8 ways that Christopher Nolans Odyssey changes Homers epic

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Set us as preferred It may have laid the foundations of Western storytelling, but Homer’s “Odyssey” wasn’t exactly built for the movies.Sprawling across 24 chapters and sending its hero through a decade of shipwrecks, monsters, gods and witches, the roughly 2700-year-old epic poem was never going to fit neatly into a single sit — even a three-hour IMAX blockbuster — without some serious rethinking.Christopher Nolan’s solution was to treat Homer less as a blueprint than a starting point.

“I wanted to tell it in a fresh and modern way, to make it as accessible for a modern audience as it was for Homer’s,” he told The Times earlier this month.His ancient Greeks certainly don’t talk like they stepped out of a classics seminar: Odysseus complains about spending “10 years on this f— beach” at Troy, while Telemachus refers to Penelope and Odysseus as Mom and Dad.

Nolan preserves the broad arc of Odysseus’ struggle to return home while freely reshaping what happens along the way, often shifting the emphasis from the mythological to the psychological.Movies Christopher Nolan explains ‘The Odyssey’: The director discusses how he made the epic new film starring Matt Damon that was shot entirely on Imax.Homer-heads will notice plenty of other changes too.

Gone are Aeolus’ bag of winds, which sends Odysseus back out to sea with Ithaca in tantalizing sight, and the Phaeacians, who help him finally make it home.The cannibalistic Laestrygonians become towering armored warriors, while other episodes are combined or radically re-imagined, with characters and storylines invented from whole cloth.Obviously with massive spoilers ahoy, here are eight of the biggest ways Nolan’s “Odyssey” departs from Homer’s.Homer’s “Odyssey” begins after Troy has already fallen, with the Trojan War recounted in memories and stories rather than unfolding as part of the action.

But Nolan puts the an...