Imagine then, for a moment, not the darkness of the cinema so much as the darkness of the king and queen’s pillared hall, where guests are gathered for feasting and for telling stories. Against the flickering fire, the bard strikes up with his harp and starts to sing, performing tales of adventure and loss, return and homecoming, of war and death and the fragile, tender threads that hold a husband and wife and a family together.
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie has all the hopes of a summer blockbuster pinned to it, and all the promise – as the trailers have showed – of magnificent effects, shocks and thrills. You will be taken inside the cave of the terrifying one-eyed giant, the Cyclops Polyphemus, who likes to dine on human flesh. You will visit the dim and misty shores of the land of the dead, where no warm-blooded human should ever tread. You will flee the pounding tread of cannibals. You will be tossed on stormy seas sent surging by vengeful gods.
And all of this spectacular adventure, for sure, is part of the Odyssey, one of the first great works of world literature, which was written down soon after the Greeks acquired the technology to do so, probably in the 600s or 500sBC. The ancient Greeks attributed the poem to a man called Homer, often described as a blind bard from the island of Chios.
In recent centuries, though, the idea that the poem can be meaningfully called the work of one single creator has been firmly called into question. Particularly after the 1930s, when the American classicist Milman Parry studied the composition techniques of nonliterate epic singers in the Balkans, it became clear that the Odyssey, and the other Homeric Greek epic, the Iliad, were written forms of poems that drew on a long oral tradition. That means that versions of what we call the Odyssey were – perhaps for centuries, long before they were consigned to writing – performed by bards, using a combination of memory and on-the-hoof improvisation….
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2026/jul/12/christopher-nolan-odyssey-influence
++++++++++++++++
After the truth-shower 