Three Strategies for Using Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey in Your Classroom; or, Getting Them off Their Trojan Hobbyhorse

Summer 2026 has been pure Odyssey. I haven’t been able to go anywhere without overhearing chatter about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Odyssey. The socials have been alive with the sound of (often preemptive) cries of joy and complaints, and a scathing review of the film in the London Review of Books by the famed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson has stirred up a tempest worthy of Poseidon. Part of the fun—and the horror—has been hearing what people think of the movie before they actually saw it, overhearing what they think it means to talk about the Odyssey, and then watching what happens when they confront the film Nolan actually has given us.

And yet, as the renowned Homerist Richard Martin has said in Variety, “All publicity about Homer is good publicity” (Ferme). The public—and our students—are hungry for Homer, are hungry to turn Nolan’s film into an extended engagement with the original epic poem. So how might we use this moment to devise some classroom activities designed to displace students from the biases of all this chatter or to get them off their own (Trojan) hobbyhorses?

Fortunately for all of us, the MLA has recently published the new volume Approaches to Teaching Homer’s Odyssey, edited by Lillian Doherty. My own chapter in that volume is about teaching the Odyssey with popular culture, since Nolan’s Odyssey is not my first (Helios-owned cattle) rodeo with this kind of public excitement. Based on my own experience teaching in the aftermath of such landmark cinematic events, here are three pedagogical approaches I would suggest, depending on what your main objective with Nolan’s film may be. Of course, I also recommend that you explore other chapters in that volume as you figure out how to make Nolan’s adaptation work for your classroom.

Two words of caution for educators. First, Nolan’s Odyssey is violent, although mercifully not gory, and it has really earned its R rating in its violence and use of profanity. Second, the film has some truly uncanny, soul-shaking moments of visible and acoustic horror—keep an eye on the Cyclops and Circe scenes in particular. I would be comfortable showing the film to college-aged students with some cautionary remarks, but I’m not sure the film is a good fit for some younger viewers.

Strategy 1: What Makes for a Faithful Adaptation? or, Is Nolan’s Odyssey as Loyal as Argos the Dog

Perhaps you are teaching Homer’s Odyssey and your goal is simply to use Nolan’s film as an opportunity to get students to engage with the ancient epic more closely and critically. Despite what some reviewers have claimed, Nolan’s Odyssey really does reward the audience member who comes in with some command of the Homeric text, from the opening sequence with the bard, to Odysseus’ many tribulations during his homecoming, to the many scenes with the suitors, and to (my favorite character) Argos the dog.

A simple compare and contrast exercise will bear fruit. Ask the students: What did Nolan keep from the original epic, and what does he leave out? The list should be extensive in both columns.

After asking students to generate a list of what’s the same and what’s different, I would then ask them whether or not they think Nolan has ultimately produced an “accurate” or “faithful” adaptation of the film. Hopefully, more than one student will ask what it means to call an adaptation accurate or faithful, at which point you can ask students to debate the meaning of those terms. I would then steer the conversation with a series of pointed questions: What are the key themes or concerns in Homer’s Odyssey? What are the key themes or concerns in Nolan’s adaptation? Has Nolan has been a good steward of the ancient Odyssey and successfully given voice to the ancient Odyssey’s concerns? Having seen the movie, I feel confident that some students will think Nolan was a good steward of Homer’s poem, and others will think he was not. The key is, on one hand, to compel students to define what an adaptation does and, on the other hand, to press students to cite evidence from the poem and the movie, by line or scene. There’s plenty of grist for the mill here, and hopefully students will collectively stumble into the realization that Nolan is doing something quite different from what the ancient poem does, although he makes good use of many of the poem’s existing pieces.

Strategy 2: Approach the Odyssey as a Christopher Nolan Film; or, It’s Not Greek to Me

When Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film came out, my older brother (who is a lifelong Batman aficionado) complained that the movie was not really a Batman movie but just another Tim Burton movie about a brooding loner (like Pee-wee Herman, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands). Similar complaints have long been lodged against Christopher Nolan, whose films—including his own Dark Knight trilogy—show a similar predilection for sticking to a brutalist worldview rather than demonstrating concern for the particular source material.

