortals, get to your Homer.

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Note: Maureen Dowd’s review, “Nolan’s Zero-Eros ‘Odyssey‘,” New York Times  (July 26, 2026): SR 3, wittily makes similar and other points.