on waiting for christopher nolan's odyssey and its impending discourse apocalypse
Scroll to the end for my thoughts on the latest trailer of The Odyssey.
I have a confession to make: I’ve been keeping a diary.
It is filled with the deranged ramblings of a mind poisoned by film discourse. Specifically, the swirling vortex of takes, reflections, and galaxy brain theories surrounding the upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey by the king of the cerebral blockbuster: Christopher Nolan.
Just think of the sheer magnitude of takes this thing is going to release. We’re talking a convergence of every online niche and subculture imaginable: The Classics scholars. The Nolan stans. The Zendaya hive. The meninists. The contrarians. The film school grads. The SparkNotes skimmers. The Joseph Campbell disciples. The MCU fans still salty about Scorsese's comments. The theater kids who did The Odyssey in high school. The philosophy majors eager to deconstruct its themes. The history buffs ready to fact-check its portrayal of ancient Greece. The 4chan edgelords. The TikTok cosplayers. The Letterboxd cinephiles. The Wikipedia warriors. The Reddit theorists. The Tumblr artists. The YouTube reactors. The Greeks!!!!
Even if your engagement with Greek epics begins and ends with Disney's Hercules, there will be no escape. This movie is going to saturate the cultural conversation for months on end. It will be inescapable.
And for me, unfortunately, it’s personal. As a Greek person, Homer’s epics are my birthright. As a film person, Nolan’s spectacles are my occupational hazard. This July, those two wires cross, and I’m already smelling smoke.
So I did what any self-respecting, chronically online writer would: I started documenting every moment of this journey like a 19th-century sailor chronicling a voyage at sea. What follows are the highlights (lowlights?) of that diary. So hop aboard, dear reader, and join me on this odyssey through the choppy waters of cultural anticipation. I can't promise these dispatches will be profound, or even coherent.
But first, a newsletter announcement:
✨That Final scene is hosting NOLAN CLUB this June ✨
Over the course of June, That Final Scene will be dedicating its FREE programming on the four key themes from The Odyssey:
nostos (homecoming)
hubris (excess)
moira (fate)
theion (divine)
Nolan Club is not a straight Nolan retrospective. While these themes run throughout Nolan’s work and I’m sure we’ll talk about it loads, they also run throughout everything else.
So this is where you, my lovely paid subscribers, come in:
I’m enlisting you to co-curate Nolan Club.
I want you to look into culture and find the thing that sits next to these themes. I want you to share your favorite poems, songs, films, essays, images, albums, passages, TED talks, photographs that produce the same feeling.
More details on how to send submissions will follow (You may want to join my Chat if you haven’t already).
I can’t wait to see you all in Nolan Club (and yes, we have a poster) 😏
December 23, 2024
I am half asleep, in bed next to my partner, the sound of rain hitting glass — our glass ceiling — gently tossing and turning as I flick through my phone, desperately searching for something to engage my mind so it might finally shut the fuck up and let my body fall into sleep. I am searching for news. I am searching for gossip. Anything. The screen dims. My eyes close. I am searching for nothing and everything, and with the energy of a sleep-deprived bat swinging blindly through the night air, I open Threads.
There it is. There SHE is. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey adaptation announced. The biggest fucking news my eyes have ever seen.
And with news so big attached to a brain so big, anything so small as brain rot is a part and parcel inevitability. Responsible social calendar where I respond to texts within 48 hours? Boring. A good night’s sleep? A waste. Stretching, showering, going to the gym, eating lunch, drinking water, a good night’s sleep? Boring.
All that is to say, that I am his greatest admirer and his worst enemy, and simply the greatest student he ever had.
December 24, 2024
Woke up this morning and it’s still true. Christopher Nolan is adapting The Odyssey. My father read me The Odyssey wrong.
He read it from memory, every night when I asked. He couldn’t hold the book in his hand, he struggled to see the small print when challenged to read the words on a page, but the story was in his head in its entirety, and he could recite it for hours if asked. It is one of the only things that could quiet me as a child, one of the only things that can get me to sit still beside him on the couch, his arm slung around my skinny frame, his deep voice droning in my ear like a lullaby.
But he got it wrong. The gods were wrong, doing the wrong things, Athena doing what Poseidon was supposed to do. Circe was more malevolent, because he thought it made a better story. He thought she should be more evil, more cruel. I didn’t know the difference at seven. He made it up, and I believed it, and it was the story that was in the house, so who could tell me that it was wrong?
