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Even if you don’t have a degree in ancient literature, you probably know the broad strokes of Homer’s epic The Odyssey. It’s an adventure story about a guy sailing along to fight witches and giants and sea monsters, right? And even if that’s a simplistic take on The Odyssey (spoiler: it is), then surely the giant Hollywood blockbuster has to streamline the plot to appeal to the masses. Matt Damon‘s Odysseus is the good guy, and he’s going to beat up the bad guys to win and get home.
However, in a recent conversation with the LA Times, The Odyssey director Christopher Nolan intimated on a more complicated approach to the story. When discussing the monstrous Scylla, Nolan admitted, “I was very inspired by Guillermo del Toro.” He continues, “What I learned from him is that a monster is not a monster. You have to approach them the way you approach any other character.” If even a tentacled creature who threatens to destroy Odysseus’s crew while they try to avoid the horrifying Charybdis gets sympathy, then Nolan’s take on The Odyssey will be anything but simplistic.
On one hand, it’s not too surprising to learn that Christopher Nolan wants a complicated story. After his 1998 student film Following, Nolan broke out with the noir Memento, a film sold on the structural gimmick of being a story told in reverse chronology. Since then, Nolan has made numerous blockbusters with fractured, labyrinthine narrative structures.
However, that complexity tends to only extend to the plots of Nolan’s movies, specifically in relationship to time. On a character level, Nolan tends to be pretty simplistic. Bruce Wayne dresses like a bat because he wants to harness the fear caused by his childhood trauma. Cobb from Inception wants to get back to his wife. Coop from Interstellar wants to get back to his children. Even Oppenheimer, a more nuanced figure than most of Nolan’s protagonists, is at his core, a guy who wanted to pursue his vision and then felt guilty about what it cost.
It’s easy to see how Odysseus falls in line with these characters. A cunning but devoted warrior, Odysseus wants only to return home to Ithaca, to reunite with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. Throw in the flashbacks to the Trojan War and a 10-year journey that must be truncated, and The Odyssey feels ready-made for Nolan.
But the fact that Nolan looks to del Toro for the monsters suggests that he’s trying something new. As seen in everything from Pan’s Labyrinth to Hellboy to The Shape of Water, del Toro prefers monsters to people, and presents even the most frightening creature as a figure of beauty and compassion. Where Scylla could be nothing more than a beast that Odysseus and his crew must defeat to get past Charybdis and get back to Ithaca, the del Toro connection suggests that Nolan wants the monster to be real, to be a living creature deserving of empathy.
Scylla lends herself to such a story, as later myths described her as a beautiful nymph who was transformed into a monster after a curse. But the casting of Bill Irwin, a Tony award-winning actor and incredible physical performer who puppeteered TARS in Interstellar, as the Cyclops Polyphemus indicates that he’ll be humanizing all of the monsters.
Thus far, audiences have turned out in droves to support Nolan’s complex narrative style. Hopefully, they’ll be just as excited to see him complicate The Odyssey‘s monsters.
The Odyssey plays in theaters on July 17, 2026.
The post The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan’s Guillermo del Toro Connection Promises a More Complicated Adventure appeared first on Den of Geek.
