What critics don’t get about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey — like Ramayana and Mahabharata, there’s no ‘true’ epic

I first encountered Homer nearly a decade ago as a first-year English major at Delhi University. We were assigned The Iliad in translation, and many of us wondered why a translated Greek epic belonged in an English classroom at all.

That question stayed with me until Professor Sunil Dua, who taught the course, slowly dismantled the assumptions behind it. The point, he argued, was never to read an “original” Homer. It was to understand how stories travel — across languages, cultures, and centuries. Translation is never an obstacle to the text; it is its afterlife.

The Iliad and The Odyssey did not begin as books. They emerged from an oral tradition in which poets performed, improvised, and reshaped stories before audiences. Long before they were written down, these epics existed as living performances, carried by memory rather than manuscript. The Homer we read today is already the product of centuries of transmission, compilation, and translation. To ask whether a modern adaptation is faithful to an “original” is to overlook the fact that the original itself is remarkably elusive.

Nolan’s film quietly acknowledges this history.

For instance, when Telemachus (Tom Holland) journeys to Sparta to meet Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), he admits to having heard of his father’s triumphs not from written records but through the bards who sang the story of the Trojan War. Similarly, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is sceptical throughout the film because she is unsure of which of the sea people’s versions to believe regarding Odysseus’ fate. The film repeatedly reminds us that reputation, memory, and storytelling shape the hero as much as his actions do. In doing so, Nolan is not departing from the spirit of the epic but, I’d argue, returning to it.

Perhaps this is why the anxiety over fidelity feels misplaced. Nolan is the latest bard in a tradition that has lasted nearly three millennia, and tells his version of this epic poem, which begins with a giant wooden horse filled with men waiting their turn at the shores of Troy. He is not simply adapting Homer; he is participating in the same tradition that allowed Homeric stories to survive in the first place. Every retelling is an interpretation. Every performance reflects the concerns of its own moment. If ancient bards could reshape episodes for new audiences, why should a 21st-century filmmaker be denied the same creative freedom?

For Indian readers, this idea should not feel unfamiliar. Our own epics have never belonged to a single text. The Ramayana exists not only in Valmiki’s telling but also in Kamban’s Tamil version, Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, countless tribal performances, regional adaptations, and modern reinterpretations. The Mahabharata continues to find new life in novels like those of Chitra Banerjee, theatre, and serialised television. When it comes to these examples, we rarely ask which one is the “real” epic. Instead, we recognise that epics endure because they invite retelling.

We have grown annoyingly accustomed to treating literature — and, by extension, culture — as fixed objects, each with an authoritative version against which every adaptation must be judged. Oral epics resist that logic. They were never static objects to be preserved behind glass but rather stories in motion. The question, therefore, is not whether the story is true to “history,” because there is not one, but whether the story is being told creatively enough to live across time. Every age finds a different Odysseus because every age imagines home, exile, and return differently.

The question is also whether we as audiences are willing to let our epics transform with us and adapt to changing times instead of being figments of the past written in extinct languages. Hearing Telemachus address Penelope as “mom” on the big screen reverberated in my eardrums too, but that is exactly how a 2026 Telemachus would call out to his mum! What’s the harm in it?

There was never one Odyssey. There were only tellings — by ancient bards, medieval scribes, translators, teachers, readers and now Christopher Nolan. The myth of the original Odyssey is, perhaps, the greatest myth of all.

The writer is a PhD Candidate, Department of English, The George Washington University