So, instead of examining Nolan’s Odyssey as a film based on Homeric epic, we might ask students to examine Nolan’s film in the light of Nolan’s oeuvre. One might assign the film alongside Memento or Oppenheimer (both films that, similar to the Odyssey, manipulate narrative time to explore problems with human memory in the face of catastrophe) and alongside Batman Begins or The Dark Knight (films that explore the costs of when an individual thinks they are playing the hero in a morally chaotic world on the cusp of collapse and anarchy).

It’s worth noting that this approach may help students make sense of something not found in Homer’s Odyssey but in scholarship on the late Bronze Age: the repeated reference in Nolan’s Odyssey to the threat of a certain “people from the sea.” From a historical perspective, some Egyptian sources from the late Bronze Age do indeed refer to “Sea People,” and some scholars have hypothesized that these Sea People may have been partially responsible for the collapse in the Mycenaean palatial centers around the Aegean (see Edwards). Again, from a historical perspective, this is a hypothesis, but Nolan seems to have doubled down on this hypothesis. Is Nolan thus using his Odyssey to signal a kind of nostalgia we feel as we face the end times and collapse of our own world order?

Strategy 3: Examine the Evolution of a Character; or, Monstrous Genealogies

Strategies 1 and 2 require us to make a clear pedagogical decision about whether we are really emphasizing (1) the source text (in this case, Homer’s Odyssey) or (2) the modern “reception,”  “adaptation,” or “transformation” (in this case, Nolan’s Odyssey). Of course, there have been countless receptions of Homer’s Odyssey since archaic Greece. It can be startling, but also exciting, to learn about all the different artistic minds that have sought to make the Odyssey their own.

Fortunately, Nolan gives us some memorable representations of the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of Helios, and Calypso. And these monsters are well attested in scholarship, as well as in compendia like the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae or in other sources online. Thus, it might be productive to assign what I call a “Monster Genealogy Project.” You can read more about this in my chapter for Approaches to Teaching Homer’s Odyssey, but the basic prompt goes as follows:

Choose one “monstrous” character from those who appear in both Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, the cattle of Helios, or Calypso). First, research that character and construct a list of every appearance of that character that you can find. In other words, construct a history/genealogy of the different versions of that monster from Homer’s Odyssey and Nolan’s film. Then, once you have completed your history/genealogy, examine some of the different ways that monstrous figure has been used. Are there any particular patterns that appear throughout the history of that monster? Or are there moments in which a later author shapes that monster so differently or iconically that the way we moderns now view the monster is somehow reshaped? And, constructing a genealogy, how can we tell which version of the monster influenced (which) later versions?

At the end of the day, there are many different ways we can use a modern version of an ancient poem, such as Nolan’s Odyssey, in the classroom. More important, I think, is that we do this work at all, that we ask our students to get past the vast amount of speculative and free-floating chatter they have experienced as Nolan’s Odyssey has roared into summer 2026, so that our students can sharpen their reading and critical thinking skills, can get thinking about ancient and modern values, and can understand how works from classical antiquity continue to be tremendous resources for making sense of and responding to so many facets of our lives.

Works Cited

Doherty, Lillian E., editor. Approaches to Teaching Homer’s Odyssey. Modern Language Association of America, 2026.

Edwards, Belen. “‘The Odyssey’: Who Were the Real-Life People from the Sea?” Mashable, 24 July 2026, mashable.com/entertainment/the-odyssey-sea-peoples-explainer.

Ferme, Antonio. “‘The Odyssey’: What Academics Are Saying about Christopher Nolan’s Epic.” Variety, 18 July 2026, variety.com/2026/film/news/christopher-nolan-the-odyssey-adaptation-scholars-react.

The Odyssey. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Universal Pictures, 2026.

Wilson, Emily. “An Uncomplicated Man.” London Review of Books, vol. 48, no. 14, 13 Aug. 2026, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man.