Nolan Films the Odyssey: The 2,700-Year-Old Travel Itinerary Behind Today's Biggest Release

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens in cinemas today — a $250 million adaptation of Homer's epic, shot entirely on IMAX film cameras across Greece, Sicily, Morocco, Scotland, Iceland and Ireland, with Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus. It is the most expensive film of Nolan's career, and the first blockbuster ever captured wholly in the IMAX format. But the source material has a claim the film cannot match: it may be the oldest travel itinerary in Western literature — and you can still sail most of it.

The book before the film: what the Odyssey actually is

The Odyssey is a poem of 12,109 lines of dactylic hexameter, divided since antiquity into 24 books, composed — most scholars agree — somewhere in the late eighth century BC. That makes it roughly 2,700 years old, and, together with the Iliad, one of the two oldest substantially complete works of Western literature. Whether a single poet called Homer wrote it is a genuine open question — classicists have argued the 'Homeric Question' since antiquity. The most influential modern answer came from the American scholar Milman Parry in the 1930s, who showed that the poem's repeated formulas — 'rosy-fingered dawn', 'wine-dark sea', 'much-enduring godlike Odysseus' — are the fingerprints of oral composition: memory scaffolding that let bards perform an epic of this length from memory, generations before it was ever written down.

The structure is startlingly modern. The poem opens in medias res — ten years after the fall of Troy, with Odysseus imprisoned on Calypso's island and his son Telemachus setting out to find news of him. The famous adventures — the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis — arrive as a flashback, narrated by Odysseus himself at a Phaeacian banquet, which means the epic's most fantastical stretch is told by literature's most celebrated liar. Nolan, a director who built a career on unreliable chronology, did not pick this material by accident.

Two dates worth knowing. The first English translation was George Chapman's, completed in 1616 — the version that, two centuries later, left Keats 'silent, upon a peak in Darien'. And in 2017, Emily Wilson became the first woman to publish an English translation of the complete poem, rendering it in plain, driving iambic pentameter that begins simply: 'Tell me about a complicated man.'

The characters Nolan had to get right

Odysseus himself is the ancestor of every reluctant, compromised screen hero since — Homer's first word for him is polytropos, 'the man of many turns'. Penelope is his intellectual equal: her trick of weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law by day and unpicking it by night held 108 suitors at bay for three years, and her final test of Odysseus — casually ordering their bed moved, when he alone knows he built it around a living olive tree — is the cleverest recognition scene in ancient literature. Telemachus gets the epic's first four books to himself, a coming-of-age story nested inside his father's homecoming. Around them: Athena scheming, Poseidon raging, Circe of Aeaea turning sailors into pigs, Calypso offering immortality and being refused, and the loyal dog Argos, who waits twenty years to see his master once more and dies the moment he does — four lines that have wrecked readers for nearly three millennia.

Did any of it happen? The data is stranger than you'd think

Troy, at least, is real. Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Hisarlik in north-west Turkey from 1870 uncovered a nine-layered Bronze Age citadel; the destruction layer archaeologists label Troy VIIa burned around 1180 BC, squarely in the window Greek tradition assigned to the war. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998, with a superb museum opened at the foot of the mound in 2018.

Then there is the eclipse. In Book 20, as the suitors sit down to their final meal, the seer Theoclymenus cries that 'the sun has perished out of heaven'. In 2008, two scientists — Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo Magnasco — published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noting that a total solar eclipse crossed the Ionian islands on 16 April 1178 BC, and that the poem's astronomical references — a new moon, Venus high before dawn — are consistent with that exact date. It remains contested, as all good Homeric arguments do. But the idea that the bloodiest scene in the epic preserves the memory of a real darkness over Ithaca, datable to the day, is the kind of detail that keeps this poem alive. (Eclipse-chasing is very much still a thing — our 2026 total solar eclipse guide covers next month's totality over Iceland and Spain.)

