Written May 2026. Before the film was released.
In years to come students of film and cultural studies will contemplate the hatred that swirled around Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey before it was released.
The publicity for the film has been greeted with howls of scorn and outrage. Admittedly the latest trailer does seem strange. The Greeks are rowing what looks to me like a Viking Longship. Batman is on the beach at Troy. There are giants in silver armour. There’s a shot of armed men running after our hero yells, ‘Let’s go’ which unfortunately sounds to me like something from that lost Enid Blyton epic: ‘Five went to Troy’.
There’s an almost hysterical hatred of Emily Wilson’s translation of the poem. Often voiced by people who haven’t read the translation and/or don’t know any Greek.
Leave all that aside.
If you’re writing dialogue for characters in the past what words do you use? Do you try to make them sound like convincing people in a believable situation, no matter how fantastical, or do you make them sound like your idea of a character declaiming lines in an ancient epic.
Do they speak modern English appropriate to their class and situation? Or do you make them speak a version of English no one has ever spoken? It's a problem everyone writing any kind of historical fiction has to solve.
There’s a fragment of a conversation in the trailer.
Penelope; Come back to me
Odysseus: What if I can’t?
Although it’s not clear what comes before and after this exchange, one commentator derided this as flat, and compared it to a snippet of dialogue from Troy (2204). He offers this as how it should be done. Achilles, about to rape a captive girl, says to her:
‘The god’s envy us. They envy us because we are mortal. Because any moment might be our last. Everything’s more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.’
It's a tidy demonstration of the problem. Two points marking a continuum along which you can place your dialogue.
Odysseus is leaving his wife. What would you have him say?
Two people are confronting their worst fears. A queen without a king is nothing. She is vulnerable to an extreme that’s hard for a modern person to understand.
‘Come back to me.’ distils that?
But what if Odysseus replies in the Brad Pitt Style.
Penelope: Come back to me.
Od’: These are the moments in our life when we are tested by the Gods. I pray to almighty Zeus, to Poseidon, shaker of cities, to grey eyed Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, that they will hold me in their favour, smooth my path and calm the seas so that I may return to you.'
A man in control of himself might speak like this. But rhetoric is false and requires self-control: the self-control of an Achilles knowing that even if Briseis disagrees with him, or thinks he’s a idiot, it makes no difference to what’s about to happen.
On the other hand, we have a situation which is so threatening to the participants they are reduced a terrified honesty? Neither is in control. He understands her fear, but cannot reassure here because he can’t reassure himself.
‘What If I can’t?’ translates: ‘What if all my famous intelligence and cunning is not sufficient in a situation where I cannot count the variables let alone predict or control them. What if the Gods favour the Trojans?’
Would you have him spell this out? Telling Penelope what she knows? Would she be reassured by a lecture on fate and individual will?
It’s difficult to discuss because how the characters speak in the rest of the film would qualify the discussion. If there are times in the film when Odysseus defaults to rhetoric, then these will be the times when the audience knows he’s performing, when we can doubt his sincerity, because we would remember how he spoke when he was sincere.
Which style do you prefer?
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