I remember that he read the curses wrong in an imaginary Greek-like accent. I think about the history of accents in Greek adaptations, of which there is a long and storied history. Troy (2004) used British accents — Brad Pitt as Achilles with an American accent widely considered a misfire. 300 (2006) didn’t bother with any particular accent, leaned into the stylisation. Gladiator (Roman, not Greek but same discourse) went British. The convention has been: Ancient world = British accents, as if Posh English is somehow closer to Ancient Greek than American English. Both are equally absurd. Neither is Greek. No Hollywood film has ever used actual Greek accents for ancient Greeks. The debate is always between two equally wrong options, with the actual culture nowhere in the room.
Will Nolan’s Odyssey follow the same path?
My father read me The Odyssey wrong. He got it wrong, but he got it right.
February 18, 2025
Matt Damon is officially Odysseus. He might be a little too likable for the role, but I’m willing to overlook that. Just have him lean into the arrogance and entitlement, and I think we’ll be good.
The cast keeps growing: Tom Holland as Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Zendaya as Athena, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o. And more names I can’t even process right now because my brain has turned into a sieve that only catches Nolan-related information and lets everything else fall through.
A Nolan Odyssey is not something one might choose, but it is an odyssey regardless.
April 29, 2025
Trying to figure out what I actually want from this thing. What I’m looking for in Nolan’s Odyssey is a more generous spectacle, one with space, water, a sky. Perhaps more than anything, I’m looking for an odyssey that isn’t afraid to be a voyage across its own glassy distance.
But what I also need — and what I want to talk about now — is a large and active connivance. I have no hope that the production design on Nolan’s Odyssey will accurately capture the ancient Greek world, much less that it will be any good, but I need — as I have needed with so many other Odyssey adaptations before — to believe I’m in Ithaca when I’m in Ithaca.
My standards aren’t too high or too low; they’re just high enough. I don’t expect hyperrealism, but I need a Nolan Odyssey that is so cunning, so selfish, so clever, that it’s willing, at times, to let me believe presumption can matter.
May 5, 2025
Started reading Homer again. First time since university when I had to write 4,000 words about narrative structure and homecoming. Forgot how Athena just meddles constantly, showing up every twelve lines disguised as someone’s dead uncle, generally establishing the world’s first parasocial relationship from Mount Olympus.
Nolan’s going to lose his mind over this. Culture is not ready.
July 29, 2025
Like many people, I spent 2023 in Oppenheimer hell. So in this sense, I’m simply thrilled the scourge of Oppenheimer can take a break. If you never recovered from that scourge yourself, I would understand why you aren’t thrilled. I read War and Peace. I’m not judging. If you are a Nolan hater, I can picture you giving me that look. I am not here for you, and nor is any movie, Hollis.
If you can’t figure out how to make Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey work for you, I can help. I’ll have a whole little resource library right here on this newsletter, we’ll find something. I’m serious: if you see any headline that makes you panic, I would like for you to send it to me. It’s going to be okay.
August 11, 2025
In 2026, I will be unable to go anywhere online without the following people ruining my day:
Ever since Interstellar was released, the Interstellar criers have been those who will defend this very specific Christopher Nolan film to death. When they meet someone new, they hand them a copy of Interstellar’s screenplay, saying, “You just have to read this.” They will tell you about the time there was a black hole and a robot named TARS and Michael Caine was there and Matthew McConaughey was crying and the soundtrack was playing and everyone was crying and now Sophie is crying and do you want to know the bookshelf quote or not?
Interstellar criers will hit their peak in 2026. Why? The Odyssey is a huge book and has multiple adaptations to its name. For those reasons, there is more narrative space for Nolan to intersperse various daughter-raising monologues throughout the movie’s 3 hour runtime. When they’re strapped in an IMAX seat for five hours, their long-dormant crying will finally commence. They will be weeping as the credits roll—not because of the movie, but because they finally have material to back up the incessant Interstellar comparisons they’ve been hurling our way for ten years. They will crash their car, recover, then immediately ask if Matt Damon wears a tunic. If he does, it will be all over for us.
I wish them nothing but the best in 2026, when it’s finally time to end.
The Tenet contrarians are a different beast. Have you met anyone who swears they “get” Nolan’s popular films, but does not like them? Or been bothered by any existential contrarian who responds to your mention of Tenet by saying they “watched it four times and it’s bad.” What does it mean to hate a movie you were entertained by, and spend twenty minutes texting someone about that movie? You haiku about Tenet. You complain about Tenet. You hold Tenet to a grudge.
They’re going to be insufferable about The Odyssey’s temporal dimensions.
Then you have the Nolanians or however they call themselves. These are the ones who give Nolan such a bad rep even though it’s not his fault everyone treats him like he’s personally curing cancer with IMAX cameras.
Remember the end of Taken when Liam Neeson finally discovers who has taken his daughter and he’s just some unassuming guy in a suit? That’s a Nolanian. He’s the kind that will log into Letterboxd purely to comment “false” on your review, or “actually, I think you missed the point of the film…”, or “it’s not his fault you’re dumb” and “I bet you didn’t even watch it in IMAX....”.
They have a very specific set of skills, and they will deploy them in time to ruin your whole day. They will find you. They will kill you. And then they will go to your house to watch Dunkirk on repeat, because it’s your fault for giving them no choice.
These people will defend truly whatever Nolan does, and yes, this includes the The Dark Knight trilogy that goes too hard — indisputably.
I actually don’t blame them for wanting to defend someone they love. In fact, I find Nolan to be a great filmmaker and a genuine advocate for cinema. But the truth is they have no critical vocabulary beyond “epic” or “it rips”. Trying to hop in and defend him by being vitriolic and insulting to others is creating this nexus of obnoxious Nolan discourse that ironically ruining the very thing Nolanians claim to love — Chris himself!
September 14, 2025
The people who will say “it’s going to be too long” before seeing a single frame are doing my head in. How about you stay at home and watch TikTok?
Man, you said that about Dunkirk even though it isn’t long. You said that about Memento, even though it doesn’t have any scenes longer than three minutes. You texted the words “it’s too long” to your partner, who is a classics scholar, this morning, to tell him why you were going to make a picnic on the couch and watch the trailer for the new Dune even though he was still watching F1. You’re already saying to yourself that if the film is more than 2 hours and 35 minutes you’re not going. You’re not a serious person.
October 12, 2025
I think the difference between Odysseus’s lies and, say, Pinocchio’s is that, unlike Homer’s hero, the wooden boy’s untruths conjure perilous mischief into being. Odysseus’s falsehoods are the work of a poet and are intended to amuse. The prophet of pleasure, he only wants himself to be amused. He lies for the same reason that he is often described as singing, for the same reason that he shrinks his enemies to the size of a calf, for the same reason that he lodges inside the chest of the great tree like a lover.
So what do we do when the poet and the butcher are the same person?
Just as Oppenheimer’s bomb, Odysseus’s cunning is a weapon. I can’t hate Nolan for being who he is. After all, he isn’t the butcher; he’s the poet.
November 29, 2025
I think about the skeptics compiling evidence. I see you and I am you.
Specifically, compiling the evidence that Nolan can’t write women. Now that women like Circe and Calypso are about to appear in his film, good luck babe! We all know he’s been married to a woman for longer than most of us have been alive, so we’re wondering why that doesn’t seem to matter? Why we can’t seem to get at least one woman who feels as natural as Nolan’s very successful collaborator and wife, Emma (who, yes, he has four kids with)? You are, perhaps, so skeptical that you rewatched Tenet the other day to see what he did with Elizabeth Debicki in that film, just to prepare yourself for the worst.
January 5, 2026
I’m just waiting for some enterprising TikToker to dig deep into the archives of her Catholic high school education and emerge with the very first “actually Penelope is the true hero of the Odyssey” take. It will get 20 million views. It will have the wrong meter. It will use a Taylor Swift song. Taylor’s version. And I will know it’s coming.
Penelope’s interiority isn’t the TikTok crowd’s prerogative, but it will be their apostle. Penelope will send them letters in the form of tarot cards. I’m telling you TikTokers will be losing their minds over Penelope. Anne Hathaway will have a field day.
February 20, 2026
Everyone will have to answer for their actions at the end of July. We’ll have to sit down and reckon with all of our reasons for wanting to see this. We’ll have to argue with the ones we love and, yes, the ones we don’t.
March 3, 2026
You’re going to see the movie anyway. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. You’re going because the only people you’ve been able to talk about anything else with since the new year began are your coworkers, who don’t read. You’re going because you’re already doomed to read every single review, whether you want to or not.
But, importantly, all of us get to see it. And all of us will be able to weigh in. I can already feel the way the discourse will dance like a marionette pulled by ten different strings. I can smell the snapping, and I’m not alone. We need to be prepared for that moment when it comes. We need to have the courage to admit we’re all waiting for it in our own way.
March 12, 2026
I’m not going to pretend that Nolan’s The Odyssey is going to be the worst thing that ever happens to me. It’ll be a lot of things before it ever reaches that point, but it’s probably going to feel worse than it is. It’ll make me laugh, but maybe not for the reasons I wanted. I’ll feel a sense of wonder that becomes disgust. Everyone will leave the theater feeling something everyone feels when they see a movie. The only difference will be that the female characters all die, or don’t and we’re asked to look at the male ones before we decide to leave.
