#117: The person you are meant to be doesn't exist yet

On Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and why it's about ~becoming~ and not finding

Spoiler alert: This essay contains mild spoilers for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026). That said, if you're familiar with the broad strokes of Homer's Odyssey, there shouldn't be too many surprises.

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Growth is the slow process of watching capacity catch up to desire. We know what we want long before we (ever) become the kind of person who can fully receive it. But no matter how much we desire to be that person, life insists that we build them slowly and often painfully.

There’s so much discourse about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. One of the biggest critiques was how Matt Damon’s Odysseus lacked the deeply complicated, flawed humanity that defines Homer's hero—a man whose greatest strength was matched only by his susceptibility to temptation, pride, and desire. Nolan's Odysseus, by contrast, is riddled with anxiety, guilt, and the quiet burden of everything he's survived: the pillaging and the bloodshed and the moral compromises. (Even Athena was washed with Odysseus's guilt—Zendaya wearing that same haunted, thousand-yard stare like Rue did) He’s seen too much. And once you've seen enough of the world, there are some versions of yourself you just cannot return to. For nearly three hours, we watch a man carrying the unbearable weight of his memory. Every decision is filtered through grief, every silence through guilt. He isn't merely trying to find his way home; he's trying to reconcile with the person the journey has made him.

(I mean, this is a metaphor for the decline of the American empire through and through. That's an essay in its own right—and one of the film's most compelling through lines—but this is about who the journey required Odysseus to become before he could return back to Anne!!!! I mean Penelope.)

I have not read The Odyssey in its entirety (though a copy of Emily Wilson’s translation is on its way to me as we speak) but I was less interested in whether Nolan faithfully adapted Homer than in what his film suggested about becoming. Because I don’t think The Odyssey is ultimately a story about getting home. This is an aDaPtAtIoN after all. And Nolan had something to say about becoming!