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Ancient Greek literature has been all the rage in 2026, thanks to the success of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. Leanna Boychenko, associate professor of classical studies and director of women’s studies and gender studies, is happy to see her field in the national spotlight, even if she feels the film’s portrayal of the poem’s female characters leaves much to be desired.
One of the big, positive takeaways from the film, Boychenko says, is that ancient works can still find relevance in the 21st century: “To hear a poem that you love and have spent a lot of time thinking about all of a sudden being on the tip of everybody’s tongue is a very unusual and exciting experience.”
Part of the discourse around The Odyssey involves the film’s reception by classicists, specifically Emily Wilson, the University of Pennsylvania classics scholar and the first woman to translate Homer’s epic into English. Wilson wrote a harsh critique of Nolan’s film that has been widely debated. However, “people have mistakenly thought that classicists are upset that it’s not true to the poem,” Boychenko says, “when the reality is that many different versions of Odysseus have always existed, even in antiquity. This is because the poem was originally performed orally, and was thus subject to change over time.
Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, and many others, utilize modern vernacular, which Boychenko sees as a valid choice. “You’re always going to lose something in translation, she says, “because it’s going to be somebody’s interpretation of the language.” She also notes that Homer’s poem is written in dactylic hexameter, which “doesn’t have a natural feeling in English in the way that it does in Greek.” Thus, she feels that Wilson’s decision to use iambic pentameter (the “Shakespearean” meter) in her translation makes sense: it reads well in English but retains the rhythm of the original Greek.
Although there is no one “authentic” version of the titular character, one of Wilson’s critiques of the Nolan film is that it glosses over the complexities of Homer’s Odysseus, painting him as an unambiguously noble character consumed with guilt over the Trojan War atrocities he set into motion. He’s also portrayed as devoted to his wife Penelope—who he hasn’t seen in 20 years—which leaves out the extramarital sex Homer’s Odysseus has with the two goddesses, Circe and Calypso.
To hear a poem that you love and have spent a lot of time thinking about all of a sudden being on the tip of everybody's tongue is a very unusual and exciting experience.
— Leanna Boychenko, associate professor of classical studies and director of women’s studies and gender studies
Boychenko agrees with Wilson that Nolan’s characterization is somewhat lacking, saying “part of what makes Odysseus such an interesting character is that he’s a storyteller and he is able to manipulate people with his stories and tricks.” We don’t see Odysseus tell his own story in the film, she says, adding that “his cleverness and his skill at deception and words” are what Athena, the goddess of wisdom, loves about him.
While she enjoyed the film as a spectacle, she says she was troubled by the domestic violence implied with the characters of Menelaus and Helen. Helen’s face is scarred—which is not in Homer’s poem and was added by Nolan to suggest Menelaus disfigured his wife after she returned from Troy.
“In a movie that otherwise is asking us to think about violence and destruction, it just very casually shows this domestic violence and then also allows Menelaus to be viewed as a good guy,” Boychenko says.
In contrast to this “abused version” of Helen, Boychenko asserts that she’s a much more active, powerful character in Homer’s poem. “We hear about how when the men were in the Trojan horse, she took on the voices of their wives to try to entice them out of the horse,” she says.
Beyond the portrayal of Helen, Boychenko says she found Nolan’s version of Calypso to be less dynamic, mentioning a speech that’s left out of the film: “When she’s told that she has to let Odysseus go home, she gives this great speech about how unfair it is for goddesses…and how gods are allowed to take whatever human lovers they want.”
Notwithstanding Boychenko’s reservations about Nolan’s The Odyssey, she sees echoes of its themes in his previous films. “He’s already played with myth if you think about his Batman movies,” she says, adding that in Inception “you have a clever protagonist who’s also trying to find his way home and he does so by creating stories.”
