Student Life
The Problem with Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’
Anyone who has been within earshot of me whenever the terms ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Christopher Nolan’ have been mentioned during the past few months would know my strong opinions about the costuming, colour grading, casting and language choices dominant in the trailer. In the run-up to the film, classicists I have spoken to at Oxford seem to be divided into two camps: those who are like me, cynical and decrying the modern depreciation of the classics. Then there are those who call us purists and snobs, and say that Nolan is merely participating in the long-standing oral tradition that has always interpreted and adapted forms of storytelling, as Homer intended. So what’s the verdict?
Despite the trailers, I was surprised at the full extent to which Nolan leaned into the set design. Stark and devoid of colour, Troy has white pillars, statues, and temples. All of this looks like it was built in a lab – the set looks like a set. It is incongruent with the ancient Greece that has long been established by researchers, where people wore vibrant, patterned peploi, and the statues were painted in bright colours. Instead, Nolan’s Greek cities and kingdoms resemble the inaccurate remnants seen under the sterile lens of a curated museum collection. This feels thematically deliberate, and therefore brilliant. Moments of magic are downplayed – ironic, since the film’s opening card sets it ‘in a time of apparent magic’. Lacking the ‘glimmer’ of magic, the transformation of Odysseus’ men into pigs becomes one of the most grotesque and viscerally disturbing sequences in the film.
This also makes pops of colour, what we regard as ‘signs of life’, perversely memorable – Agamemnon’s stark black helmet plume with its mechanical golden vertebrae becomes recognisable from a distance, and terrifying against the bright white of the city he is about to destroy. The opening shot of the Trojan horse half-buried in sand, cutting a bronze diagonal across the too-white beach and the too-dim sea is emblematic of Nolan’s choice of set and costume design, almost backrooms-like in its struggle to reconstruct memory. The visual language of the film translates itself to something on the verge of collapse, which ties in neatly with the overarching theme.
And memory is important here. The film’s episodic structure reflects how Odysseus’ memories gradually come back to him on Calypso’s island, having long repressed them due to trauma. This is, in my opinion, one of the bigger points of reinvention that I actually don’t mind. Through the bard figure, hilariously performed by Travis Scott, Nolan shows an awareness of the weight this story carries within a long-standing oral tradition. The original text is itself already highly meta: a story that focuses on storytelling as an active act of remembrance, and attempts to translate the story as ‘live performance’ of stories within stories.
The film’s treatment of gods also relates to memory, specifically through Athena, the only ‘goddess’ who appears in physical form and stays constantly by Odysseus’ side. The reveal that she takes the face of the priestess beheaded at the Temple of Athena during the sack of Troy is haunting, while simultaneously making me insane with joy, because Nolan has managed to visualise the very human way the mortals relate to the divine. Athena shows up as the only god Odysseus can put a face to because her face is a manifestation of his guilt and grief. Despite the multiple invocations of the other gods in turning points of life and death by Odysseus’ men, most prominently Poseidon and Zeus, they remain silent. Is this representative of the perversion of the divine-human relationship, broken forever due to the Trojan War?
However, the film’s semi-atheistic outlook translates to something confusing and inconsistent. It cannot decide how much moral responsibility its characters actually have. The film’s tagline is ‘defy the gods’, and through the film this is framed as a condemnation – the defiance of the laws between men is a defiance of the gods. Yet a line from Athena at the start of the film, when Odysseus is still on Calypso’s island, throws a spanner into this moral, where Athena disparages Odysseus for taking full responsibility for what is already fated and inevitable. The implication here is that she condemns him for being almost hubristic in his urge to constantly assume full responsibility for the loss of other lives, when the gods have already decreed that they were bound to die. Such a bold statement never really gets resolved, and the scene in the Underworld, where Teiresias once again emphasises that there is nothing Odysseus can do to prevent his entire crew dying because he ‘cannot save them from themselves ’, deepens this problem.