The route: where the ancients said it happened

The Greeks and Romans themselves played the location game — Strabo, writing his Geography around the time of Augustus, catalogued the candidates, and most of the traditional identifications have held for two thousand years. The land of the Lotus-Eaters was placed by Herodotus on the coast of modern Tunisia, traditionally the island of Djerba. The Cyclops belonged to the volcanic country under Etna in eastern Sicily — the sea stacks at Aci Trezza are still called the Faraglioni dei Ciclopi, the rocks the blinded giant hurled at the escaping ship. Scylla and Charybdis guarded the Strait of Messina — there is a Calabrian town named Scilla on the exact spot, and the strait's whirlpool-generating currents are a documented oceanographic phenomenon. Circe's island Aeaea was pinned to Monte Circeo on the Lazio coast south of Rome, which still carries her name. Calypso's Ogygia is claimed by Gozo, Malta's second island, complete with a signposted Calypso Cave above Ramla Bay. And Scheria, where shipwrecked Odysseus washes up at the feet of the princess Nausicaa, was identified with Corfu as early as Thucydides.

Ithaca itself is the best argument of all. The obvious answer — the Ionian island still called Ithaki — has a problem: Homer describes Odysseus' kingdom as 'low-lying' and 'furthest towards the dark', which modern Ithaki, mountainous and hemmed in by larger islands, is not. In 2005 the British researcher Robert Bittlestone proposed that Homer's Ithaca was the Paliki peninsula of neighbouring Kefalonia, arguing it was once a separate island before earthquakes and rockfall filled the channel — a thesis pursued with geologists from the University of Edinburgh and published as Odysseus Unbound. Geological drilling has neither confirmed nor killed it. Either way, the search area is one of the most beautiful sailing grounds on earth.

Sailing it yourself

This is the part Homer's audience would understand best: the Odyssey is a sea story, and the sea is still there. The Ionian — Ithaki, Kefalonia, Lefkada, Zakynthos — is Greece's gentlest charter water, all afternoon breezes and deep sheltered bays; our superyacht guide to the Greek islands covers the ground, and if you're weighing island groups, the Greek islands decision matrix settles Cyclades versus Ionian versus Dodecanese in one table. A serious Odyssey route runs it in reverse: Corfu south through the Ionian to Ithaki and Kefalonia's Paliki coast, across to Sicily for the Cyclops country and the Strait of Messina, finishing at Malta for Calypso's Gozo — three countries, one wine-dark sea. The Mediterranean charter overview explains how cross-border itineraries like that actually work.

Travelling by land instead? Base yourself where the film did. Nolan's crew spent months on Favignana in Sicily's Egadi Islands and around Pylos in the Peloponnese — Methoni Castle and the perfect horseshoe of Voidokilia beach both appear, a short drive from Nestor's palace at ancient Pylos, the real Mycenaean site where Telemachus begins his search in Book 3. Compare stays before you commit: live rates on Kefalonia for the Ithaca question, eastern Sicily for Cyclops country, and Gozo for seven years with Calypso — or at least a long weekend. Stringing the three countries together is a multi-city flight problem; Kiwi builds self-transfer routings that the airlines' own sites won't show you.

Why it still works

The Odyssey has survived 2,700 years, one questionable authorship, several thousand translations and now a quarter-billion-dollar film because its subject never dates: the journey home is the only trip everyone takes. Homer's genius was to understand that the destination is not the point — Ithaca is a rocky island of no great wealth, and Odysseus turns down literal immortality to get back to it. The Greek word for it is nostos, the homecoming; it gave us 'nostalgia', the ache for return. Nolan has the IMAX cameras. Homer had the better travel insight: as the poet Cavafy put it in 1911, pray that the road is long. Ithaca gave you the marvellous journey — without her you would not have set out.

The Odyssey is in cinemas worldwide from today, 17 July 2026, including 70mm IMAX engagements. The poem is out of copyright and everywhere; Emily Wilson's translation (W. W. Norton, 2017) is the place to start.

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