I don’t want the college students I teach to go from having had a good time at the movies to a pedantic and entirely unseductive siren song of a thousand “well-actuallys” when we cover The Odyssey this school year. That’s why my goal in the classroom is to indulge and appreciate the vision of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster, while also surprising my students with a quirkier, more bizarre version that unfolds over hundreds of pages.

Nolan’s Homer offers us a deeply compelling vision of a man who sees himself complicit in a world that war has changed, because, as he says, “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entirely.” But Nolan misses the language, the epic similes, the eroticism, the hero who freaks the hell out when his wife suggests they move his bed.

When I first read The Odyssey, what I found most compelling was how much Odysseus wanted to feel it all. As Alfred Lord Tennyson poeticized him, this is a man who longs equally for the domesticity of Ithaca and the “untravell’d world whose margin fades / Forever and forever when I move.” While Nolan’s Odysseus is haunted by deep regrets and thinks a successful quest will redeem him, Homer’s Odysseus is like a shark. He must keep moving or die; the poem ends not on the resolution of his domestication, but the question of whether or not he can ever be tamed. That’s why he listens to the siren’s song— not just to survive the terror, as Nolan implies—but because it is pure and unfiltered experience, a noise that could destroy you but that you might live through.

My favorite moment in The Odyssey is when Odysseus begins crying when he hears a Phaeacian bard tell his story while he listens, anonymously, in the audience. It’s here that Odysseus reveals himself and tells the story of his travels. In Nolan’s adaptation, Odysseus has selective amnesia and comes to terms with the trauma of war by remembering his story to Charlize Theron’s Calypso. But in the poem, Odysseus hasn’t forgotten who he is; he just can’t handle the fact that he is not that person anymore. That’s what makes him “polytroupos” which Robert Fagles translates as a “man of twists and turns.” As the Talking Heads once sang, “I’ve changed my hairstyle / so many times now / I don’t know what I look like.”

Since Odysseus’ story has never gone out of print, nitpicking the representation of his travels in translations and adaptations is a timeless project. The 1954 Ulysses with Kirk Douglasis gloriously silly yet often revels in Homeric energy; the 1997 TV miniseries is sometimes corny with its celebrity cameos but is accessible and exciting.

All the way back in the 1720s, Richard Bentley, the arch-classicist of his age, famously called out Alexander Pope for his bestselling translation, which featured cadenced rhyming couplets that read practically Seussian in the face of the original Greek.

Pope wanted to write translations of Homer for his age, and he admitted that he found the original text “a wild garden,” one that his precise, jingly, but often stirring heroic couplets could provide with an Augustan order.

“It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer,” Bentley reportedly fired back.

The translator Emily Wilson said essentially the same for Nolan’s adaptation some 300 years later. “Why can’t gods speak in a way we understand?” Matt Damon’s Odysseus asks Zendaya’s Athena in the film. Wilson implied that the director asked this question about The Odyssey itself in her controversial London Review of Books piece. Yet even amid sick burns and faint praise, Wilson ended her review on an optimistic note, calling Nolan’s Odysseyan “event to celebrate” because it reenergized public interest in the poem.

Like its hero, the poem itself is “polytroupos”—twisted and turned. And like Pope’s translation, Nolan’s adaptation doesn’t so much smooth The Odyssey out, as demand further attention to Homeric wildness.

That’s what I want my students to take away from it. Homer’s Odyssey is not merely complex; it is brutal. Nolan projects the trauma of Troy’s destruction onto a moral consciousness that doesn’t exist in the poem. After they leave the coast of Troy, Homer’s Odysseus and his men wage war on the Cicones not because his men need food and supplies, but because these enemies fought alongside the Trojans. “We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us,” Odysseus explains without regret.

In an episode not included by Nolan, the Spartan king Menelaus explains how he and his men got information about Odysseus by holding down Proteus, an “ancient sorcerer” who “changes shape to every animal on earth, and then water and holy fire” until he reaches his original form. There’s no simple way to think about The Odyssey and its wild dissonances that somehow come together into coherence.

Passed down through oral tradition, inscribed somehow and reproduced, collected in medieval manuscripts, and translated by hundreds of different hands, it’s impossible to wrestle The Odyssey into its protean form. I hope my students leave any class setting where we’ve discussed Odysseus doing their own wrestling with these interpretations.

Because from poem to novel, from recitation to film, from Ancient Greece to English, The Odyssey will always change shape, and that’s what makes its darkness so strange, its narrative so exhilarating.

Andrew Black is an English professor at Murray State University. His scholarly interests include 18th-century Methodists and the music of Kesha. You can read his blog posts leading up to the film here.

Primary editor: Jackie Mansky | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard