Review of the film The Odyssey, 2026

by Gary Tedman

Homer wrote, or compiled (from songs), The Odyssey as a follow up to The Iliad, which is the story of the sack of Troy - Ilion was another name for Troy. Parts of the Iliad story are retold in the film. Homer’s book does not begin with the preparation for or the start of the war, it begins instead with the hundreds of ships of the Achaeans, to us better known as the Greeks, pulled up on the beach, and with the siege of Troy having already begun a while ago. In the film as in the book there is a strong sense of time having already passed.

OK, this is not a history lesson, but some things I needed to clarify for myself in the writing of this review: ‘Achaeans’ was the term for the people who shared the Greek language and a similar culture, Greece is the name we have for the relatively modern nation state which did not exist during this period, in which there were only city states, like Athens. However, Homer was writing for this Greek language audience, to which he is obviously biased. It is also important to note that what we call the gods of the Ancient Greeks, or the ‘Greek gods’, belonged in reality to the Achaeans and were not shared with the Trojans as far as we know, but in Homer’s books the adversaries shared the same Greek gods, which were assumed to be ruling over all peoples.

The Odyssey film begins with the war already having been won, but at some cost, by the famous subterfuge of the hollow wooden horse, and there now seems to be only two black ships on the beach, the one of Odysseus, and Agamemnon’s. Although they have achieved a victory, there is an ominous feeling to the proceedings. The plot concerns Odysseus’ trials as he tries to lead those Achaeans still under his command home after having been away for years.

The activities of the gods feature quite a bit in The Iliad: of Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Thetis, Hera, and so on. They seem like an extended Greek patriarchal family with added superpowers. Achilles, the great runner, is for instance a demi-god. And this brings a problem also for the Odyssey film and the director Christopher Nolan - of how to deal with the real and the imagined.

Nolan obviously opted for a treatment of the subject in a similar realist way to his other war film, Dunkirk, but does this work? - Perhaps Homer was also aware of this problem, all that time ago. For instance, in The Iliad book there is a peculiar passage where the author-narrator tells us about not being able to make the reader aware of the simultaneous events in the battle at different gates of the beach encampment protecting the boats of the Achaean myrmidons from the Trojans, who have come out of the city to attack them. These are the actions of mere mortals. But Homer evidently has no trouble telling us about what the gods are doing, and how they interfere in the lives of these warriors, which seems contradictory, for, surely an author who knows what the gods get up to can also know what ordinary men do, even if they do it at the same time in different places? I therefore wonder if Homer is deliberately revealing something to us about the writer’s art? A modernist element in Homer?

Nolan’s realist treatment is caught between trying to depict a historical reality that we presume must have existed, and the mythology of the actors within this history, and which is in the handed down stories of Homer and which form an integral artistic part of those stories. Simply put, the problem is, does the artist, writer, or film director, refer to the Greek gods as affecting the lives of these fighters, as really existing gods, or not? If not, we still need to get some idea of how these gods operate in the imaginations and alienations of these heroic figures, do we not? Because these imaginings would have helped shape their feelings and thus also take part in determining their actions, even in the real history of Troy.

Is it a timely film? It is plainly anti-war. The aftermath of the horrors of war figure here in indirect ways, revealing guilt and an unclear search for redemption. The viewer or the reader does not really find out why Troy was being attacked. There are hints in the film about an economic struggle over trading routes to the east which do not exist in Homer as far as I can tell. Historic Troy, which was not long ago discovered, was on an important sea route, the Dardanelles, near the entrance to the Sea of Marmara, which itself is connected to the Black Sea by what is now the strait of the Bosphorus (Thracian Bosporus). Currently we have the war between the US and Iran involving the Strait of Hormuz waterway.

The reason for the war given in the account of Homer is Helen, the most beautiful mortal woman, who was either, taken forcibly, or removed willingly, from her husband, by Paris and ensconced back in Troy. All this also involves the intrigues of the gods of course, but it still seems to us, today, too feeble an excuse to launch a thousand ships and destroy a city state. The Helen story could be allegorical of course, symbolizing the Trojans unfairly stealing the Achaeans trade and obtaining beautiful booty that they felt that they should have. Homer does not dwell on Helen much, although she seems wise and a little regretful. It would have been in any case an historical economic fact that this society, being slave based, and agrarian, would have required occasional conquest and plunder to add riches to it, as well as to excuse its faults by blaming evil foreign forces.

Homer’s The Iliad book is full of the top commanders wearing resplendent custom-made armour, with bronze, silver, and gold decorations, worn by the heroes, wielding amazingly wrought weaponry, which the sides fight over and strip as a spoil when they have succeeded in killing them. But The Odyssey film shows little of this splendour, it seems deliberately grubby, gritty, and dark, with no make-up evident on the actors, even the pores of the actors can be seen, which is unusual. Probably the ordinary soldiers, not professionals in the modern sense, in reality had to make do with their more humble gear and were modestly attired and evidently even needed to be cajoled and corralled into battle by their noble commanders, but I suspect the leaders did look pretty impressive even in the mundane real world of the Bronze age, but not so this filmic Odysseus. Otherwise, Matt Damon achieves all that is needed of him in the role, he is good at this sort of thing, if perhaps too recognisable, Jason Bourne in a Greek helmet.

