The Odyssey and Existentialist Anti-Adventure

By David Sorfa

I have been interested in existentialism and its relation to the study of film for a number of years and have recently put together a special issue of the journal Film-Philosophy (Vol 30, Iss 2-3, 2026) on the topic with my colleague Lucy Bolton at Queen Mary University of London. I think that the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and more, has much to offer the understanding of cinema and television in the contemporary world and I teach a course on Film and Existentialism at the University of Edinburgh. I am always interested in how current films can be viewed through an existentialist lens, and, here, I put my oar into the seas of hubbub around The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026).

Heading Out

The ancient Greek king, Odysseus, also known as Ulysses by the Romans, leaves the island of Ithaca, sometime around 1250 BCE, to go to Troy, in modern-day Türkiye, to demand the return of Helen, wife of another Greek king, who had run off with Paris. After ten years of battle, Odysseus breaks the siege of Troy by hiding his men in a wooden horse, left as an ostensible gift for the Trojans. Odysseus then spends the following decade trying to get back home to Ithaca, and this journey forms the basis of Homer’s The Odyssey (ca. 800 BCE) and a number of film versions, including, of course, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation. The story of The Odyssey is less of an adventure than an anti-adventure in that it charts a return after the adventure of conquering Troy has been completed. Emily Wilson, one of Homer’s English translators, says that it is “the story of a man whose grand adventure is simply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything back to the way it was before he went away.” Odysseus’s return is also structured like an adventure, but one in reverse.

Christopher Nolan has always been interested in such reversals of narrative form, from the repetitive memory loss of Memento (2000), to the trauma-recall of The Dark Knight (2008), to the back-and-forth time travelling of Interstellar (2014) and Tenet (2020). In The Odyssey (2026), Nolan begins at the end, and just as Homer does, gives us the story in flashback. We know where we are going to end up from the start. This doubled journey makes up the third part of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, as described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Following “Departure” and “Initiation” comes “The Return,” and while there will no doubt be many essays written to track Nolan’s film against Campbell’s seventeen stages (or Christopher Vogler’s twelve stages), it is the inevitability of the outcome of the hero’s quest that is of existentialist interest,

The Adventure Illusion

In their very recently published book, The Adventure Illusion: Why Life is Not a Journey (Bloomsbury, 2026), Simon Gusman and Arjen Kleinherenbrink argue that the normative force of adventure narratives is profoundly damaging. The problem is that the structure of the hero’s journey is not merely descriptive but that the structure must be applied not only to future narratives but to our own lives. In contrast, existentialism claims that every human being is radically free and that every choice we make is fully our own responsibility since there is no metaphysical guide to what we should do with our lives. Gusman and Kleinherenbrink worry that the adventure model is so attractive because it says that the hero’s life—and, by extension, our life— is given meaning by that adventure, by the quest. For the existentialist, there is no such quest and we are, as Jean-Paul Sartre says, “condemned to be free” (Being and Nothingness, 1943). The anti-existentialist hero, however, is not free and is governed, apparently, by destiny, fate, and the gods. This abnegation of freedom is what the existentialists call living in bad faith.

In the forward-moving adventure (Odysseus leaves Ithaca to help conquer Troy), the “ultimate ordeal,” to use Campbell’s terminology, is the wooden horse ploy used to infiltrate the besieged city, but in the return adventure, the ultimate test is Odysseus’s battle against the suitors hoping to marry Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Both events have a similarity: a disguise is used to enter a forbidden place.  The Greek soldiers hide inside a wooden effigy, while at the palace, Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar, and when Penelope sets a final challenge— the stringing of her husband’s bow— he steps forward to take his rightful place.

In both instances, Odysseus uses subterfuge to achieve his aim. So, our hero could be an existentialist trickster who uses whatever tools are at hand to achieve victory, regardless of social or political expectations. But why does he do all this? Why does he leave Ithaca in the first place, and why does he return? It is much clearer in Homer’s tale that it is the gods who determine his fate and that he, like all other human beings, has no choice but to follow the dictates of otherworldly beings. Of course, there is much more to say about the role of fate here, but I will focus on two parts of Nolan’s film to unpack this a little.

The Lost Seven Years

After three years of battling various monsters and obstacles, Odysseus winds up on an island trapped by Calypso (Charlize Theron). In the original story, he is kept prisoner against his will, but in Nolan’s version, he is fed lotus leaves that make him forget who he is, and so he has no choice but to stay since he no longer remembers who he is and what he is supposed to be doing. In one sense, he is in absolute bad faith here since, we existentialists might say, that he uses the excuse of being drugged to avoid his true freedom.

However, of course, Nolan-Odysseus would claim that the force of circumstances had prevented him from being able to act freely and so could not be in bad faith. If we shift the scale of the question away from the character in the film to the film itself, we could say that the film itself acts in bad faith, since Nolan has explicitly chosen to give Odysseus a psychological excuse for staying with Calypso, rather than a merely physical one as in Homer’s version. In Homer, though, Odysseus only escapes because the gods in Olympus decide that he should get on with his task and demand that Calypso set him free. Even there, Odysseus remains an oddly passive figure.

Heading West

In Homer, the story ends with Odysseus and Penelope reunited in Ithaca, but in Nolan, the couple leave their son Telemachus (Tom Holland) to rule and set off to the West to give proper homage to those that had died on his adventure without receiving proper burial rights. The Greek myths seem peculiarly obsessed with proper burials, but this is not the place to try and get to grips with that, and I will end with the observation that, in this film, the West represents freedom itself. We could read the West as standing in for the idea of the United States of America, and the freedom it offers is one that looks forwards (to individual freedom) but also backwards (to a reckoning with the past). Fate collapses in on itself.

What Does an Existentialist Anti-Adventure Look Like?

But I am not here to pour scorn or praise on Nolan’s film. I do not think that it offers a particularly interesting existentialist take on freedom or fate, but then, what films might do so? There are many other takes on The Odyssey, and it is perhaps in the freewheeling comedy of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2000) and its own reference point, Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941), where we can find more authentic expressions of existentialist anti-adventure. These are adventures where there are no gods and where every decision taken is one for which each character is absolutely responsible, not only to themselves but to everyone else.

Recommendations

• I would recommend this episode of the Moving Histories podcast on The Odyssey.

Here are some other films that deal with myths of Ancient Greece:

• The Return (Uberto Pasolini, 2024). Like Nolan’s film, this version begins as Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) returns to Ithaca, but does not use a flashback structure.

• Troy (Wolfgang Peterson, 2004). This follows Homer’s Iliad and focuses on Achilles (Brad Pitt) and his adventures in Troy. Odysseus (Sean Bean) is a minor character, but it is fun to see Brian Cox — from Succession — hamming it up as Agamemnon. Nolan casts one of the Uncut Gems (2019) directors, Benny Safdie, in that role, clearly channelling the spirit of Darth Vader.

• Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davis, 1981). In case you were wondering where all the gods had gone. This features stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen.

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About the author

Dr David Sorfa is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University  of Edinburgh. He is Programme Director of the MSc and PhD in Film Studies and has served as the Postgraduate Research Director for the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Film-Philosophy and convenes the Academic Committee of Edinburgh University Press. He was previously Head of Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University.

He has published work on existential imagining in film, the problem of freedom in independent American cinema, suicide in film, Czech cinema, surrealism, belief and the presentation of thought on screen. He has particular interests in existentialism, phenomenology, the philosophy of fiction, and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. 

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