The Best ‘Odyssey’ Adaptations That Aren’t by Christopher Nolan — Including, Yes, ‘The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie’

Christopher Nolan has produced a most stunning film adaptation of the Homeric epic — but only this side of Bikini Bottom.

Let’s talk about Odysseus. 

Not that IndieWire readers who have seen Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” are the only ones who’ve spent a lot of words trying to get a handle on this complicated man, of course. Odysseus has more Homeric epithets than pretty much anybody else who appears in the ancient poems, and he has been interpreted variously as a witty tactician, a stoic leader, and a lying fraudster who is, according to Dante, still leading his men around the eighth circle of Hell. 

In a lot of ways, it’s the mark of what makes Odysseus so compelling that he is both cunning and hot-headed, long-suffering and kingly, both favored by the Gods and cursed by them. But something happens in film adaptations of “The Odyssey” that take the legendary world of Archaic Greece as its setting. Odysseus… kinda ends up being your standard Noble Hero, complete with Modestly Badass Armor and Aragorn Beard Scruff and in absolutely no danger of (knowingly) committing adultery against his faithful wife waiting for him back home.

Now, in fairness, there is usually at least one beat that gestures toward Odysseus as a tactician. While he’s sitting around on that fucking beach for 10 years, maybe he sees a toy wooden horse and that gives him the idea for One Neat Trick to break into the walls of Troy. 

But whether it’s good old Sean Bean in Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 “Troy” or good old Armand Assante in the 1997 TV Miniseries or good old Matt Damon in this latest iteration, contemporary films — in their quest to make someone with swords and/or sandals seem relatable to us phone-clutchers today — can’t help but transform Odysseus into an animal that’s easier for us to get along with. A bronze-helmeted John McClane, who would simply like to get back to his wife, really, but will blind any Cyclops in front of him with extreme prejudice. Now I have the unstringable bow. Ho ho ho. 

If there’s a moment that shows what Christopher Nolan is doing in adapting the poem to explore his own interests in the travails, as our critic David Ehrlich put it, of a “hyper-capable but profoundly heartsick middle-aged man,” it’s a recurring piece of business with Odysseus’ bow. First seen in flashback as Antinous (Robert Pattinson) tells Penelope (Anne Hathaway) of his youthful admiration of Odysseus, the young Antinous (Raimy Lang, with his incredibly Pattinson-ish cheekbones) goes with the King of Ithaca on a hunt. Odysseus plucks his bowstring the moment before he shoots at a boar, because it’s only fair that his quarry has some warning. 

He does this noble quasi-salute again while hunting on Circe’s (Samantha Morton) island, and right before shooting suitor Polybus (Corey Hawkins) in the throat — although, notably, the Cyclops (Bill Irwin) gets no such warning of one last parting shot, nor do the Trojans taken in by Odysseus’ scheme with the horse. For Nolan, it’s a visual way (and aural, with some very cool backing from Ludwig Göransson’s score) of tracking Odysseus as a fundamentally moral man who deals in violence justly and sparringly, in comparison to the ambitious Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) or the prideful Menelaus (Jon Bernthal).     

All of which is valid, to be clear. It’s certainly no surprise within the ambit of Nolan’s filmography and the protagonists he’s drawn to as a storyteller. But the idea that Odysseus, one of the core trickster figures in the Western literary imagination, gives anybody a warning on account of being fair-minded is so risible that it actually took me out of the film, IMAX 70mm or no IMAX 70mm. It is one of the worst-offending cases of the character’s edges being sanded down in order to help us cross a gulf of time and tunics to empathize with Odysseus’ wanderings.

This is not a problem when you set the story of “The Odyssey” anywhere else. 

Probably the contemporary film example of an “Odyssey” that honors Odysseus the schemer, the man of many wiles, is George Clooney’s silver-tongued, escaped convict, Ulysses Everett McGill, in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” It’s wild how well it works. The Depression-Era South, as a setting for the Coen brothers’ film, is familiar to us and not. It’s full of monsters who just so happen to be con men, politicians, and klansmen, and far enough away from the reach of iPhone filters and drones that it still plausibly contains magic. 

Everett, like the Odysseus of the poem, doesn’t want to go home again until he’s loaded with treasure, and yet his quest to get rich quick keeps leading him into even more trouble. Damon’s performance in “The Odyssey” is a lot of things, but even at his most blindly ambitious and deceitful, he’s got nothing on Clooney’s arc from fast-talking snake oil man (apologies, Dapper Dan man) to “Wait, am I the asshole?” when he takes his first, halting, extremely reluctant steps toward selflessness. 

Neither extreme represents the whole of the character, of course. Odysseus lies at the center of a diamond of contradictions, and a single film can usually only ever see him through one or two facets. But it’s telling that the films set in the Ancient World™ don’t feel as comfortable playing with the morally ambiguous, scheme-y, wily facets of Odysseus. Or perhaps they’re overburdened with the bronze-plated imperative to convey his epic as an Important Story, where the hero changes the world such that it moves a little bit closer to the one we live in now. 

But “The Odyssey” is also a much more intimate story. It’s about “A man!” as Travis Scott’s bard memorably shouts at the beginning of the Nolan film. Not the man. But a man who desperately wants to return home to his family. If anything captures how the story is both epic in scope and all too ordinary, it is — I’m really not kidding about this — “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.” 

If you’re looking for the film that faithfully represents the most incidents from Homeric poem, it might well be “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.” SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Patrick’s (Bill Fagerbakke) quest to assuage the wrath of Neptune (Jeffrey Tambor) and unfreeze his best pal/boss Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) takes him to places where time passes deceptively quickly (the Goofy Goober/island of the Lotus Eaters), the cave of a strange and hostile monster (the Cyclops’ cave/Shell City), a terrifying realm of giant monsters (the island of the Laestrygonians/the Thug Tug), and a side trip to the underworld (the land of the dead/the Trench). 

Sure, the Sirens never tempted anybody with ice cream, and the friendly King Alcinous has nothing on David Hasselhoff, but the movie’s not-so-epic 87-minute running time does a great job of approximating the parts of Odysseus’ journey that make it so memorable. SpongeBob himself, too, is an agent of chaos with a heart of gold in the same way that Odysseus will raid and pillage and wake up hungover, and yet will also go to unspeakable lengths to do right by the people he loves. 

“The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” is a comedy proudly made for kids, and not for cinema-maxing, of course. But SpongeBob is just as unambiguously heroic as Damon’s Odysseus is (even if our favorite burger-flipping tamer of snails requires a gift from a certain daughter of a goddess to find his courage). And the movie’s able to get at something of the excitement and the imaginative delight that Odysseus himself takes in telling of his adventures in “The Odyssey” without ever being weighed down by them. 

If you look at alternative “Odysseys,” be they set in space or the streets of Dublin or the seafloor of Bikini Bottom, they are often able to explore more of Homer’s tale and hero than those that pin him down on the beaches in front of Troy. This is not to say that the journey Nolan takes is not worthwhile, nor Damon’s performance is unconvincing. It is, and it is convincing. But the poem’s opening asks the Muse to “tell the old story for our modern times.” Its hero need not look, nor behave, like our expectations for a man of the past.