Nolan does not show us the gods, but he does hint at them sometimes, a little, by some camera techniques if I am not mistaken, but also when he does have to show us the mythical manifestations and appearances, given they are a mainstay of the story, like the one eyed giant or the siren, he does it in the aforementioned realist manner, which is peculiar: the giant has a twisted face, malformed, he seems merely disabled, rather than having a central alien-like eye. I found myself wanting some CGI for once (maybe there was some, I don’t know, but I wanted it to be more obvious). If ever there was a justification for some extravagant special effects, this was it, I felt, it required a spectacle. But the opportunity was not taken up. I found myself pining a bit for Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation such as in Jason and the Argonauts.

Nevertheless, the movie was gripping, even without attaining the epic quality that Dunkirk did sometimes succeed in. It made me want to read The Odyssey again. I had read an abridged version when I was young, but apart from the famous bits I had forgotten most of it.

A few translator’s observations on 'The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944'

Bloomsbury Academic 2025

Translated and edited by Iona Singh

Sick of thinking my own thoughts and writing them down, the possibility of trying to get into someone else’s thoughts and writing them down instead interested me. I knew Lucien Febvre’s work and his subtle approach to the role of feelings from A new kind of history, Sensibility and history and History and psychology (RKP 1973). These are fantastic essays, unique in their field, the kind you dream about when trying to understand the social and political affects of art and design, for example, and they can be applied way beyond the realms of historical studies. And Febvre, in these essays kept mentioning this person Bloch, he died in the war, shot by the Germans, and was a great loss.

When I first began as a French to English translator, some years before, I had the naive idea that some of the ‘Frenchness’ of the original language should be maintained in the translation, if possible, even if this was not quite correct English. A slight miscommunication with the editor of a Publisher I was translating several books for convinced me they wanted a literal translation of the tenses used in French. English and French are different in this way, the imperfect tense, for example, is used more frequently in French. I’m embarrassed to say this now, but I followed this through and the translation read like the events were ongoing and in the present, like the editorial of Hello magazine. Luckily, the misunderstanding was soon straightened out, forgiven, and I never did that again!

This is one set of innumerable choices that the translator must make to determine not just how to interpret the meaning of the original writing but also the way it is expressed, I would call this the politics of translation. Is a text to be translated formally or officiously or is it casual, should I use slang words or stick to polite terms, middle class or aristocratic phrases and how literal do you need to be in the translation in order to really convey what the writer wants.

These were all questions I needed to mull, especially when translating the writings of Marc Bloch. In the beginning it still seemed charming to retain a little of his French expressions and grammar, but by the time I had finished, over years, I ended up understanding that I only needed to convey what Bloch actually MEANT and that alone. And often these charming Frenchisms got in the way and definitely had to GO.

Translating a work awards a great deal of power, leverage and responsibility to an interpreter. For me the best way to honour that was to grasp the sentiment of what Bloch wanted to say, the feeling, as well as the language. I decided it needed to be like Bloch chatting out loud and explaining it. His writing has a chatty element and by the end of the process, every time I read it, I could hear him saying the words out to me in English (with an English accent)?!

It helps a translator to understand what they can about the personality of the translated. When I began stumbling through Bloch’s long sinuous sentences (even his biographer Carole Fink mentioned these as difficult) and pairing them with the stiff war time photos of a middle-aged Bloch and his grand position in French education, I was intimidated into reading and translating his texts literally and formally, which came across as a bit boring and slightly pompous. But with perseverance the nuances emerged and I realised it was in fact ME reading these things into the work. If his writing is a bit polite and formal at times it needs to be adjusted against the politeness and formality of the epoch which is finally therefore negated to reveal that Bloch, who was mainly addressing young people, students, and academics from outside the mainstream discipline of history, was trying to convey things on their level. From then on, the sentiment of what Bloch actually MEANT and how he meant to say it became much clearer.

And how did he mean to say it? After Bloch’s death in the war Lucien Febvre recalls him recounting an argument wearing ‘that slightly amused look on his face’. And that image clicked with me, because on removing those starchy barriers whether from Bloch’s own pages or from inside my head, that comment dovetailed with the texts to reveal that Bloch was funny. That the contradictions he points out are befuddling puzzles he’s trying to solve, and they often quite amuse him.

The difficulty of trying to get to this as a translator, to facilitate his words as if he is enunciating them, (some of the chapters in the book are transcriptions of lectures) and informally speaking to his class, became the main challenge. When translating from French, the words chosen from the available English are not, of course, to be translated on their own, they are part of a line of words, and sentences of words, and each of these, adjusts the others. The meaning, starts as a fluid dynamic, moving through the intellectual variables of space and time, but gradually in view of the wider text, this is homed in and any inexactitudes whittled away until the meanings are contained within their correct limits and the spirit, irony, and humour finally comes clean.

I’ve enjoyed listening to Marc Bloch chatting to me over many afternoons while the thread of his language was checked and rechecked - even if I couldn’t get a word in. Sometimes little paragraphs that caused so much trouble at the time still come back to me out of the blue. Ancient words in French I did not know but now will never forget, and I’ve talked about them so much to my husband that he won’t forget them either. And now the book is published it's a bit of a shame to leave my talkative old mate behind.

A reviewer of the book mentioned that Bloch’s voice ‘shines through’ from within the edition but made no reference to the role of translation in this. Bloch’s voice does shine through, but not of its own accord as some transcendental force that asserts itself under any circumstances, it shines through by the material mechanics of translation, the processes of understanding what that voice is and of eventually ridding it of anything that stifles it.  

Iona Singh

The paperback edition of The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944 is available from 20 August 2026 from Bloomsbury Academic https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/selected-writings-of-marc-bloch-9781350513433/ and Amazon.