BORIS JOHNSON: Wow, what a movie! But if you want the full uncensored version of Odysseus with all the sex, gods and humour, go and read Homer

Published: 23:00, 17 July 2026 | Updated: 01:58, 18 July 2026 Wow, what a movie. I came out of that Imax on the South Bank feeling like a cracked crustacean washed up on the tarry shingle of the Mediterranean, as wrung-out and storm-tossed as Matt Damon’s Odysseus himself. I cowered – you will too – as the hideous Cyclops browsed over the limbs of the Greek hero’s men. I yelped at Scylla, the hydra-headed alien thing; I believed in that whirlpool. And when the much-enduring hero finally gets back to his home island of Ithaca and his faithful old dog Argus rouses himself from the dung heap where the horrible Suitors have flung him, and wags his tail because he recognises the master he has not seen for 19 years – and then promptly dies – I can tell you that I thought of our dog Dilyn, and the hot tears coursed down my cheeks. Christopher Nolan is the first man in 2,700 years to begin to do cinematic justice to The Odyssey. He is the only man who has come close to capturing the surf-crashing grandeur of the epic. Out of those 12,109 dactylic hexameters he has found the big psychological punch of the drama – a young man growing up without a father, his lovely but despairing mother still loyal to her husband’s memory, bravely fending off the lubricious and aggressive advances of the men who surround her; and then the joy of the sudden and glorious return of the king. It is a fantastic, elemental story, and in its essence The Odyssey has never been better retold. If Nolan were living in the age of Aeschylus, he would take the bronze tripod, the first prize in one of the annual dramatic competitions. Like Aeschylus he has taken scraps from the rich banquet of Homer, and he has given us a feast; and yet this is not, of course, the full banquet of Homer. The film is wonderful, but there are so many wonderful things that are missing, and whose absence can only be explained by the great gulf in attitudes between Homer’s time and our own, and – let’s face it – the tender sensibilities of our age. In trying to shoot The Odyssey for a modern audience, Nolan’s first and biggest problem is the plot: because he needs to explain quite why the man seems to dawdle so much on the way home. Christopher Nolan is the first man in 2,700 years to begin to do cinematic justice to The Odyssey, writes Boris Johnson In trying to put it all into three hours Nolan has of course failed to do justice to the original, because that would be impossible. Never mind. It is a heroic start By the time the film begins, all the other heroes have long since made it back from the Trojan War to Greece, some to a hero’s reception, others to be stabbed in the bath. If Odysseus is so darn clever, why can’t he find a quicker and more reliable means of transport? Some cynic once said that no man ever travels for long except to escape his wife, and since Odysseus is nine years late, you would think Penelope deserves a pretty good excuse. Well, Homer gives Odysseus his first and main excuse, and it’s a corker. It’s the gods! There’s Poseidon, god of the sea, who has it in for Odysseus because he kills his son Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops. Then there is Helios, the sun god, who is also cheesed off because Odysseus’ men have eaten his sacred cattle. Both of them have gone to Zeus, the king of the gods, and complained about this behaviour and Zeus has accepted that they have a legitimate grievance. And though the hero has some gods who are very much on his side – Athena, for instance, and Hermes – the result is that Poseidon alone is responsible for all sorts of shipwrecks and other logistical foul-ups that keep sending him back to square one. That is how Homer explains it, and it is an explanation his audience would have very largely understood. The trouble for Christopher Nolan is that this is almost impossible to depict convincingly to a 21st century audience. Homer’s world is stocked with a parallel cast of immortals – feasting, plotting, quarrelling – rather like the Hindu pantheon in their number and diversity. Sometimes their antics are comical, like the moment when Hephaestus – the god of metallurgy – manages to catch his wife Aphrodite (goddess of love) in flagrante delicto with Mars, the god of war. Hephaestus traps them both with an iron net, which the rest of the gods find so funny that the whole of Mount Olympus shakes with their unquenchable laughter. It is a mistake to think that the Greeks dismissed all this as mere fables, or a picturesque metaphor. They genuinely thought the world was infused with the divine – a divine that needed to be propitiated at all times – in a way that we just don’t. In this profoundly sceptical age, Nolan could see that it would greatly weaken his story to claim that Odysseus’ nine year no-show was genuinely caused by some celestial grudge. Suppose you went to your beloved, and said, sorry I didn’t catch the train back last night, darling, Poseidon the girdler of the earth caused a points failure, or Apollo of the silver bow struck down the driver with a sudden sickness. It just isn’t plausible; and that is one of the reasons why the gods are omnipresent in Homer, but very largely absent in Nolan. What does that leave him? How else can he explain the extraordinary dilatory performance of Odysseus in making his way back to Penelope? There is another reason, I am afraid, and one that is completely unacceptable to our progressive way of thinking. I must break it to