The Odyssey for Dummies: Everything That Actually Happens, Before You See the Film

Christopher Nolan’s three-hour, IMAX-only, star-stuffed adaptation is finally in cinemas, and there’s a good chance you’re going in having last thought about Homer during a English lesson you mostly slept through. Good news: the actual plot of The Odyssey is somehow both messier and more entertaining than anything a school syllabus let on. Here’s what happens, minus the ancient Greek and minus three years of your life reading it properly (I did so I’m here to explain it to you)

First, the bit nobody tells you

The Odyssey isn’t really about the journey home. Or rather, it is, but Homer tells almost the whole thing backwards, in flashback, over a drink, at a dinner party. Odysseus spends most of the poem’s twenty-four books either stuck somewhere or being talked about by people who aren’t him. It’s less a road trip and more a slow-burn mystery about whether the most famous man in Greece is alive, dead, or just extremely late.

The setup: the Trojan War ended ten years ago. Odysseus, king of the island of Ithaca, was the bloke who came up with the Trojan Horse, so everyone assumed he’d be first home. He wasn’t. He’s been missing for a decade, and back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope is fending off a small army of men trying to marry her and take over his kingdom.

Meanwhile, his son Telemachus has gone from baby to young adult without a father in sight, and is starting to wonder if he’s ever going to see one.

That’s the actual starting point of the poem. Everything else, including all the monsters, is a story someone tells partway through.

Telemachus goes looking for his dad

Books one to four are essentially a spin-off nobody asked for but which turns out to matter.

Telemachus, fed up with the suitors eating him out of house and home, sets sail to visit two of his father’s old war buddies, hoping for news. He gets some: Odysseus is alive, but stuck. He’s a prisoner of sorts on an island, held by a nymph who doesn’t want to let him go.

This section exists mostly to build up Telemachus as a character in his own right, since he’s going to need to hold his own later. It’s also the section most adaptations trim down hardest, because “young man asks two other men for information” is not, strictly, an action sequence.

Calypso’s island, or seven years of a very nice prison

Here’s where we meet Odysseus properly, and he’s not doing great. He’s been on the island of the nymph Calypso for seven years. She’s in love with him, has offered him immortality if he stays, and he still wants to go home. The gods eventually intervene (mostly because the goddess Athena has been nagging her father Zeus about it for the whole poem) and Calypso is ordered to let him go.

He builds a raft. It goes badly. Poseidon, the sea god who has personally hated Odysseus since roughly book nine, wrecks it out of spite, and Odysseus washes up, half-drowned, on the shore of a completely different kingdom.

The flashback: how he actually got stuck

This is the part most people vaguely remember, and it’s told entirely as a story-within-a-story. Washed up and taken in by a friendly royal court, Odysseus is asked to explain who he is and how he got so lost.

What follows is basically him narrating his own highlight reel, and it’s the section with all the famous set pieces:

The Cyclops

Odysseus and his crew get trapped in a cave by Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant who eats several of his men. Odysseus gets them out by getting the Cyclops spectacularly drunk, blinding him, and escaping by clinging to the underside of his sheep. He also makes the mistake of shouting his real name back at the giant as they sail off, which is how Poseidon (Polyphemus’s father) finds out exactly who to be furious at for the rest of the poem.

The bag of winds.

A minor god gives Odysseus a bag containing every unfavourable wind, so his ship can sail home in peace. His crew, convinced it’s treasure he’s hoarding, open it while he’s asleep. The winds escape, the ship gets blown almost all the way back to where it started, and everyone’s mood worsens considerably.

The Laestrygonians

A tribe of giants who are, essentially, cannibals with excellent aim, and who destroy almost the entire fleet by throwing rocks at the ships from a cliff.

Circe

A witch-goddess who turns half of Odysseus’s remaining men into pigs. He resists her magic (with a bit of divine help), gets his men turned back, and ends up staying with her for a year, which the poem is remarkably breezy about.

The trip to the Underworld.

Circe tells him he needs to visit the land of the dead for directions. He does, and has a very awkward series of conversations with the ghosts of his mother, his old war comrades, and a blind prophet who tells him, ominously, exactly how badly things are going to go if he’s not careful.

The Sirens

Famous for their singing, less famous for the fact that the singing lures sailors to their deaths. Odysseus has his men plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast so he can hear the song without being able to do anything about it.

Scylla and Charybdis

A monster with six heads on one side of a strait, a ship-swallowing whirlpool on the other. There is no good option here. Odysseus picks the one that only kills six of his men instead of all of them.

The final wreck.

His men, starving, ignore a direct warning and eat the sacred cattle of the sun god. Every single one of them dies for it in the storm that follows. Odysseus alone survives, and drifts to Calypso’s island, which is where his story catches up to where the poem actually started.

Back to the present: the disguised homecoming

Once the flashback ends, the poem picks back up with Odysseus finally arriving home, and this is where it turns from adventure story into something closer to a heist. Athena disguises him as an old beggar so he can scope out the situation before revealing himself. He’s taken in, without recognising him, by his own loyal swineherd, and slowly reconnects with Telemachus, who’s just got back from his own trip.

Father and son team up, still in disguise, to work out how to deal with the suitors, who by this point number over a hundred men currently living in Odysseus’s house, eating his food, and pressuring his wife to remarry.

The contest of the bow

Penelope, worn down after twenty years, finally sets a challenge: whoever can string her husband’s old hunting bow and shoot an arrow through a row of axe heads can marry her. Every suitor tries. Every suitor fails, mostly humiliatingly. Then the old beggar asks for a turn, everyone laughs at him, and he strings it on the first attempt.

What follows is not a negotiation. Odysseus, Telemachus, and two loyal servants barricade the doors and kill every single suitor in the hall, in a fairly brutal sequence that the poem does not shy away from.

Reunion, eventually

Even after the bloodbath, Penelope doesn’t immediately believe the man in front of her is really her husband. Twenty years is a long time, and she’s cautious. She tests him by asking a servant to move their marriage bed out of their room, which is impossible, because Odysseus built it around a living olive tree years earlier and it can’t be moved without destroying it. Only the real Odysseus would know that. He does. That’s the moment she finally believes him.

The poem ends with some tidying up: a brief uprising from the suitors’ furious families, and Athena stepping in to broker peace before things spiral further.

What to expect from the film

Nolan’s version reportedly compresses and reorders a fair amount of this, since the flashback structure that works beautifully on the page tends to get simplified for the screen. Early reactions have singled out the Cyclops and Circe sequences as particular highlights, and Samantha Morton’s role has been widely praised, which tracks if her part leans into either the Circe or the Underworld material. Whether the film keeps the story-within-a-story format or tells it in a straight line remains to be seen.

Either way, you’re now equipped with more context than most of the audience. Enjoy the chaos.