Why directors keep picking the wrong Homer
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey announcement reveals something odd about how Hollywood reads the classics
What if the problem isn't that Hollywood butchers great books, but that it keeps choosing the wrong great books?
Christopher Nolan just announced he's adapting The Odyssey, and honestly, I can't shake the feeling this is backwards. According to BookRiot's CinemaCon coverage, he's calling it "a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new film technology." Which sounds exactly like what you'd expect. Epic battles, stormy seas, maybe some very expensive Cyclops.
But here's what keeps nagging at me: The Odyssey is already perfectly cinematic.
Meanwhile, Taika Waititi is adapting Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, which actually makes sense. That book lives in the spaces between what's said and what's understood. Klara's solar-powered consciousness, the way she processes human emotion through her artificial lens, the quiet horror of what "lifting" really means to Josie's family. That's material that needs a director who can find warmth in weird places.
I keep thinking about how Klara observes the world through the store window, cataloging human behavior she doesn't quite grasp. There's something almost documentary-like in Ishiguro's approach to her perspective. She notices everything and understands nothing, which creates this constant low-level tension.
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it feels like directors gravitate toward the classics that already work as movies instead of the ones that could become something entirely new on screen.
The real test will be whether Nolan can find something in Homer that we haven't seen before. His best films take familiar concepts and twist them into pretzels. The Odyssey might be too sturdy for that kind of manipulation.
Or maybe that's exactly what it needs.
