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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Chris Tryhorn

Sex, beds and grisly executions: what Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey changed, invented – and left out

Film still from THE ODYSSEY, with silhouettes of people pulling ropes attached to a large horse-shaped structure on a beach
A kingdom for a horse … The Odyssey Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Turning a 12,000-line poem that takes a day to read aloud into a three-hour film was always going to require some pruning. So it has proved with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which dispenses with a number of scenes and characters from Homer’s ancient Greek epic. The director has also changed the emphasis in some of the story’s most famous episodes and made a few of his own additions. Here we run down the most significant alterations.

What Nolan has left out

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