Adaptation is everywhere! In 2026, MTC is running a new series called Adaptation Anxiety, where new and returning writers consider literary adaptations from the last few years. We ask not whether these adaptations are good or bad, faithful or unfaithful to the source, but bigger questions about the logic underlying contemporary works of adaptation and why audiences have such big feelings about seeing precious characters on screen. Why, in other words, are we so anxious about the move from book to screen, and what does all this angst about the adaptation as a form tell us about our present relationships to these mediums?
Tom Cruise reportedly had a great time at Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey (2026), repeatedly exclaiming throughout that what he was seeing was “so fucking sick.” Surely Cruise, bearer of such Homeric epithets as the Last Movie Star and the King of Movies, sees some affinity between himself and Nolan, President of the Director’s Guild of America and Lord of the Box Office, whose blank checks keep growing for hit after hit, a director that refuses to succumb to so many of the ills afflicting Hollywood, from sequel-exhaustion to over-reliance on CGI. Cruise, too, has cast himself in the role of cinema’s savior, and I imagine he also saw himself in the hero Odysseus, a man fated to do what no one else could. There’s a darker side to such a burden, of course, and many have read Cruise’s triumphant legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick (2022), for example, as indicative not of cinema’s salvation but its deathly stasis, as the Boomer protagonist refuses to surrender his place to younger co-stars, insisting on doing the stunts, and being the hero himself. We might draw a queasy analogy with contemporary America at large, in which older Americans own a vastly disproportionate number of homes and wealth, and the Democratic Party struggles to center younger candidates with fresh ideas after the disastrous 2024 election.
Nolan’s Odyssey, Cruise’s praise notwithstanding, is excessively conscious of its generational burden, as an adaptation of literature’s biggest Daddies (Homer and his protagonist, the ambivalent family-man Odysseus) and as a product of the noblesse oblige attending Nolan’s place at the top of the mountain. Self-seriously, perhaps, yet palpably, Nolan’s Odyssey feels pressed to represent something. The film drew right-wing backlash as a “woke” desecration of Homer for its casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliott Page as the soldier Sinon, as well as its contemporary American accents and dialect, and while these choices aren’t flaunted, they’re deliberate enough that Nolan seems to be adapting in line with a general liberal cosmopolitan inclusivity. Such a view, of course, exists in dialogue with Nolan’s own massive privilege, and indeed the film’s biggest thematic pivot from Homer involves making the sack of Troy, accomplished through Odysseus’s trick with the horse, the nuclear tipping point that “breaks the world” and dooms Greece to perpetual violence, mistrust, and civilizational decline. The film is a trauma plot about Odysseus’s guilt, repression, and gradual attempt to take responsibility and atone for what he has done: Oppenheimer 2.0. The film is anxious about the possibility of civic life post-Trum…I mean Troy, now that a belief in xenia, or “Zeus’s law” – the golden rule that travelers should be respected lest they be gods in disguise – has been broken. But The Odyssey is less an anatomy of this new reality or even a paean to cinema’s ability to restore the collective than it is a searching examination of responsibility. Who is to blame for this, and what can they do?
Homer’s text thus becomes a Trojan horse through which the contemporary can be litigated. Some would argue all adaptations work that way, and there is indeed a long history of treating Homer as mirror, from Virgil’s revisionary centering of the Trojans as guarantors of the virtue of Roman empire to George Chapman’s Renaissance Stoic proto-colonizer Odysseus to Emily Wilson’s recent careful attention to the status of women and enslaved persons in the text. Much online debate on the film turns on the question, is divergence from the poem good or bad? Should Homer’s own Bronze Age vision be accurately portrayed? But what’s different here, I think, is that Nolan so urgently sees adaptation – a negotiation between old and new – as an urgent issue in a global climate marked by generational struggle. What can a Homer, or a Nolan, offer the future? Have they, simply by taking up space, helped to diminish it? What would it mean to atone for that? Is guilt enough?
Within the film, this dynamic surfaces most profoundly in the wishy-washy portrayal of Odysseus: the movie wants to insist both that he’s a villain who doomed the world at Troy, who steadily whittled down his men through a series of trolley-problems and that he is to be admired because he feels really, really, attractively bad about it. Casting America’s Dad Matt Damon certainly helps. The trauma plot is always stubbornly redemptive, adding depth and dimension even when the victim is also the perpetrator. Is this a mea culpa from a filmmaker who cursed Hollywood to endless superhero slop after his paradigm-shifting Batman films and has tried to atone ever since? Whose guilt may be further heightened by Nolan’s position in the Venn diagram’s center of critical praise and box office appeal, netting him resources that virtually no young filmmaker can and perhaps ever will receive?
The ending turns the screw again, as Nolan has the hero of his biggest-ever movie (in both budget and scale), shot entirely on the most conspicuous format there is (IMAX), wish only to be forgotten. In a massive departure from the poem, Odysseus and Penelope abdicate the throne of Ithaca and sail west to properly mourn Odysseus’s fallen crew, leaving young zoomer Telemachus at the helm. Fading from memory would be an unthinkable wish in Homer, whose heroes always seek kleos, or renown, but this desire gives viewers a glimpse at what Nolan may consider his own burden: he can never be the anonymous beggar or pure family man ever again. His first film, Following (1998), ended with the trickster Cobb, very much a director figure, fading anonymously into a crowd, and while 2026 Nolan may yearn to do the same, the spectacle of Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway sailing into the setting sun while holding forth about civilization and memory perversely spotlights their director even more as the Main Character of Cinema. There’s a narcissism to Nolan’s Odysseus, in his fixation on his own culpability and his insistence on taking responsibility for his men’s deaths, even when both Circe and Tiresias insist they die for their own transgressions. Nolan can try to efface himself in every possible way – redeeming a classic for a new audience, ritually staging his own guilt, assuming the burden for the world’s problems just as his Odysseus insists on killing the suitors himself to keep Telemachus’s hands clean – but all of this centers him ever more fully. Turns out Homer was right: you can never really go home again.
This paradoxical futility isn’t bad, though, in the end. In fact, its honest contemporaneity ensures The Odyssey’s power. Nolan is often criticized for his blunt literalism, exhaustively spelling out the themes and rules of his worlds, but in this case that approach strikes a certain chord with an author who, as Erich Auerbach famously argued, “knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely.” In other words, by making Homer so modern, and Odysseus like the director in disguise, Nolan has given us an Odyssey in Homer’s own spirit, and tapped perhaps our key problem: that we cannot really adapt to the old. Like suitors in each other’s houses, one of us will eat the other.
Nathan Likert is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. He too yearns for his lost home of Ithaca (New York), where he spent some beautiful years in grad school, listening to the Sirens sing of organic soap and swimming in technically-illegal swimming holes.
Series Banner illustration by Carolyn Jao for MTC.
Article photo: Pictorial Atlas to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by R. Engelmann and W.C.F. Anderson (1892) via Public Domain Review