When I heard Christopher Nolan was releasing a cinematic adaptation of The Odyssey this summer, I thought, oh yeah, I definitely want to see that. The Odyssey, along with the Iliad, is among our original stories, told orally nearly 3000 years ago, and the first of our written works in the West, about 600 years BCE. Countless plays, novels, poems, stories, and films flow from these works. The story-telling of the Bible flows from them. Shakespeare references the stories before they were even translated to English in ~1615. They are the foundation on which our storytelling in the West is built.

Last spring, I read both for the first time since college (if I even read them in college — I don’t remember!). Barely a year later, my only recollection of The Odyssey was that the scene with the Sirens was so much shorter than I expected. Out of 400 pages of story, the Sirens were maybe half a page.

I just finished reading The Odyssey again in preparation for the movie, and I had a much richer experience this time. I bought a physical copy of Emily Wilson’s translation, underlined, wrote notes after each of the 24 books, and joined in a community read-along. And once again, I was surprised by many things. One was that we think of Odysseus as being heroic, which he was in his time, not because of moral choices but because of his strength as a warrior. And yet, he’s full of sorrow. He is continually weeping. He’s the called the unluckiest man alive. I typically think of his odyssey being one of overcoming obstacles to get back home, and that it’s a success story because he ultimately does get back home. But there is so much death and bloodshed along the way.

I was again surprised that the things so many of us think about when we think about the story — the sea-faring, the Cyclops, the lotus-eaters, the Sirens; the six-headed Scylla and the whirlpool Charibdis — are quite small relative to the real stories. Those “adventures”, as I typically think of them though they result in the deaths of every man Odysseus left Troy with, are contained within 4 of the 24 books of The Odyssey and less than a quarter of the page count. There’s so much more to it than those cinematic scenes!

This is what I’m super curious about with The Odyssey movie coming out on July 17. Is it going to just build around these scenes because that’s what everyone wants from a movie of The Odyssey, or is it going to do justice to the other 75% of the epic? I’m sure battling giants and cyclops and being lashed to a mast will be great eye-candy, but there’s so much more to the story. I cannot imagine trying to edit this whole thing down to two or three hours of film.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that the movie will get into some of the deeper ideas the poem presents: the ethics of hospitality, of caring for strangers, of being good hosts and good guests; the longing for home and our rightful place, despite being presented with other options that might look like a pretty excellent life; the roles of fate and free will; the importance of knowledge and information — and the sharing of stories to give and receive both. And can we even believe Odysseus as a narrator? He’s the only one who survived the journey back in these 20 years since he was last seen in Ithaca. And so much more! I’m eager to see where the movie goes deep. If none of these points, at least it will hopefully be something fun to feast our eyes on.