Have you seen Christopher Nolan’s the Odyssey in theaters? The nearly three hour long film seeks to bring the classic Homeric tale to life – relying on an incredibly stacked cast and creative use of practical effects.<\/p>\n
Any adaptation must deviate from its source text slightly – translating text to film necessitates some changes. If you’re interested in reading the original text and discovering those differences, it’s pretty easy to find copies! We have several different editions available in print at the Consortium Library<\/a> (though it’s popular right now and you may have to wait for a hold) and it’s also available as a free download through Project Gutenberg<\/a>. Emily Wilson, who translated the Odyssey in 2017, includes some of the differences between the movie and the poem in her rather critical review<\/a> (which in the end also celebrates the movie’s success at encouraging interest in the classics).<\/p>\n Explore different aspects of the Odyssey with these articles from our databases below (don’t forget to log in for off-campus access<\/a> or connect to campus wifi before clicking the links!). With a text as old as this one, there has been so much discussion and analysis of almost every aspect of the story, you can dive deeper on any point of interest. The articles below are just a small selection – if there is something else that you’d like us to help you learn more about, don’t hesitate to ask us.<\/a><\/p>\n The Odyssey has been the inspiration for numerous retellings and adaptations, much of which you can find through the Library. In literature, Dante’s Inferno<\/a> draws from the Odyssey as Dante meets Odysseus in the 8th circle of hell. Ulysses by James Joyce<\/a> was heavily influenced by the Odyssey as well. More recently,\u00a0Circe, the novel by Madeline Miller<\/a> draws from the text to imagine Circe’s life on her deserted island before and after Odysseus (who in the poem stays with Circe for a year). The Odyssey has been adapted for the screen several times before, as early as in 1911 in a silent Italian film and more recently by Andrei Konchalovsky in 1997 as a mini series called the Odyssey<\/a>; by the Coen Brothers in 2000 (quite loosely) in the film O Brother Where Art Thou<\/a>; and by Uberto Pasolini in 2024 in the film The Return<\/a>.<\/p>\n A lot of conversation has also been sparked about the use of practice effects (as opposed to CGI) in Nolan’s rendition. You can review a list of some of the most-discussed examples here<\/a>. If you want to understand more about practical effects, these books about special effects in film and TV published in the 1980s and 90s are a great place to start – they were released at a time in filmmaking that was less reliant on computer generated imagery.<\/p>\n\n
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