March 19, 2026
It’s in no one’s interest to pretend you’re not going to have an opinion in a few months. You’ll be at the premiere with the rest of us. You’ll be asking yourself why you got up so early. You’ll be counting down the hours until the movie starts. You’ll know it all over again when the lights go down and the logo appears. You’ll clap in the places where everyone claps, and you’ll clap because he’s Nolan and that’s what you’re supposed to do.
You will have an opinion, and that’s fine. You’ll have to work through that opinion, and that’s also fine. But the more we talk about it, the more we’ll realize we aren’t all that different. And the more we can make our peace with how very little we have in common.
April 12, 2026
The best thing I can do before the chaos begins, before everyone collapses into their positions, before the discourse becomes unbearable, is take a breath. I don’t love all of Nolan’s movies. I didn’t love Dunkirk. I don’t love TDKR. I might not love the The Odyssey. But I also can’t stop the world from loving these stories if it sees something in them.
I am going to do something embarrassing when this film comes out, and so will you.
April 19, 2026
Fast forward to a few months from now: you’ll have stepped out of your house, you’ll read the reviews, you’ll hear the voice in your head saying “nonsense.” It’s July 2026, we’re all going to see Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. The mind is calm. The cinema is fine.
I guarantee that when you least expect it, true peace will come upon you.
May 4, 2026
Well, I’m alive again. What is it about a new Nolan trailer that makes me feel like I’m coming back to life, limbs tingling with anticipation? If I could bottle that feeling, I would trade the rest of my life to keep it in my veins forever.
I woke up late and rushed through my coffee so I could watch the new The Odyssey trailer in bed before I started my day. I was already excited and I definitely should have paused to collect myself first.
You know how I feel about Robert Pattinson. He is my main man, my #1. The movie could have been called “Odysseus and the Very Handsome Man” and I would have seen it like, ten times already. But in the spirit of true impartiality, I’m going to do my best not to let his presence cloud my judgment. Here goes nothing.
The moment I hit play, all Nolan memes flash before my eyes.
I’m most likely paraphrasing here but I think it was Matt Zoller Seitz who said that war is a kind of male sex in Nolan’s films, and I’ve always loved that. Odysseus here is a man who has the full weight of ten years of war on his shoulders, and still the only thing that matters to him is the woman waiting for him at the end of it. And yet, for all of that violence and bloodshed, “we won no war.” The Greeks may have technically won the Trojan War, but it ends up not mattering for the sake of his return. Like, my god. Do we think he reads Sappho?
I hope he does.
Right, I distracted myself. What about the Robert Pattinson of it all? Never once did I think, he is going to be a huge problem for Odysseus. The way he’s smirking at the camera, the way he’s wearing that skirt like he’s absolutely going to eat it, the way he’s so annoyingly cool that at least twenty people are going to die so he doesn’t get to be that way in peace. I want blood and more than blood. I want their heads on spikes. I want Odysseus, the bloodied monster, to drag them through the dirt to meet their fates.
Nolan puts me in the very unique position of siding with a violent cheater/murderer who has not been home in twenty years.
“Let’s go!” is such a funny line to put in Odysseus’s mouth (and such a specific type of Nolan action-movie line) that I thought no one would actually say it with a straight face. But there’s Matt Damon, shouting “let’s go!” readying his men for battle as if he’s winding them up for a trip to the football game. This is probably more damning than anything else he’s done in this trailer. Surely Odysseus didn’t fuck Calypso on that island just to return to Ithaca and have his son call him “dad” with an American accent!
The international spectacle, the massive CGI whirlpool, the armored figures…all of it looks cool, and I would watch that movie without a second thought. The Ithacan scenes, however, feel like they belong in any prestige TV show — Game of Thrones, perhaps. But f I wanted to watch Game of Thrones I’d watch Game of Thrones? puzzled emoji
It gives me pause when I think of all the Western classics that have been brought to screen. How many films based on Greek myths I’ve watched in English despite the stories taking place thousands of years before the language existed. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel off.
Odysseus doesn’t need to sound like he’s in Billions to appeal to me.
May 5, 2026
I know everyone is sharing similar feelings but I have to give my little rant anyway because it’s my diary and God is dead.
I like modern dialogue in theory, but it hinges on an understanding of language within its time period, a correct approximation of modern vernacular. But “let’s go” is not boyish vernacular; it’s a catchphrase that says more about 21st century American culture than it does about Greek culture. This is the problem with modern dialogue. It can’t help but reflect modern culture (and yes, I get that’s the point, who wouldn’t want to inject their culture into ancient Greece but why must it be this one?).
