It's a new day and I NEED to rant more about The Odyssey because I haven't milked every ounce of hate that I've felt for some of its parts.
I've already talked a bit about the mythology (or rather lack of) in the movie and I wrote very briefly about Athena, Calypso and Circe, but I really want to focus on the women in this movie. To begin with, the movie is just misogynistic- to an alarming degree. I've heard a lot of people blaming it on the source material, which is by itself very cruel to its women, but I feel like that's a poor excuse. The original poem was written centuries ago, of course it's going to portray women poorly, this is a movie made in 2026, there's no excuse for Nolan to do the same.
The women in Nolan's adaptation are at worst, not written and at best, stripped of all agency. With a character like Athena, a goddess that in the source material has A LOT of moments where she takes center stage and influences both Odysseus and Telemachus journey, anyone would've expected her to appear, but she rarely does. She's not there, she's not a character and only serves one purpose: to haunt Odysseus. It's insane how she isn't even a character, how the most important deity of the Odyssey is NOT THERE. Not once do you see her help Odysseus, not once do you see her talk to the gods to win their favor, or disguise herself to help- she does nothing. She doesn't even have a personality in his visions, she isn't cunning, she isn't stern, she doesn't impose over mortals and she doesn't guide; because she is no one in this movie.
And then, with a character just as important, Penelope, Nolan writes her to only cry and moan– just like Odysseus. He's stripped her of what little power she already had in the original poem, as well as her cunning nature that mimics that of her husband. While, yes, missing her husband is a central part of Penelope, there surely is more you can say about her, right? Why not let her talk about Sparta? About Helen? About her parents? About the life she used to have? Why not let her remember Odysseus sweetly, instead of just being angry that he's gone? She's supposed to be this persevering wife, but there's no way the audience can sense that in her when all she does is complain, fight and insult her son and almost have an affair with Antinous. And then, Nolan dares to insinuate a feminist-like trait about her character when she complains about her spot on the throne, how everyone misses the king but fails to recognize that their queen is there and could be just as powerful. And it would've been an interesting thing to explore! But this version of Penelope doesn't take action, she doesn't have any agency and the only thing Nolan allows her to do is cry and wait for Odysseus to come back. If he really wanted to explore those desires of her, that sense of helplessness, I'm sure the cunning and persevering Penelope that he's trying to adapt would do something about it.
And to contrast the figure of the "perfect wife" (as gross as that sounds) there's Helen and Clytemnestra. While in the original poem they served as opposites to Penelope, almost foes of what the Trojan war had done to their wives, here they are both treated even worse than in the source material.
Helen is treated horribly by Menelaus, in a way that made me uncomfortable, yet she is not allowed to have any control of the situation. In the source material, Menelaus wouldn't even dare to put a finger on her like he does in the film and he wouldn't insinuate her beauty to have gone away. Even if she is supposed to represent the weight of the war herself, it would've been more respectful to just write both of them as guilt-ridden, yet still loving to one another, showing a bit of hope for what could come after the war?
And then, Clytemnestra is just treated as a crazy woman. It's crazy, how Nolan chooses the worst parts to adapt truthfully from the poem. While yes, she has been traditionally portrayed as crazy, I'd like to think that most of those portrayals at least try to add the level of tragedy her story has. In this movie? There's none of it and since she takes some sort of control over the situation she found herself in, she's shown as a "bad" example of a wife and something to be wary of.
Now lastly, there's Calypso and Circe. I'll be quick with Calypso: she isn't a character. Just like Athena, she only serves the purpose of making Odysseus remember and anything else she's meant to be is forgotten. She says she loves Odysseus, but doesn't show it, there's a quick jab at her being a goddess that is quickly forgotten, and then all her loneliness and the selfishness that comes from it is non-existent.
And with Circe, since Nolan doesn't allow the women to be powerful or have any sort of control over the men, we find her scared of what those men could do to her. There's no intelligence, there's no prowess, she doesn't really seem like an equal to Odysseus or even an actual threat to his crew. Even if she has some of her magic, all that power dissipates as easily as it appeared. And, on the other hand, she berates Odysseus for letting his men inside, as if she truly was terrified of them hurting her, as if that would even be a thought that'd run through the mind of someone as powerful as her. In the end, every little interaction she has makes you feel like Circe isn't a threat at all, like she can't actually hurt Odysseus and his crew. Once again, Nolan found one female character with more power and more presence than the men in the cast and instead of allowing her to be that, he dumbs her down and makes her seem weaker than she actually is. As if he was unable to just write strong female characters, not only narratively strong, but also literally strong.
In the end, it all reads as extremely lazy, as many other mistakes and writing decisions Nolan has taken for his movie. I'm not an expert in this, of course, and if I've gotten something wrong then please do let me know, I just wanted to get all of it off my chest, because I left the theaters feeling incredibly annoyed and a bit offended.
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