Christopher Nolan's 'Odyssey' and Homer's splintered gospel
Christianity Today
July 9, 2026
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Centuries before the New Testament authors wrote their gospels, Homer laid down his own evangelium:
Now royal Odysseus, who had borne the long war, spoke again: …
“Your lord is now at hand.
And I expect a gift for this good news [evangelion]
when he enters his own hall. Till then I would not
take a rag, no matter what my need. …
All I say will come to pass!
He will return, and he will be avenged
on any who dishonor his wife and son.”
The Odyssey has survived the ceaseless war and wear of the ages in part because it reflects what J. R. R. Tolkien’s biographer called “a splintered fragment of the true light”: a gospel preached first to a simple herdsman; a returning master dressed as a beggar, unrecognized and rejected by his people; and a quest through many trials, sorrows, and temptations to restore the king’s bride, household, and land. Alongside these prefigurations of Christian truth, Homer’s epic makes human hearts sing with perennial themes of home, human greatness, fatherhood, time, and loss.
Tolkien was convinced that mankind’s myths, for all their failings, still steer toward a “true harbour.” To succeed, Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey will have to steer toward that same harbor, doing for the “man of twists and turns” what he did in other films, like the Batman trilogy, Inception, and Interstellar.
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Not every adaptation lives up to its source material or succeeds in touching that same transcendent light. Many before Nolan have been shaken off course, smashing into the Scylla of a wooden rendition or the Charybdis of excessive license. The best adaptations preserve the dramatic contours of Homer’s poem while guiding them ever more perfectly toward the true harbor.
Consider the star-studded 1997 television miniseries, connected with luminaries like Francis Ford Coppola and Christopher Lee. With a staggering determination to include every magical episode from the poem, it preserved Homer’s paganism for a world that could no longer make sense of it. The result was an adaptation that lost Homer’s grandeur, treating its plot like set pieces in a fantasy adventure rather than a drama about human existence.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) found partial success by rejecting the epic mode altogether and embracing the absurd. Instead of seeing a straightforward pagan or Christian hero, we get the Dapper Dan antihero Ulysses Everett McGill. The film was clever, but it refused the transcendent at every step. Despite the high musical and entertainment value, it foreclosed on much of deeper significance.
Other Homeric adaptations have found a measure of success in earnestness and modest christening of their heroes. Troy (2004) transformed Achilles from a glory-bound killing machine into a more sympathetic modern protagonist. Driven by his love interest in an invented-for-the-film romance with Briseis, Brad Pitt’s Achilles moved from rageful violence and a hunger for fame to protection of the weak and noble self-sacrifice. If not fully baptized, the old pagan ideal, in this rendition, was at least misted with Christianity.
The Return (2024) avoided tensions between the pagan and modern worlds by cutting them out of the story almost entirely. Beginning with Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washed ashore in Ithaca, the film focuses on the drama of homecoming. As a result, Odysseus’ indulgences with Circe and Calypso are reduced to a line or two of rumors, allowing the film to concentrate on his restoration as a husband, father, and king.
Troy and The Return both lose something of the cosmic scale of Homer’s epics by removing the gods from the drama. Yet in their other modifications, both films seem to implicitly understand Tolkien’s key insight: We read Homer today because, in spite of his being pagan, his poems point toward the true harbor of human existence.
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This is why fretting (as the internet is prone to do) about Nolan’s casting decisions and anachronistic costuming seems largely misplaced. The ultimate merit of his film will not be determined by helmets, the cast, armor details, or even colloquial speech. (Yes, some people are furious that Telemachus calls his father “Dad.” Were they hoping for patéras?) The deeper question is whether Nolan will do justice to the great humanistic themes and foreshadowing of the gospel that have ensured Homer’s relevance for multiple millennia.
We have ample reason for optimism here. Across his career in film, Nolan has proven himself worthy of Homer’s splintered fragments: from nostos (homecoming) to anagnorisis (recognition), anamnesis (memory), and chronos (time). Nolan’s protagonists are all echoes of the Odyssean hero, whether they’re crossing the ravages of time and space to return to families who were left behind (Interstellar) or struggling to maintain their grip on reality in pursuit of a son and daughter (Inception). And unlike most modern films, Nolan’s work tends to display commendable restraint, offering the hope that Odysseus’s sexual indiscretions will not devolve into the kind of smut that has plagued other adaptations.
But most important is how Nolan will deal with the great symbols at the center of Homer’s epic: Odysseus’ scar, his washing and recognition, the slaughter of the suitors, the secret of the marriage bed. One need not be a literary genius to notice splintered fragments of the gospel here: The apostle Thomas’s recognition of Christ in his scars, the parable of the judgment of the wicked tenants, the great mystery of Christ and his bride.
As the Gospels testify, Jesus came to his own, and “his own did not receive him” (John 1:11). His coming, like Odysseus’, was proclaimed first to humble herdsmen. Even after the gospel turned the world of pagan heroes upside down, myths like The Odyssey endured because they continued to point, in humanity’s crooked timbre, toward truths fulfilled only in Christ.
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Whether or not he realizes it, Nolan’s task is to preserve the perennial themes of The Odyssey for a modern audience that hardly takes Christianity any more seriously than they do the extinct paganism of Homer’s day.
The Odyssey begins with an invocation: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.” If the Muse is to sing through Nolan, he must gather up the splintered fragments of the true light and deliver the great cinematic adaptation The Odyssey deserves but, like Odysseus, has been perpetually blown back from.
This summer, will we see an adaptation truly worthy of the poem and the truth hidden within it? Like the isle of Ithaca, we have been waiting so long we have grown doubtful.
John Shelton is vice president of policy at Advancing American Freedom.
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