My ideal version of this, because I’m a realist and I’m not expecting Matt Damon to learn ancient Greek, would have been an adaptation in early modern English. Preserve the original text, similar to Sheakespearean adaptations like what Joel Coen did with The Tragedy of Macbeth. This is where Christopher Nolan’s limitation lies: Not so much in writing the screenplay but his insistence that he must write his screenplays all alone.
It sounds dumb, but he literally didn’t need to be this unserious. When you have a text that’s inherently serious, the unseriousness of this type of dialogue becomes an insult. When it’s this sterile, it’s feels uncaring.
May 5, 2026
Some more thoughts today because the discourse has shifted on British vs American accents. I hate this debate when it comes to Greek adaptations.
As I’m writing this, I’ve fully converted to 1st Gen Film Kid. Capital G, Capital F. I’m so interested in the way cultures get remapped by the strangeness of global cinema. It’s very strange to see the film boy era of my teenage years — my father’s myth — at the hands of the most successful man in Hollywood. To see empathy, the empathy I learned from reading Odysseus’ return home to Ithaca, turn into something singularly filmic.
I feel like empathy has become a stand-in for culture in the 1st Gen Film Kid era. I am not alone in thinking that there is something queer at the heart of this myth. Not the queerness of Odysseus’ potential love for Achilleus, or the queerness of Odysseus and Penelope’s relationship, but the queerness of its refusal to be tamed by heterosexual convention. The poem keeps placing marriage at the centre of everything and then making marriage behave like a riddle, a disguise, a delay tactic, a private joke about a bed no one else is supposed to understand. Odysseus is a husband, sure, but he spends most of the story as Nobody, or a beggar, or a man crying on someone else’s island. Penelope is a wife, yes, but her fidelity is active and weird and tactical, all loom-work and suspicion and buying herself one more day. Their reunion is romantic because it is so specific. She doesn’t melt into him. She tests him.
I don’t care about the accents. Accents are arbitrary. What I care about is the erasure of the culture from the text, the assumption that something meant to be Greek can never truly be Greek. I care about representation, about pride. I care about a myth that already belongs to so many being taken and possibly made into another Troy.
It’s not that I have a problem with homogenisation, or that I think it’s making the world infinitely worse. I don’t think it’s making the world better, either. It is a capitalistic inevitability. But I reject the idea that sharing a culture with someone inherently gives them ownership of it.
I blink at my desktop, the way I usually do when I’m angry enough to want to write but don’t know where to start. I wonder what it would be like to tell my dad about the film when it comes out. It’s hard to picture. When I close my eyes, I see his face, the way he’d smile and shake his head, but I don’t know if I’d tell him.
But what do I know? Hope it was just a weird trailer.
May 6, 2026
Dear Diary,
Sometimes I close my eyes and try to picture my father. It’s not easy, since I have only seen a portrait that hangs in the great hall, but I imagine his voice is deep like the ocean waves that crash against our shores. I imagine his arms are warm like the summer sun that penetrates the winter chill of Ithaca. I imagine he is strong, brave, clever, and has defeated monsters a thousand times over, even if I am not really sure what monsters look like. I imagine he can hear me when I ask him why he has not come home after so many years. Has he forgotten about me? About my mother Penelope? About Ithaca? Does he even want to come home?
And then I open my eyes, and the house is still filled with the sounds of men drinking and laughing as they take my father’s place at our table. They are so loud, I feel like they are even in my mind, mocking me. I can’t allow them to make me weak, even if the thought of confronting them fills me with fear. They say my father is dead. They say he will never return. So many voices shouting the same thing must mean it is true. My own mother has bent to their will; she is no longer the woman I used to know. Perhaps this means he has forgotten about me, and the boy he left behind. And yet…
And yet, dear diary, I cannot help but be convinced otherwise. I will not allow myself to be beaten without a fight. I will not allow these men to feast on my people’s food and bed my mother as if they are kings when my father is still out there, somewhere. I will believe in my father with everything I have, even if he has no reason to come back for me at all.
I was told today by one of the suitors that Odysseus is “just a daddy you didn’t even know.” I do not know if I have ever heard a more disgusting sentence in my entire life. I do not care how much time or distance separates us, he is my father, and he is still alive. I refuse to believe that he will sit idly by as these fools ruin his name and take what is rightfully his. I refuse to believe that he will not come home for me, or for Ithaca, or for the sake of a little vengeance. He is coming. I know it. The gods know it. And the suitors will know it soon enough as well.
Yours,
Telemachus
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