Not-so-sacred texts
By Nikki Babri
This summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey turned a nearly 3,000-year-old poem into a global blockbuster, packing theaters around the world. At UC Irvine, the film’s success came as no surprise. In the Department of Classics, courses on Greek gods, heroes and their receptions in diverse geopolitical contexts across the centuries have been filling lecture halls with students from across campus for decades.
“I think there’s no future in the classics, or in any field, if you treat it as a butterfly under glass. We want audiences to engage actively with these millennia-old texts,” says Professor and Chair of Classics Zina Giannopoulou. The film, she believes, is a reminder of how alive the classics still are. “Nolan’s retelling of the Odyssey reflects his own aesthetic, political and cultural sensibilities. The film reimagines an old story for a contemporary audience,” she adds.
Standing the test of time
On October 22, 2026, the department hosted a student-led discussion of Nolan’s film that was presented by two undergraduates from outside classics – a deliberate decision by Giannopoulou. “Emotional investment makes us quick to judge the things we think we know well,” she says. When the students expressed doubt in their qualifications because they weren’t classicists, she said, “That’s the point.”
Instead of asking what the movie got “wrong,” she wants students to explore what it says to audiences today. Over half of the film’s theater audience was between the ages of 18 and 34, and Pilar Vitug, a third-year literary journalism major and political science minor, can guess why. “People in my generation are very tired of stories that are overplayed,” Vitug explains. “They recognize something in honoring the classics not just as another narrative being rewritten but a way to preserve something special from the past.”
Vitug reads the film’s popularity as a cultural signal of what our society deems relevant. Unlike another “cash-grab” sequel, they argue, retelling a story like the Odyssey carries a certain purity. It’s art that has stood the test of time because “it portrays the complexities of humanity that are still relevant today beyond Ancient Greece.”
Reading beyond the text
Every new adaptation of the Odyssey raises the question of how faithful it should be to the original. Giannopoulou has no interest in measuring the film line by line against Homer because film is a different medium entirely. “So we have to make the transition from what we read and enjoy – maybe even love – to an audiovisual spectacle,” she explains. “And there is no one-to-one correlation.”
Sabella Habtemariam, a third-year comparative literature student, considers her unfamiliarity with the text as a chance to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. “With less preconceived notions, I don’t seek to compare where Nolan was loyal to or departed from the original text,” she says. Instead, her field has taught her to read texts “in concert with other texts,” contextualizing them alongside their reception, criticism and surrounding discourse.
As a result, she’s more interested in how well the film was received – and why. A star-studded cast, a popular director and a huge production budget help explain some of its success, but “such is true of so many movies, and Nolan could have chosen any story to bring to life for modern audiences,” she explains. “This is where my main question lies: why the Odyssey, and why now?”
For Habtemariam, the answer lies partly in Nolan’s signature, grandiose style, from the 70mm screens and the “wine-dark sea” stretching across the film to the visual onslaught at Troy and Odysseus’ final homecoming. “This Odyssey is dialed up to the max, with nuance sidelined for the grand size and scale of this towering king and warrior,” she says. The film’s scale continues to its frenzied fan reception, and Habtemariam wants to understand what lies beneath the spectacle on the surface. “I’d like to see how that ‘wine-dark screen’ might reflect back at us,” she shares.
Vitug sees something more political in Matt Damon’s Odysseus, whose portrayal of masculinity “represents the rugged individual of a Hollywood classic.” Nolan’s focus on male hubris, they argue, functions as American propaganda, its hero more reminiscent of an American movie icon than of an ancient Greek king. “He has made the epic more accessible by reestablishing a patriotic sentiment into a classics genre, effortlessly,” Vitug explains.
Giannopoulou welcomes these fresh perspectives. Questioning the classics, she believes, is vital to renewing them. Students connect with the material because its themes resonate with them: homecoming, resilience, fate, rebellion, etc. “But these texts are not sacred,” she says. “Let’s talk about them. Let’s challenge and critique them, as long as we first understand what they say.”
A history of missing voices
The film is only the latest in a long line of retellings. For centuries before Homer’s epics were written down, they were performed out loud. The versions we read today, explains Professor of Classics Andromache Karanika, are “a filtered record of a much larger oral world.”
Much of that oral world belonged to women, whose laments, lullabies, wedding and everyday work songs were rarely recorded because writing was reserved for other “literary” genres. Still, Karanika believes “we shouldn’t treat these stories as fixed literary texts by single authors, but as the surviving surface of a performance culture.” Read closely, the poems reveal traces of the voices and genres that writing left out. When Calypso and Circe sing at their looms, for example, Karanika hears “the female voice woven into the epic fabric.”
But these female voices also reveal the poem’s darker side, complicating Odysseus’ straightforward image as a hero. “If someone views the Odyssey only as an adventure story, they’ll miss out on the highly complex power dynamics between men and women,” explains Aleah Hernandez, associate professor of teaching in classics, who studies gender and violence in Greek mythology.
Acts of sexual violence are commonplace in Greek mythology, where stories of Zeus transforming himself to “seduce” women focus on the transformation itself, ignoring his exertion of power over human women’s bodies without their consent. Students are often taken aback when they identify the various forms of violence, but Hernandez believes readers should face it head-on. “Although consent is an idea which we advocate today, this was not the case in the ancient world,” she says. “It doesn’t help to sanitize or omit the actual content of myths because it causes us to lose sight of how things have and haven’t changed over time.”
Why students keep returning
Thousands of years later, students are still drawn to these stories, and Karanika believes it’s because the problems they explore never go away. “At the end of the day, different times have fundamentally similar problems to address: war and its cost, grief, homecoming and the limits of human hubris,” she says. “Each generation finds its own reflection in different media” and for 2026, it’s in Nolan’s film.
UCI classrooms have reflected that continued interest for many years. Since the fall of 2018, 2,487 students have enrolled in the Department of Classics course “The Gods” alone. Many come from STEM and other fields with no background in mythology, while others arrive with extensive knowledge due to video games and pop culture.
Giannopoulou admits she isn’t fond of the word “classics” because of its associations with class and aristocracy. But set those aside and what remains are stories that belong to everyone. “You’re dealing with stories that feel very close to all of us,” she says. “You read them and you recognize in them your own hopes, anxieties, longings, fears and dreams. No matter how old you are, they still know you by name.”
(Note: The main image was created using assistance from Canva AI’s “Magic Edit” tool.)
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