Entertaining Angels: Nolan’s Odyssey and What We Owe the Stranger
Aqsa Ijaz on the Tradition of Classical Texts and Their Adaptations
The classics are never as settled as the shelves on which we place them. They return whenever the present discovers that its most urgent questions have already been imagined in the stories of the past. We may think of our age as enthralled by novelty, and its writers as burdened by what Harold Bloom called the “anxiety of influence,” yet contemporary culture remains crowded with ancient lovers, forgotten victims, maligned queens, and canonical heroes demanding to be heard anew.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the newest, and by far the most extravagantly scaled, chapter in this history of return. Viewers whose knowledge of Homer comes largely through cultural circulation recognize Odysseus as the ingenious wanderer, Penelope as the faithful wife who waits, and Ithaca as the promised end of an arduous voyage. The film retains these outlines but redistributes their moral weight. Odysseus’s ingenuity becomes inseparable from culpability; Penelope’s waiting becomes an active form of moral endurance; homecoming becomes an audit of everything his heroism has cost. These transformations constitute the film’s reading of Homer. They also reveal the interventionist power of retelling and adapting: its ability to use what an audience already knows to disclose what familiarity has concealed. Submerged tensions, neglected consequences, and unrealized moral possibilities rise into view. Nolan draws on Homer’s cultural memory and cultural capital to make an ancient hero answerable to the ethical demands of the present.
The film is precisely this movement into a new moral key that we have failed to hear in much of the criticism that has generated around it. Writing in the London Review of Books, Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of Homer, readily acknowledges that adaptations may acquire their greatest power through radical transformation. Nevertheless, her review takes shape as a ledger of Homeric losses. Nolan’s characters are flatter, his psychology thinner, his treatment of war, memory, time, and homecoming impoverished beside the poem’s extraordinary amplitude. Many of these observations are entirely fair: no three-hour commercial film could preserve Homer’s narrative breadth or psychological density. As an exposition of what Homer possesses and Nolan omits, Wilson’s critique is formidable. As an encounter with Nolan’s retelling, I think it is curiously incurious. The expertise that enables her to identify everything that has fallen away leaves surprisingly little space for what the film has brought into view.
Paul Losensky’s account of the Persian term taqlīd offers a striking image for understanding this relationship between the so-called original and an adaptation. Loosely translated as “imitation,” taqlīd derives from the act of fastening a collar, rope, ornament, or sword belt around another’s neck. The image gradually acquired the sense of unthinking submission: the receiver is bound to the giver and led where the giver chooses. Approached through the logic of taqlīd, the original becomes master and the adaptation its obedient dependent, valuable chiefly insofar as it follows the path prescribed for it. But retelling begins where obedience ends.
Linda Hutcheon describes adaptation as “repetition without replication,” an interpretive and creative act shaped by the interplay of recognition and difference. For audiences unfamiliar with the source, an adaptation can stand as an autonomous work. For knowing audiences, memory creates a second register: each scene carries the echo of an earlier version, and every alteration acquires significance through that remembered presence. The pleasure of adaptation arises from this movement between familiarity and surprise. Recognition draws an audience into a world it already feels able to inhabit; variation unsettles the assumptions attached to that world. At its most consequential, the process carries moral as well as aesthetic force. A familiar story like the Odyssey then becomes a site of novelty, reckoning, and shock, while the security of recognition gives those disruptions their intensity.
That ethical reorientation explains why Ezra Klein calls Nolan’s Odyssey “the political movie of the decade.” His reading carries Nolan’s moral argument directly into our own world. Klein recognizes a Homeric logic of retaliatory violence in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack and in an Israeli response increasingly governed by the fantasy of “hundredfold revenge”: injury becomes a warrant for vastly magnified retribution, while power supplies its own moral justification. Klein finds the same trickster ethic in the ascendancy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, figures whose ability to violate norms, manipulate attention, and escape consequence has become central to their political charisma. Nolan turns that ethic back upon itself. The qualities that make Odysseus heroic—his cunning, audacity, adaptability, and command of deception—gradually disclose their destructive, self-consuming underside. The trickster who masters every situation must eventually confront the world his mastery has damaged. Familiarity becomes an instrument of indictment: the hero we remember returns as a mirror of a political culture being devoured by its admiration for force, impunity, and revenge.
The film also retrieves from the archaic world a law capable of judging such power. At the center of Nolan’s Odysseystands the law of Zeus, the ancient code of xenia that bound host to stranger and made hospitality a measure of civilization. Nolan expands this inherited obligation into what Klein identifies as the film’s “central trick”: a Jewish and Christian ethic of reciprocity enters the Homeric world. Zeus’s protection of the wanderer begins to echo Leviticus’s injunction to love the foreigner, Hillel’s refusal to inflict upon another what one finds hateful, and the Gospel’s command to treat others as one wishes to be treated. The stranger’s claim no longer depends upon kinship, usefulness, or likeness. It interrupts the moral enclosure by which a person or a nation makes its own suffering absolute.
