No sex, please – we’re Gen Z. But this zero-eros movie neuters Homer’s Odyssey

July 26, 2026 — 1:30pm

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Medievalists must be jealous. Classicists are having a moment on social media, happily discussing whether Odysseus was “polytropos,” “polymetis” or “polymechanos”. And that’s very cool. Thank you, Mr Nolan.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a throwback to the days when Hollywood big shots fearlessly took on literary classics, undaunted by the challenges of bringing vast, thorny tales to the screen. Conjuring the Civil War in Gone With The Wind? Re-creating the desert battlefields of World War I in Lawrence of Arabia? Depicting the Russian Revolution in Doctor Zhivago? Why not?

Nolan’s portal to ancient Greece has lured audiences back to theatres and spiked book sales of Homer’s The Odyssey, over 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter verse composed in the seventh or eighth century BCE.

Nolan has turned one of the foundational works of Western literature into an entertaining adventure saga.

Nolan told Stephen Colbert that he used every trick in the book to achieve his stunning visual effects. (The Mediterranean was ready for its close-up!) Yet the director failed to capture the essence of the man of tricks and twists, Odysseus, who delighted in storytelling and feigned identities.

In keeping with Generation Z’s waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised.

Much of the moral ambiguity has been drained to make Matt Damon’s protagonist more likable. Except for a few mournful appearances by Zendaya’s Athena, who seems more like Odysseus’ conscience than his shape-shifting partner in deception, Nolan doesn’t depict any of the major meddling gods from the story.........

© Brisbane Times