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Film & TV

As Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Hits Movie Screens, BU Students Already Know the Story

Homer’s epic is a foundational text in the College of Arts & Sciences’ Core Curriculum

With Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, based on Homer’s epic poem, now in theaters, Boston University students who have taken the College of Arts & Sciences’ Core Curriculum are likely to enter the theater with a deeper understanding of the story than most moviegoers. 

For decades, Homer’s epic has been one of the Core Curriculum’s foundational texts. First-year students reflect on its themes of home, storytelling, identity, and heroism, which continue to resonate nearly 2,700 years after the poem was written. 

For Kyna Hamill, director of Core and a CAS master lecturer, the film’s release is an opportunity to discuss why The Odyssey—the story of the tumultuous, adventure-packed travels of Ithacan king and hero Odysseus—remains a cornerstone of a liberal arts education and why today’s students continue to connect with it.

View the trailer for The Odyssey above.

Nolan’s adaptation stars (Boston’s own) Matt Damon as Odysseus alongside an ensemble cast that includes Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, and BU alum Benny Safdie (COM’08). The film, shot entirely with IMAX cameras, opened to strong reviews on July 17 and earned more than $264 million at the global box office in its opening weekend, putting it on pace to be one of the summer’s biggest releases and earning it early Oscar buzz.

Core, CAS’ elective interdisciplinary program, has taught The Odyssey since the program was founded in 1989. Every student in CC 101: Ancient Worlds reads Homer and has the opportunity to move on to works such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

“It is the foundation for so many of the other stories that we read, and there are so many texts that we read that are citing it, are alluding to it,” Hamill says. “And so it’s absolutely one of the foundational texts that help us to teach the students about a literary tradition.”

Although ancient literature can seem intimidating, Hamill says her students are often surprised by how contemporary the story feels. The poem’s structure, especially Odysseus’ account of his adventures with the Cyclops, the Sirens, and other mythical creatures, resembles modern cinematic storytelling.

“It’s narratively very modern,” Hamill says. “Students [see how] it moves in a direction and includes multiple cinematic-type flashbacks that explain the reason for why [Odysseus is] in the situation that he is. It is modern in terms of the narrative trajectory of the storytelling.”

That familiarity helps first-year students, most of whom are leaving home for the first time. “We talk about the idea of nostos—nostalgia, the pain for home—which is what Odysseus has, and we have very interesting conversations with students about what it means to be away at college, and what they’re missing about home,” she says. “Some faculty have students bring photos from home and begin conversations about The Odyssey by talking about what home is like to them.” 

Hamill chooses to start her classes by emphasizing storytelling. She encourages students to question whether Odysseus is a reliable narrator when recounting his adventures. “Is he a narrator that we can trust? Did he really see monsters? Did he really see all of these things?” she asks. “He tells a very good story.”

She also enjoys drawing connections between Homer’s recognition-and-reveal scenes and modern superhero movies, like when “Superman opens up his chest and shows that it was him all along,” she says.

Since 2023, every incoming first-year student in Ancient Worlds has received a complimentary copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s acclaimed translation of The Odyssey, funded through a Giving Day campaign supported by Core alumni. Members of the Core Alumni Council, led by Liz Jones-Dilworth (CAS’02), also helped create a commemorative bookplate placed inside each copy, designed in collaboration with a graphic designer from Jones-Dilworth’s marketing and design firm, JDI, based in Austin, Tex.

For Hamill, the gift demonstrates the sense of community that defines the program, which has more than 220 students signed up in the fall. 

“Core builds community, because it breaks up into these small discussion classes,” she says. “It draws students from data sciences, engineering, and English. All of them come from their own point of view and talk about this book. It’s this diverse, disciplinary group of students talking about the same book. It’s great.”