The Odyssey, Explained Before You See the Movie

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey opens in theaters on July 17, and half the people I know have asked me the same question this month. Do I need to read the book first? You don't. But it helps to walk in knowing who Odysseus is, why the trip home takes ten years, and which scenes every version of this story has borrowed since Homer. That's what this post is for.

I write gods for a living, and the Odyssey is a big part of why. It's one of the oldest stories we have, and still one of the best built. So before Nolan's version, here's the real one, not a scene-by-scene summary, just the shape of it and the parts people actually remember.

What we actually know about Nolan's Odyssey

A few confirmed facts, since the marketing has mostly been mood. It opens in the US and UK on July 17. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, Tom Holland plays Telemachus, and Nolan shot the whole thing on IMAX film cameras, a first for a narrative feature. Runtime is close to two hours fifty-two. Rated R.

That's genuinely all I'll say about the film. I haven't seen it, and I'm not going to guess at plot details I can't verify. What I can do is make sure you're not starting from zero when the lights go down.

Who Odysseus actually is

Odysseus isn't the strongest hero in Greek myth, that's probably Achilles or Heracles. His identity is built around being the clever one. Homer's favorite word for him translates roughly to "the man of many wiles," and it shows.

The clearest proof comes before the Odyssey even starts. The Trojan Horse, left outside Troy's gates with soldiers hidden inside, was his idea. Ten years of siege had gotten the Greeks nowhere, and he won the war with a trick instead of a sword.

The shape of the story: ten years there, ten years home

The Trojan War itself lasts ten years, that's the Iliad's territory, and the Odyssey assumes you already know it happened. This story picks up after Troy falls, following Odysseus's attempt to reach Ithaca, a trip that should take weeks by boat. It takes another ten years instead.

Homer doesn't tell those ten years in order. He drops you in near the end, with Odysseus stranded on Calypso's island, narrating the backstory at a royal dinner table. I'll give you the events in the order they happened, since that's the order you'll want for the movie.

The famous stops on the way home

These are the episodes that show up in nearly every retelling. Here they are, in order.

The cyclops and the "Nobody" trick

Odysseus and his crew get trapped in the cave of Polyphemus, a one-eyed cyclops who eats several of the men before Odysseus gets him drunk, blinds him, and escapes clinging to the bellies of his sheep. The trick that made it famous: he tells Polyphemus his name is "Nobody," so when the cyclops screams for help, the others hear him shouting that Nobody is attacking him and don't bother coming. Best joke in Greek epic, and it costs him. Polyphemus is Poseidon's son.

Circe

On the island of Aeaea, the witch-goddess Circe turns half his crew into pigs. He resists her magic with Hermes's help, forces her to change his men back, and stays a full year. She's also the one who sends him on his strangest errand: go speak with the dead.

The land of the dead

Odysseus sails to the edge of the underworld and speaks with the ghosts of his mother, old comrades from Troy, and the prophet Tiresias, who tells him what's waiting for him at home. It's one of the oldest underworld scenes in Western literature, and everything since, Virgil to Dante, answers it somehow.

The Sirens

Circe warns him about the Sirens, whose song lures sailors onto the rocks. Odysseus wants to hear it and survive, so his crew plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast, ignoring his begging to be freed. It works, and it's Odysseus in miniature: engineering his way past danger instead of avoiding it.

Scylla and Charybdis

Next is a strait guarded by two monsters, Scylla, a six-headed creature that snatches sailors off the deck, and Charybdis, a whirlpool that can swallow the ship whole. Odysseus sails closer to Scylla, accepting the loss of a few men rather than risking everyone. That's the origin of "between Scylla and Charybdis."

The cattle of the sun

On the island of the sun god Helios, Odysseus's starving crew ignores every warning and eats the sacred cattle. For once the mistake isn't his, and it costs him everything anyway. Zeus wrecks the ship, every man drowns, and Odysseus finishes the journey completely alone.

Calypso's island

Odysseus washes up on Ogygia, home of the nymph Calypso, who keeps him seven years and offers him immortality if he'll stay. He says no. This is where the Odyssey actually opens, with the gods debating whether to finally let him go, which is why Homer tells everything above as a flashback.

The Phaeacians

Freed from Calypso, he's shipwrecked once more and washes ashore among the Phaeacians, a seafaring people who feed him and ask for his story, told at that royal dinner table I mentioned earlier. Once he finishes, they give him a ship and send him home.

Coming home is its own story

Reaching Ithaca doesn't end the story, because home isn't safe either. Odysseus has been gone twenty years, and his palace is full of suitors, over a hundred men eating his food and pressuring Penelope to remarry, convinced he's dead.

Penelope has a trick of her own, cunning runs in the family. She tells the suitors she'll choose once she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's father, then unravels each night's work, stalling for years.

Odysseus comes home disguised as a beggar and tests his household's loyalty before revealing himself. Penelope sets one last trick: only the real Odysseus can string his old hunting bow, something none of the suitors can manage. He strings it, then kills every suitor in the hall.

Even that isn't enough. She tests him once more, telling a servant to move their marriage bed out of the bedroom. Odysseus reacts with real anger, because he built that bed himself around a living olive tree, so it can't be moved without destroying it. Twenty years, and the proof is a piece of furniture only he could know the secret of.

The ideas underneath the plot

Strip away the monsters and the poem runs on a small number of ideas the Greeks took seriously.

Nostos, or the weight of home

The Greek word for homecoming is nostos, where we get "nostalgia," literally the ache of homecoming. The poem is built around Odysseus needing to reach one specific place and family, not just survive somewhere.

Metis, the cunning that wins

Every crisis in the poem, Odysseus solves with his mind rather than his sword: the Nobody trick, the bow, the olive tree bed. Athena favors him for exactly that, because he thinks the way she does.

Xenia, and what it costs to break it

Hospitality in ancient Greece was closer to sacred law than good manners. Hosts fed and sheltered strangers without asking who they were, because the stranger might be a god in disguise. The suitors break that law for years, and their deaths read less like a twist than a debt finally collected.

Gods who take it personally

Poseidon spends twenty years making sure one man suffers, because that man blinded his son. Athena spends the same years quietly clearing his path. The gods in the Odyssey aren't distant, they're personally invested in how one family's story ends.

Do you actually need to read it first?

No, and I'd say that even if I didn't run a mythology comic for a living. Nolan's film will introduce the characters and stakes the way every adaptation does.

If you want the extra layer, catching what he changed and kept, Emily Wilson's translation is the one I'd hand a first-time reader. Clean, fast, plain modern verse that doesn't fight you to reach the story. Fagles's is the older favorite for something more classical.

Why this story keeps coming back

The Odyssey has been adapted continuously for nearly three thousand years. Virgil answered it with the Aeneid. Joyce rebuilt it as a single day in Dublin. Now Nolan is doing it on IMAX film with Matt Damon. Every generation needs its own version of a man trying to get home while gods argue over his fate.

Part of why I made Pantheon: The Elemental Artifact was that same pull. The Norse, Greco-Roman, and Mesopotamian gods in my book are all real and share one world, and Ragnarök already happened by the time the story opens. The Greek gods who meddled with Odysseus are still around, older, quieter, not necessarily less dangerous.

Volume One opens on the murder of a revered goddess, and three young gods from rival houses, one of them Greco-Roman, have to work together to find out what happened. If Nolan's film reminds you how good it feels when the gods act like real characters, that's the feeling I was chasing.