In Homeric epic, the gods, Fate, and free will toe a very fine line. The gods do intervene, but human motivation and human choice always come first in narrative terms. There are many moments where mortals blame the gods within the poem, and none of these positions are justified in Homeric theology. So when Odysseus laments that Zeus made him fall asleep while his men ate Helios’ cattle, the audience is not meant to sympathise with his argument that this therefore makes him blameless – it can be an expression of frustration that the god has not helped him, or the confusing incomprehensibility of the gods (which Nolan also emphasises), but it does not mean Odysseus is free of the responsibility of his choice. Characters’ freedom to make choices is integral to driving the plot and characterisation forward, and yet Nolan fails to make clear the explicit chain of human cause and effect between the plunder and massacre Odysseus and his men conducted at Troy and the disastrous journey home. This leads to interpretations that the whole action of the film is simply the gods’ decree, and Nolan risks diluting his moral message.
This confusion ultimately boils down to where the film suffers the most – the overt sanitisation of Odysseus’ character. Throughout the film, Odysseus’ eyes are those we look through to judge the events of the Trojan War, the journey, and most of the narrative – the audience is inclined to sympathise with him, and having suffered the repercussions of his actions in the Trojan War, he becomes the plausible mouthpiece for Nolan’s message, the righteous avenger against the suitors who violated Zeus’ law first. But as the film repeats the shot of Odysseus staring out as he leans against the marble staircase at Troy, watching the priestess’ head get cut off, I cannot help but wonder – why is Odysseus so special? What makes Odysseus so much better that he is singled out by the gods to return home, and the rest of his men do not, when their actions have been so similar? If that moment where he watches the destruction of Athena’s temple is meant to be his epiphany, why does he carry on to burn down the first island he sees? Nolan has simplified Odysseus so much throughout the film that any straying away from virtue lands oddly instead of adding nuance. Emily Wilson is right: Nolan has written a very uncomplicated man indeed.
Homer, however, never hides how Odysseus is, in many ways, an incompetent leader, and most of the disastrous journey can be attributed to Odysseus’ bad judgement or arrogance. One famous example is the Cyclops episode, where after he and his remaining men successfully leave, Odysseus shouts back into the cave his name, his father’s name, and the destination he is heading to, entirely unnecessary apart from establishing glory for himself. Essentially, Homer establishes clear cause and effect (how Odysseus’ poor choices lead to the downfall of his men), and this elevates narrative significance when he does make the correct choices. Odysseus is not a character who can become a noble, simple character while retaining the same story beats. He is polutropos, a man of many ways – the complexity of his journey home reflects the complexity of the man. Dropping his incriminating story beats makes Odysseus more likeable, but the result is inconsistent characterisation, as well as a lack of character depth. Nolan’s version of Odysseus is unrecognisable when compared to Homer’s, who is cunning, flawed, and subtle.
The other issue with Nolan’s insistence on Odysseus’ nobility: it comes at a cost to the depth of other characters too, especially the women around him, and this is most evident in Penelope. Homer’s Penelope is Odysseus’ narrative parallel, and Book 23 is, in epic terms, Penelope’s aristea, her big ‘heroic’ moment, where she tests the reality of Odysseus’ identity by asking her handmaiden to move her bed, and waits for Odysseus to refute it because only her husband should know that it is immovable. Only then does she relent and greet Odysseus. There is much scholarly debate that Penelope had recognised him much earlier than Book 23, adding to the complexity that she may have been planning the exact type of contest that would benefit Odysseus ever since she saw him in disguise. The bed scene is left out entirely in Nolan’s film, and there is also no nuance as to when Penelope finally does recognise Odysseus.
