July 13, 2026
Contact: Cary Littlejohn, carylittlejohn@missouri.edu
Photo by Abbie Lankitus
Jim Crozier has spent his career helping students unlock the power of ancient storytelling. Now, the University of Missouri classics professor is watching the world turn its attention to one of the field's most revered works.
As Christopher Nolan's long-anticipated adaptation of “The Odyssey” hits theaters, Crozier is thinking a lot about nostalgia. It’s an oft-used word to describe the rationale behind a lot of our current popular culture: movies and TV shows that rely on retellings of familiar stories to get audiences invested.
In Mizzou’s College of Arts and Science classrooms, Crozier regularly uses Homer’s epics to help students explore those timeless themes, including identity, home and human resilience.
“‘The Odyssey’ is the original nostalgia story,” Crozier, a recent recipient of the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, said. “It’s the granddaddy of them all. The Greek roots of that word are ‘nostos,’ which means ‘homecoming,’ and ‘algos,’ which means ‘pain’ or ‘longing.’”
The epic poem follows King Odysseus on his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War, facing monsters, shipwrecks and divine intervention along the way. But beneath the adventure lies a family drama: Back in Ithaca, more than 100 suitors have taken over his home and are pressuring his wife, Penelope, to remarry.
“The enduring attraction of ‘The Odyssey’ is in the wanderings,” Crozier said. “It’s so action-packed.”
“The Odyssey” also satisfies moviegoers’ yearnings for summertime blockbusters, as the story serves as a blueprint for numerous action-packed films. Odysseus’ men in the Cyclops’ cave paved the way for monster films such as Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” His men’s clash with the Laestrygonians — giant cannibalistic monsters — gave us every zombie film ever made, from “Night of the Living Dead” to the “28 Days Later” franchise, Crozier said.
There’s little mystery as to why Nolan, whose directorial resume includes three Batman films, would be interested in “The Odyssey.” While doing press for the film, he said that modern comic-book culture “comes pretty directly from the Homeric epics.”
Drawing on his decades of teaching and scholarship at Mizzou, here’s what Crozier will be watching for in this latest adaptation of a timeless tale.
Incorporation of the Trojan War
One aspect of the film that excites Crozier is the amount of freedom Nolan will have to depict the Trojan War, the decade-long conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans after Helen, wife of Menelaus, was kidnapped.
“‘The Odyssey’ is just one of a group of poems — nostos epics — that are related to the Trojan War, but the war itself isn’t depicted in any of those stories, not even ‘The Odyssey,’” Crozier said. “Nolan is clearly going to show us the war, so it will be interesting to see how he does it.”
The freedom opens up visual and storytelling possibilities for which Nolan has become famous: non-linear storytelling, practical effects and big, action set pieces.
The overall storytelling scale of “The Odyssey,” not just the Trojan War sequence, makes this a tricky adaptation to pull off, Crozier said.
“But I have every confidence he can do it,” he said. “A director wouldn’t want to be constrained by the text and wouldn’t want to attempt to make a word-for-word recreation of it. It would be almost impossible anyway. So, we’ll see how this all comes together. This will meld all of the other movies he’s made along the way. They’ve all been building to this; his career was always on a collision course with ‘The Odyssey.’”
Depiction of the Greek gods
Another creative choice that Crozier will be monitoring is how Nolan chooses to handle the gods. The epic contains numerous references to familiar names of Greek mythology, but the film could stray from the story’s version of the gods.
Crozier is optimistic after seeing the first images of the goddess of wisdom and warfare, Athena, portrayed in the film by Zendaya.
“They nailed the look,” he said. “She’s not wearing armor or anything outlandish. She’s perfect: beautiful, eternal, timeless. This is what the gods are.”
Crozier is hopeful that Zendaya’s Athena is evidence that Nolan will treat all the gods he chooses to depict with a degree of realism.
“In older films that deal with the gods, you have these over-the-top versions of majesty,” he said. “Like beams of light radiating off the gods as they’re talking to mortals. It can be more subtle than that, which is how it’s depicted in the myths.”
Women as central characters
For Crozier, Zendaya’s styling as Athena also speaks highly for how the film will handle its female characters, which are likely to be a big part of the film, Crozier said. In “The Iliad,” Homer’s other famous epic poem, women are marginalized characters.
“They only exist to show the reader something about a male character. They’re used as spotlights,” he said.
Not so in “The Odyssey.”
“Women in ‘The Odyssey’ are exceptionally powerful and dangerous,” Crozier said. “Penelope, portrayed in the film by Anne Hathaway, is a good example. She is chaste, beautiful, loyal to Odysseus, but she is deadly to the suitors.”
From Charlize Theron’s depiction of the goddess Calypso to Lupita Nyong’o pulling double duty as Helen of Troy and her sister, Clytemnestra, the story will be greatly influenced by its female leads and how the hero responds to them.
“The only person who can deal with women at all in ‘The Odyssey’ is Odysseus,” Crozier said. “He’s the only person who’s able to handle it.”
Agamemnon
Crozier is eager to see how Nolan handles Agamemnon’s storyline.
Agamemnon, portrayed by Benny Safdie in Nolan’s adaptation, is a Greek commander of heroic standing who led the sacking of Troy. After surviving the ravages of war, he returns home, not to a hero’s welcome, but to familial betrayal: He is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus.
In the epic, Agamemnon has already been killed, and Odysseus meets his spirit when he ventures into the Underworld. There, he learns of how Agamemnon died and receives a warning from him that a similar fate could await him if he eventually makes it home.
“In the epic poem, the narrative tension is essentially ‘Is Odysseus’ homecoming going to end up like Agamemnon’s?’” Crozier said.
The warning only serves to heighten the drama around the reality that the audience will know from early in the film: Odysseus may conquer obstacles of mythic proportion along the way, but the greatest threat to all he holds dear is waiting for him at home.
The growth and development of Odysseus’ son
The extent to which Nolan explores the dire situation at Odysseus’ home in Ithaca will be another exciting opportunity for interpretation.
Crozier expects a lot of attention to be paid to Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, portrayed by Tom Holland.
He begins the story in a dispirited place, not having seen his father in roughly 20 years.
Early in the epic, the goddess Athena, in disguise, goes to Telemachus and asks if he’s related to Odysseus. Instead of simply answering in the affirmative, Telemachus expresses doubt as to who his father really is, which sets the stage for the character’s development over the course of the story.
If this were to play out in Nolan’s film, it could see Holland and Zendaya, who recently confirmed their marriage, acting opposite one another. Crozier admitted, as a fan of both actors, he would love to see such a scene.
“It’ll be interesting to see to what extent Nolan highlights Telemachus, his maturation process and development from a callow, youthful boy to a full hero who’s able to help his father get rid of the suitors,” he said.