you gently – because Nolan’s film conceals the truth – that when Odysseus is delayed for seven years on the island of Ogygia, in the company of the sea-nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), their relationship is not Platonic. He sleeps with her every night. It is fair to say that this relationship is hard to avoid for Odysseus, in the sense that Calypso is semi-divine and prevents him from leaving. It can also be entered in the defence of Odysseus that though she is said to be extremely beautiful and though Odysseus voluntarily shares her bed, we are explicitly told by Homer that she is much keener on sex than he is. I am afraid no such defence can be mounted in the case of his romance with Circe, the enchantress who turns his men into pigs. According to Nolan’s version, Circe has had some kind of bad experience with men, and thinks they are all pigs anyway. Nolan’s Circe (played with guile and menace by Samantha Morton) emphatically does not have a sexual relationship with Odysseus. But she is not the Circe of Homer. In the epic, Odysseus manages to spend a whole year with Circe – after his men have been restored to human form – eating meat and drinking wine and generally sexually canoodling this sorceress, while poor Penelope is demonstrating enormous moral restraint at home. Anne Hathaway gives a fantastic performance as the abandoned but faithful wife – playing Penelope in the blockbuster film Go and see the film, because it’s great – but read the poem because it’s much, much better, says Boris Johnson Anne Hathaway gives a fantastic performance as the abandoned but faithful wife, still virtuous, still defiant, still contemptuous of the dozens of Suitors living riotously under her roof. But she is ever more conscious of the weakness of her position. We see her desperation, as she finally announces to the crapulous throng that she will indeed marry one of them – but only when she has finished her tapestry; and we see her trying to stave them off by spending the evenings secretly unpicking what she has done during the day. There is a fundamental imbalance, and injustice, in the position of husband and wife, and you can see Nolan’s artistic problem. There is a risk – if he follows Homer – that Odysseus will appear a complete creep. How can he spend so many years away from his wife – mainly in the arms of beautiful women – when Penelope is being so magnificently faithful at home? The awful truth is that Homer’s Odyssey seems to involve complete double standards about male and female marital fidelity. The poet dwells extensively on the adulteries of Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, and much is made of the disasters that both women caused. But Odysseus? No one seems to bat an eyelid. The whole thing seems to go against the most basic modern ideas of gender equality. So what can Nolan do? He can’t explain the delay by reference to the gods; he can’t possibly mention these sexual dalliances. So the director has cudgelled his brain and produced an excuse that sounds vaguely credible to us, but would have sounded utterly ridiculous, I am afraid, to Homer, and to Odysseus. It turns out that Odysseus is stricken with guilt about the Trojan Horse. He fooled the people of Troy, persuading them to accept a horse packed with Greek soldiers in the belief that it was a gift – and thereby enabled the sack of Troy and the massacre of so many civilians. The whole thing has left him with such Nam flashbacks and PTSD that he needs time on an island to recuperate. I mean honestly. What a load of total cobblers. Homer’s Odysseus doesn’t suffer from guilt about the Trojan horse. Homer’s Odysseus rejoices in his cleverness and ingenuity. There we have the final big lacuna of the film. There aren’t enough gods. There isn’t anything like enough sex. There isn’t any humour at all. Homer’s Odyssey contains the first great joke in western literature. When Polyphemus the one-eyed monster traps him in his cave, he asks Odysseus his name, and the hero replies ‘Outis’, which means nobody. So when the Greeks have later blinded the Cyclops, by sticking a sharpened olive branch in his eye, Polyphemus rushes out of his cave screaming and shouting about his injury. ‘Who has done this to you?’ say the other Cyclopes. ‘Nobody did it to me,’ he says, to which they of course reply that if nobody did it they can’t see why he is complaining. Homer’s Odyssey has light and dark, comedy as well as pathos. The poem has delicate vignettes like the shock of Nausicaa and her girlfriends when they go down to the sea to do the washing, and a naked and salt-caked Odysseus comes out of the bush. The poem has lingering and intricate descriptions of parties, and palaces, and how to mix and drink wine. Nolan’s Odyssey is altogether starker, grimmer, more apocalyptic. Better than anyone yet he has captured that sense of the awfulness of war, the horror and nothingness of death, and the longing to be home. Homer has all that – but intensified by a complementary interest in the joys and pleasures of life. In trying to put it all into three hours Nolan has of course failed to do justice to the original, because that would be impossible. Never mind. It is a heroic start. We have the atmosphere, the locations, the rough idea. What we need now is 24 one-hour shows, an episode for each of Homer’s books. Go and see the film, because it’s great. But read the poem because it’s much, much better. Now DONALD TRUMP slams Thomas Tuchel's 'unusual' tactics: US President bizarrely takes aim at England boss for playing 'great guy' Harry Kane 'in defence'