Nolan also makes the mistake of telling rather than showing when Penelope screams at Telemachus that she has been ruling Ithaca for years and that it is about to be taken away from her male heir. Yet from an audience’s perspective, she isn’t doing much ruling, as all we see of her in the film is her crying and pining away for Odysseus. Even the scene where it is revealed that she has been taking apart the shroud every evening, her overarching line of characterisation throughout the story, is overshadowed by the strange scene where she almost caves to Antinous’ advances – stranger still, because at no point in Homer’s story does Penelope even remotely entertain him. Her complexity becomes less of a point of attention because her parallel character, Odysseus, is also not stepping up to the narrative depth game. In the poem, Odysseus and Penelope work since although they occupy very different spheres of movement and gender roles, they still mirror each other. Nolan’s Penelope falling flat is especially fatal because she has no ‘action’ to rectify or distract from it, unlike Odysseus.
In general, I think I liked the film a lot when I was watching the credits roll. It is a spectacle, and despite knowing the exact story beats of the plot, the escape from Polyphemus and the harrowing flashes of the storm still had me on the edge of my seat. Odysseus’ final stringing of his bow still almost brought tears to my eyes. And much of it for me is that there is clear love shown in the stunning visual and musical language to deliver those emotional beats, and in a very meta way, I love that this much is devoted to a subject that I have spent many years loving and studying, and seeing a work from so long ago come alive on the modern screen.
I also mourn the fact that this may be the only version of The Odyssey that a modern audience will see in their lifetime. To me, Homeric epic has withstood the test of time not only because of a flashy plotline, but because it is, at its core, a story that contains the scattering multitude of human experience and complexity – to return home as a complicated, flawed individual to a complicated, flawed community, and finding love anyway. For that to hold, the characters cannot all feel universal, and that is unfortunately what Nolan tried to narrow down with his characterisation and theology. I just wish that I could point to a moment throughout the film where I leapt for joy that Nolan understood the character, their motivations, and why some things are important for the story to keep. I wish I was actually watching the Odysseus I love to hate, and the Penelope that mirrored him in all the strangest ways.
Nolan had all the tools for greatness. Instead, to my eternal frustration, his Odyssey will always only be just alright.
St Edmund Hall has opened new, sustainability-focused accommodation in Norham Gardens, one of Oxford’s most affluent neighbourhoods.
The College describes the buildings, which took three years to construct, as an “exemplar” of sustainability. Designed by architects Wright & Wright LLP, they are certified with a Passivhaus standard, widely regarded as the industry benchmark for energy efficiency, and were built using “sustainably sourced and low-embodied carbon materials”. According to a press release on the Teddy Hall website, the buildings will use 70% less energy than the typical modern building.
It contains 127 en-suite study rooms, split across three new buildings: Willis House, Ashton House, and Elliott House, on the nearly 50-year-old Norham St Edmund site. The buildings, which back onto University Parks, are powered at least in part by solar panels and are heated by air-source heat pumps.
The rooms include heated towel racks, big double beds, and dimmable lights. Despite the luxury, the College kept the nightly rate in line with the rest of its Norham housing. The College told Cherwell that it “recognises the need to keep rents as low as possible” and that its accommodation costs are “below the median of all Oxford colleges”. By that standard, tenants are expected to pay around £30 a night.
Rooms on the site will be reserved for Teddy Hall returning undergraduates. They will not be available to postgraduates and, by extension, not be offered through the Oxford University Collegiate Accommodation System, now in its second year of opening college rooms to students from other colleges. The accommodation will allow Teddy Hall to accommodate all undergraduates for their whole degree.
The development’s outdoor spaces are boasted as climate-resilient and biodiverse, with landscaped gardens and lawns. For budding geographers and biologists, the most intriguing feature may be an ecology pond.
Chancellor William Hague said in a press release: “Norham St Edmund is a world-leading blueprint for future student accommodation projects and sustainable building design, both in Oxford and beyond. I look forward to seeing it serve a thriving college community for generations to come.
Human rights experts called for stronger legal protections against the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) at an Oxford AI and Human Rights Summit, with speakers arguing that human rights standards must be embedded into AI governance and technology.