Yet the Homeric law already contains a radical uncertainty. The stranger may be more than the figure who appears at the door. Athena arrives in Ithaca disguised as Mentes, and Telemachus welcomes her before he knows that he has received a goddess. The Phaeacians feed and shelter the shipwrecked Odysseus before asking his name. Eumaeus receives his master as an unknown beggar; the suitors reveal their unfitness to rule by abusing that same man. The Cyclops, who devours those seeking shelter and mocks the protection of Zeus, embodies the collapse of civilized order. In each encounter, judgment falls during the interval before identity is disclosed. The hidden god makes hospitality a judgment under uncertainty. Divine disguise makes unknowing the point: one must honor the stranger before rank, affinity, or power supplies a reason.
Why, then, has criticism around the movie proved so much more adept at cataloguing Nolan’s departures than at describing this crucial intervention? Rita Felski has observed that the affective range of academic criticism remains remarkably narrow: exquisitely articulate in its adversarial modes and excruciatingly tongue-tied before the work that art performs upon its audiences. Wilson’s review exemplifies this limitation. Its erudition illuminates Homer, yet it leaves little room for the possibility that the film has perceived something urgent in the epic and made it newly visible. Criticism adequate to retelling needs two forms of attention: precision about what transformation leaves behind, and receptivity to what it releases. The first preserves the density of the old work. The second recognizes why an old story has returned now.
The stakes of Nolan’s return become even clearer when xenia is placed within a wider constellation of ancient stories. At the oaks of Mamre, Abraham looks up and sees three men standing near his tent. He runs to meet them, offers water, rest, bread, and meat, and only afterward does the narrative disclose the magnitude of the visitation. In Ovid’s account of Baucis and Philemon, Jupiter and Mercury travel in mortal disguise and find door after door barred against them. The poor elderly couple receive the strangers into their small house and place before them everything they can offer; their humble dwelling becomes a temple.
The Apostle Paul’s “Letter to the Hebrews” turns this recurring scene into an enduring admonition: hospitality may mean entertaining angels without knowing it. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ goes further and identifies himself with the stranger who is welcomed or refused. Jacob belongs to this imaginative constellation in another register. Alone at night, he wrestles with an unnamed man until daybreak and emerges wounded, renamed, and blessed. Only after the encounter does he declare that he has seen God face to face. These stories locate moral and spiritual transformation in the presence of a figure who cannot yet be known. The decisive act—welcome, resistance, endurance, care—precedes certainty. Divinity intensifies the stakes of that interval, where the unknown other exceeds every category available to contain him.
Nolan draws this encounter inward as well. Odysseus comes home as a stranger to Ithaca, to Penelope, and finally to himself. The war has produced a man whom the returning king does not fully know: a self formed through grief, guilt, pride, and the long exercise of violence. His final monster is therefore inseparable from the hero he has learned to admire. Such inward hospitality begins with recognition. The unknown self must be admitted into consciousness before judgment, restraint, or transformation becomes possible. If the stranger at the threshold can carry a god, the stranger within can carry an unspent moral possibility—the capacity to become answerable to lives one’s heroism has injured.
Robert Pogue Harrison’s account of Ulysses gives this homecoming a longer historical scale. Dante had already recast Homer’s homeward-bound wanderer as a centrifugal adventurer, unmoved by the claims of father, son, or wife and driven beyond the Pillars of Hercules by his hunger for knowledge. Later centuries discovered themselves in this figure. His outward flight came to embody the energies of Renaissance humanism, transoceanic exploration, scientific discovery, colonial expansion, and the modern dream of technological self-transcendence. Harrison suggests that this Ulyssean age has reached its volta do mar: the oceanic turn by which an outward voyage finds the winds that can carry it home. On a finite and ecologically imperiled planet, heroism acquires a different direction. It lies in acknowledging limits, becoming answerable to the world that has borne the costs of our expansion, and learning to inhabit the only home available to us. Nolan gives that historical turn an intimate and political form. Ithaca becomes both limit and tribunal, the place from which the voyage receives its moral judgment.
The retelling itself begins to resemble xenia. An old story arrives in unfamiliar dress and asks to be received before its identity is fully known. Recognition grants it entry; difference reveals what it has carried across time. Nolan receives Homer by altering him, and the film asks its viewers for the same generosity of attention. It asks us to remain with the unfamiliar version long enough to discover why the ancient wanderer has appeared at our door in this form.
Nolan turns one of the foundational heroes of the Western tradition into a mirror for a society still enthralled by men who violate every limit and call that violation greatness. From the same tradition, he retrieves a law by which such men might be judged. The stranger in these older stories may be a god, an angel, an enemy, a beggar, or the unacknowledged self born through suffering and pride. Each arrives bearing a claim that precedes recognition. That claim is also the gift of retelling: the past returns in a form strange enough to disclose who we have become. The deepest question of Nolan’s Odyssey is whether a civilization that has abandoned the law of the guest and stranger can still find its way home.
Aqsa Ijaz is an essayist, musician, translator, and comparative literary scholar who teaches Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu in the Department of Language Studies, as well as courses in the history of religions and South Asian Humanities in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her forthcoming monograph with Edinburgh University Press, Shaping the Language of Love: Reading Niẓāmī Ganjavī’s Khusrau o Shīrīn in Persianate India (Thirteenth to Nineteenth Centuries), traces the medieval poem’s reception across Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi literary traditions and develops a transregional account of Persianate literary history beyond monolingual and nation-bound models. She is a Contributing Editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.
