{"id":684682,"date":"2026-07-10T18:25:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T18:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/684682\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T18:25:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T18:25:08","slug":"the-guardian-view-on-homer-the-odyssey-is-more-modern-than-we-might-like-to-think-editorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/684682\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guardian view on Homer: The Odyssey is more modern than we might like to think | Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Magasphere\u2019s endless appetite for culture wars is wearily familiar. But who could have foreseen that Greek literature would become the new casus belli? Ahead of its much-anticipated general release next week, Christopher Nolan\u2019s adaptation of Homer\u2019s Odyssey has triggered Elon Musk and other supposed defenders of western civilisation. Directorial decisions such as the casting of the Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong\u2019o as Helen of Troy, Mr Musk ranted<\/a> incoherently, amounted to \u201cpissing on Homer\u2019s grave\u201d.<\/p>\n

The absurd insistence on the white skin of a mythological<\/a> figure reveals nothing we didn\u2019t already know about the owner of X. The rest of us can move on and look forward to a lavish cinematic take on a story that has inspired artists for almost 3,000 years. Homer\u2019s account of Odysseus\u2019s 10-year struggle to return home from the Trojan wars has been reworked by Virgil in the Aeneid, relocated to Dublin in James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/a>, and given a feminist treatment by Margaret Atwood in her Penelopiad<\/a>. Now for the 21st-century Hollywood treatment.<\/p>\n

The Odyssey by Homer. Photograph: WW Norton & Company<\/p>\n

Armed with an estimated $250m budget following\u00a0the unexpected box-office success of Oppenheimer, Nolan has produced<\/a> a film which is, by\u00a0all accounts, appropriately epic and old-school in scale. Props and locations, including a formidable-looking Trojan horse, have been laboriously built rather than generated through green-screen special effects. Lasting three hours, the Imax version went though around<\/a> 11 miles of celluloid.<\/p>\n

Indolent lotus-eaters, a terrifying but gullible cyclops and enchanting goddesses will grab the attention. But the Odyssey can also speak directly to a modern audience. In its portrayal of exile and the longing for home \u2013 and in the case of the eponymous hero\u2019s wife Penelope, the predicament of those left behind \u2013 Homer\u2019s verse deals with universal human themes. As an account of postwar trauma, disillusionment and dislocation in the ancient world, it also has a notably dark side.<\/p>\n

Homer repeatedly describes Odysseus as polytropos, skilfully rendered in Emily Wilson\u2019s recent translation as \u201ccomplicated\u201d. As Wilson observes in her introduction, he is \u201ca migrant \u2026 a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person \u2026 a pirate, thief and liar \u2026 a mass murderer, and a war hero\u201d. Reaction<\/a> to this week\u2019s premiere in London suggests that Nolan has not skirted the grimmer stuff. As a brutal war continues to play out in Ukraine, and migrants continue to die making<\/a> treacherous sea crossings in the Mediterranean, some scenes may carry an uncomfortably modern resonance.<\/p>\n

As a blog<\/a> by Mary Beard entitled \u201cOdyssey fever\u201d indicates, classicists are jubilant at the prospect of a Homeric summer blockbuster. Emerald Fennell\u2019s sexually frank adaptation of Wuthering Heights may have been criticised for not being sufficiently faithful to the novel. But Fennell\u2019s film sparked an explosion of new interest in Emily Bront\u00eb, and sent a new generation of pilgrims to the West Yorkshire moors.<\/p>\n

Can the pulling power of Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway<\/a> and Tom Holland do the same for Homer? A wave of new Odysseus reading groups suggests the answer is yes. The superhero genre that made Nolan\u2019s reputation as a fine and subtle film-maker may be on the wane. But at a time when the derivative powers of AI have spooked artists of all kinds, he is returning to the source. It is no more than one of humanity\u2019s greatest storytellers deserves.<\/p>\n

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Magasphere\u2019s endless appetite for culture wars is wearily familiar. But who could have foreseen that Greek literature…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-684682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}