The summit was hosted at the newly redeveloped Rhodes House in Oxford and organised by the Institute for Ethics in AI. It built upon Professor Yuval Shany’s consultation on a white paper, published in 2025, on the need for and feasibility of an international AI Bill of Human Rights, which proposes ways to adapt existing human rights standards so as to better address some of the unique challenges posed by AI systems and their uses.
An opening video address from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk outlined how AI policy can keep pace with a fast-developing technology. He said that “great power demands responsibility on the same scale, and when the two don’t match, we have a problem”. Corporate control, he explained, means that AI policy stretches beyond existing national borders. He continued to praise this summit for bringing together leaders and representatives at the forefront of the discussion.
Speakers called on the UK government to establish legislation, recalling Labour’s manifesto commitment to an AI Bill of Human Rights. The panellists broadly agreed on the importance of human rights, but appeared less aligned on what enforcement should look like in practice.
In an exclusive interview, Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, told Cherwell that political short-termism Continued on pg. 2 risks undermining efforts to address the long-term consequences of AI. “We are infected across our societies with shorttermist responses to the great issue of our societies and politics,” he said, adding that electoral cycles make it difficult for politicians “to think beyond the next election”.
O’Flaherty also noted that younger generations no longer take the international human rights system for granted. “There is no longer an assumption that the human rights system is safe, that it will survive,” he told Cherwell. He argued that political leaders increasingly treat human rights selectively, saying: “Increasingly, leaders are treating human rights, if they are respected at all, as an a la carte buffet. We take those rights because they serve our goal. We’ll ignore others because they get in the way.
The summit also heard concerns about the effects of AI-generated misinformation on communities that may have limited access to, or awareness of, the technology itself. An audience question asked human rights experts to consider the impacts of AI on populations, such as those in India, who might be unaware of its existence. The focus on the impact of AI on populations in developing countries more vulnerable to the power of big tech was a key theme of the summit.
Eileen Carter from the South African Human Rights Commission warned that underrepresentation of African languages in large language models could exacerbate existing inequalities. She also raised concerns about the effects of misinformation and deepfakes on elections, referring to more than 360 deaths associated with unrest and the amplification of narratives.
The third panel, which offered a civil society perspective on promoting human rights in AI systems, offered some hope. Across all speakers, the potential for AI to transform the beliefs that underpin human rights, including the rights to water, education, and an interpreter, was debated. When asked about AI’s potential to unravel and alter the definition of human rights, such as what is included in the ‘right to education’ O’Flaherty told Cherwell: “The damage that can be done by AI has hit more dramatically and more visibly than perhaps any other sector within education through the phenomenon of cognitive loss, of cognitive transfer. We’re only beginning to realise the extent to which we have allowed education to be fundamentally undermined for an entire generation.
“It’s time to seize that now and engage it. I’m not sure that the classic understanding of the human right to education is particularly well-framed for this extraordinary development.”
In a discussion on different countries’ regulatory approach to AI, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, professor at Brown University and former AI advisor to US President Joe Biden, argued that AI systems should not be treated as inevitable developments beyond human control. “We continue, I think, to talk about AI as a thing that emerged out of nowhere that we just have to deal with,” he said. “We forget that these aren’t coming from an alien planet and they were built by entities that choose to build them in a certain way.” He called for pressure on technology companies to make different choices about how AI systems are developed.
Questions of accountability also emerged during discussions about AI’s potential to improve access to justice. Research presented by Philippa Webb said that only 10% of people who have access to a lawyer can get one while there are thousands of bookings for an interpreter in a court covering 150 languages. However, this progress is not cemented as “general-purpose chatbots hallucinate 58% of the time on a legal task”. The use of AI in moderating legal proceedings raised fundamental questions about humanity and authority. Thompson Chengeta from Liverpool John Moores University said that “human rights is the last line of defence so when we say we want a human rights based governance… human rights is not an idea, it is an obligation. There is a gap that can only be recovered by a legally binding instrument”.
