Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.

(Holland is good at playing a gormless young man of twenty going on twelve).

(the one in the weird Darth Vader outfit)

In the film, xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity: wealthy people should be gracious towards the poor and hungry in their midst (without necessarily doing anything to mitigate their poverty).

xenia

charismatically slimy Robert Pattinson

a kitsch, poorly designed horse (with no wheels) appears on the windswept beach as if dumped there by drone.

Oppenheimer

Nolan’s grunting one-eyed giant is referred to as ‘it’, barely speaks, doesn’t get drunk and has neither neighbours nor a favourite sheep.

I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter.

Attempts at vigorous speech – ‘My dad’s coming home’ or ‘Let’s get off this fucking beach’ – sit uncomfortably next to grandiose meditations: ‘Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus’ law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn’t bear to see the ruins of what he’d done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.’

Damon’s grizzled Odysseus is neither a master storyteller nor a flirt.

Circe, played with earthy vigour by Samantha Morton, is Baba Yaga in a Hansel and Gretel cottage;

and yet there is no Zeus.

but there is no sign that we are supposed to realise they are goddesses.

The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common.

Charlize Theron’s Calypso looks gorgeous, but she is never angry, never funny, not skilled in rhetoric, and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim. She’s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.

But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem.

Nyong’o’s double part as Helen and Clytemnestra is hugely underwritten; she is given only a few minutes of screen time to perform a set of brief tableaux of female victims (the outraged bereaved mother, the abused wife, the repentant adulteress).

(a beautiful sonic image of the archer as musician, borrowed from the poem).

Scott, as the Ithacan bard, Phemius, yells a few words and pounds a stick, but does not get to sing, tell a story or play the lyre:

Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.

Nolan gives us an all-inclusive buffet.

Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring,