Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is far from the first committed to screen. As early as 1911, Italian director Guiseppe de Liguoro made a silent version entitled L’Odissea. Readers of a certain age may remember watching the futuristic animated series Ulysses 31 throughout the 1980s. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is based on The Odyssey. So too, if you squint as hard as you can and discount the Goofy Goober song, is the first SpongeBob SquarePants movie.
However, the pre-Nolan adaptation that has the biggest legacy is arguably Andrei Konchalovsky’s two-part version, made in 1997 for the Hallmark Channel. This is the adaptation that has been doing the rounds in recent days, clipped up on social media (the full version is highly discoverable on YouTube) and catching the eye of Joyce Carol Oates, who spent much of Thursday night tweeting very enthusiastically about it.
The scene that first caught Oates’s eye concerned Circe (played by Bernadette Peters), who rushes towards Odysseus (Armand Assante) and pushes his thighs apart, to better position herself against his crotch. This, she said, was a “much more interesting interpretation than Nolan.” She also praised its portrayal of Odysseus (“So manly, so fully human”), its Hades interlude (“mesmerizing”) and its comparative expansiveness (“which perhaps Nolan had not seen”).
It might be worth pointing out that, three decades ago, the adaptation was not received quite as warmly. At the time, TV Guide’s review said that it “plays like a ‘Classics Illustrated’ adaptation of the original work,” while the St Louis Post-Dispatch claimed that Konchalovsky “couldn’t decide whether to make a cheerful comic book, in the style of Xena: Warrior Princess, or a Greek tragedy”. The Arizona Republic reviewer said that “Even though the made-for-TV movie is only four hours long, I wasted a fifth stewing over how godawful it was,” while the Toronto Star – seemingly determined to find something good to say about it – mustered: “This Odyssey is not all an arduous task to sit through.”
Should you seek it out, two things are likely to strike you about the Hallmark Odyssey. The first is that it attracted a plethora of legitimately big stars. Greta Scacchi plays Penelope, Geraldine Chaplin plays Eurycleia, Christopher Lee plays Tiresias, Isabella Rossellini plays Athena, Vanessa Williams plays Calypso and (I’m aware this is stretching things a bit) Eric Roberts plays Eurymachus.
The second is that – and this goes double if Nolan’s film was your first experience of the story – the Hallmark Odyssey very much looks like something that was made for television three decades ago. It is a cavalcade of dodgy wigs and glued-on beards. The Trojan War is full of extras standing completely still in the background, listlessly clanking their swords together like they’re in a school play. The Cyclops is a giggling muppet bedevilled by a flute.
The biggest difference, of course, is that this version actually has gods in it. And, not to immediately contradict Joyce Carol Oates, but you might suspect that Nolan decided to leave them out of his version purely because of how awkwardly they are dealt with here. The most egregious inclusion is Hermes, played by Freddy Douglas, who is portrayed as a flying man with frosted tips who appears to be wearing a nappy. His every appearance is marked with egregious green screen use, and he zips about the sky like someone caught on the end of some fishing wire. It is spectacularly bad now, and it cannot possibly have looked convincing back in 1997 either. If you were Christopher Nolan trying to figure out how to adapt the poem to screen having watched this, you’d just try to pass all deities off as weather as well.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any similarities to the original. When he first meets Calypso, for example, Odysseus is just as ravaged by guilt and loss as he is in Nolan’s version. However, his manner of dealing with the guilt varies vastly. While Matt Damon willingly subjects himself to memory loss to prevent him from reflecting on the atrocities he carried out, Armand Assante decides to get over it by immediately having sex with Vanessa Williams. And I mean immediately. Like, straight away, in front of everyone. To his credit, it does seem to do the trick.
There is also the ending to consider. Homer’s poem famously splutters out into nothing, with the massacre of the suitors followed by the families of the dead coming for Odysseus until Athena tells everyone to cool it. Nolan’s attempt to tidy things up involved Odysseus voluntarily putting himself into exile after killing everyone. The 1997 Hallmark version, meanwhile, ends with Odysseus murdering everyone and then (you guessed it) immediately having it off with Greta Scacchi.
It is, all said, a weird egg. The Hallmark Odyssey is longer than Nolan’s film, and so it can fit more in. But it lacks the same intensity, propulsion and spectacle as Nolan’s film. Still, you have to admire Hallmark’s ambition to make something on this scale. If it had tried to adapt The Odyssey in 2026, it would have almost certainly been turned into a cheap Christmas movie called It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ithaca.
So, as fun as it is, we can safely assume that the Hallmark Odyssey has been comprehensively usurped by Christopher Nolan. And it is likely to stay this way, at least until Elon Musk decides to unveil his historically accurate Grok version.