The event culminated in a panel offering an industry perspective. Co-host Dr Caroline Emmer De Albuquerque Green questioned representatives from Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Michael Karimian, who works in digital diplomacy at Microsoft, discussed the role of private sectors in engaging with AI, defining corporate responsibility as something which “provides transparency and identified risks”.
All companies supported having formal programmes to ensure that they have an AI policy in place. Within their own companies, they suggested protective measures such as specialised training to ensure that policies, such as whistleblowing, are understood. Alexandria Walden from Google described how consultations with stakeholders could be used to identify when the product breached users’ boundaries. These assessments, according to OpenAI’s spokesperson, “feedback into tangible technical input” and “benchmark it”.
Fundamentally, understanding the rationale behind human rights is imperative, though lacking. Alexandria Walden from Google said: “Whether or not they understand human rights, they care enough to infuse it in their company… we might not always get it right, but it is something we care about.”
Where former panels discussed controls to ensure human rights are considered in the development and implementation of AI products, this panel focused on mitigation. A spokesperson from Google pointed out that technology is inevitably going to move faster, so multiple tools are needed. Companies, OpenAI’s representative noted, still encounter issues such as discrimination and free speech. Consequently, they regard this as an additional policy which companies have a structured model to deal with, but newer companies, and newer industries, haven’t learnt it yet.
In her concluding remarks, Green called for policy makers to “make the abstract actionable” at both governmental and corporate levels. She argued that, by framing the issues posed by AI as human rights issues, we gain a “foundation” for recognising AI’s many societal impacts.
Ugandan participants in a clinical safety study received an Oxford developed Ebola vaccine this week.
Researchers vaccinated the first participants on 6th October in Masaka, Uganda. The phase follows the launch of a first-in-human Phase I trial in the UK evaluating the same vaccine candidate.
They received the vaccine as part of an evaluation of the safety and efficacy of a ChAdOx-based Bundibugyo Ebola vaccine candidate developed by the Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) and the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford.
Development for this vaccine began in May this year in response to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The research, led by OVG’s Professor Teresa Lambe and Professor Simon Drysdale, is funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). No licenced vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola virus currently exists.
In a statement to Cherwell, OVG said its involvement includes collaborating with the Ugandan research team to support “the study’s scientific design, clinical trial coordination, safety oversight, and evaluation of vaccine safety and immunogenicity”. The Phase I clinical trial addresses a rare strain of Ebola virus affecting communities in the DRC since May. The phase is a collaboration between the Medical Research Council/ Uganda Virus Research Institute and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Dr Nicole Lurie, CEPI’s Executive Director for Emergency Preparedness and Response, told Cherwell: “It [the Bundibugyo outbreak] remains the fastest-growing and second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded – and we currently remain without a licensed vaccine or treatment.” The Bundibugyo Ebola epidemic in the DRC has surpassed 8,600 cases, with almost half of infections proving fatal.
The outbreak was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in May.
OVG told Cherwell: “For more than a decade, the University of Oxford has performed many clinical trials of candidate viral-vectored vaccines. Some of the most promising vaccines used a modified chimpanzee adenovirus, a harmless version of a common cold virus. The Oxford-AstraZeneca (ChAdOx1) COVID-19 vaccine was approved for emergency use in the UK in December 2020 and was estimated to have saved six million lives during 2021 alone, and over 3 billion doses were used worldwide.” The adenovirus vector vaccine technology trialled in this study was successfully used worldwide as part of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
More funding is necessary to ensure the development and approval of the Ebola vaccine. Lurie told Cherwell: “Without sufficient additional funding, we are at risk of not being able to develop these promising vaccine candidates… CEPI urgently needs US$128M now to keep our Bundibugyo emergency R&D response moving. Without it, we are putting the DRC, and the world, at tremendous risk.”
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