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Artful Weaving

Daniel Mendelsohn
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 Trojans dragging the wooden horse back to Troy; from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

The Trojans dragging the wooden horse back to Troy; from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Reviewed:

The Odyssey

a film written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Aristotle, for one, wasn’t all that impressed by Odysseus’s adventures. In the seventeenth chapter of his Poetics he observes, apropos of the relationship of a story’s “essential” meaning to its constituent episodes, that

the storyline of the Odyssey is not long. A man has been away from his homeland for many years, and Poseidon is always on the watch for him, and he is all alone. Meanwhile, the situation at home is such that his wealth is being consumed by the Suitors, who are plotting against his son. But after a storm-tossed journey he returns, and after revealing himself and attacking them is saved and destroys his enemies. That is the essential; everything else is episodes.

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More by Daniel Mendelsohn

More by Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey was published in paperback this spring.

Read Next

  1. 1

    The Odyssey, a two-part 1997 American miniseries directed by Andrei Konchalovsky and starring Armand Assante and Greta Scacchi as the royal pair, fared less well than its European counterpart. It hewed far less closely to Homer’s text and made a mistake that Aristotle warns against: telling a story sequentially, like a history, rather than having its episodes radiate from “the essential action,” like a true epic. It begins with the birth of Telemachus and trudges on from there. ↩

  2. 2

    See, for instance, Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Atheneum, 1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (Scribner, 2002). ↩

  3. 3

    “Christopher Nolan and the Anxiety of Making ‘The Odyssey,’” June 25, 2026. ↩

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