Every Monster in The Odyssey, Explained (Real Mythology)

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is packed with monsters. A giant with one eye. A living whirlpool. Cannibal giants. A witch who turns men into pigs. But almost none of them look the way the old myths describe them. Today we go through every single one. What the ancient story actually said. And what Nolan changed for his version. Nolan's The Odyssey picks up right after our Troy video. The war is over, and Odysseus just needs to sail home. Except the trip takes 10 years, because almost everything he meets along the way is trying to kill him. Let's go through them, in order. The Lotus Eaters Before any real monster shows up, Odysseus' men land on an island with strange fruit. In Homer's story, the people there are called the lotus eaters. They eat a plant called the lotus. Anyone who eats it forgets home completely. They stop caring about their families. They just want to sit and eat more lotus forever. Odysseus has to drag his own men back to the ships by force. Some of them cry the whole way because all they want is to stay and eat. It is a small scene in the poem. Only a few lines. But it sets up the whole theme of the story. Everything Odysseus meets from here on is a way to keep him from getting home. This one is not a monster with teeth or claws. It is temptation. That is actually scarier in a way, because it does not attack him. It just makes him want to give up. The Cyclops Polyphemus This is the most famous monster in the whole poem. Bill Irwin plays Polyphemus, the Cyclops, in Nolan's film. In Homer's version, Polyphemus is a giant with a single, huge, round eye in the middle of his forehead. He is the son of the sea god Poseidon. He lives alone in a cave on an island, herding sheep. Odysseus and his men get trapped inside his cave. Polyphemus blocks the entrance with a massive boulder and then eats several of Odysseus' men, two at a time. Odysseus' escape plan is one of the most famous tricks in all of Greek mythology. He gets Polyphemus drunk on wine, then tells him his name is Nobody. Once the giant passes out, Odysseus and his men drive a sharpened wooden stake into his single eye, blinding him. When Polyphemus screams for help, he shouts that Nobody is hurting him. So the other Cyclops outside think nothing is wrong and don't come to help. The next morning, Odysseus and his men escape by hiding underneath Polyphemus' sheep as they're let out to graze, since the blinded giant can only feel the tops of their backs. This is where the movie makes a clear change. Nolan's Polyphemus is a giant with a strange, twisted, human-like face, and an eye that looks more like a warped, inverted oval than the traditional single round disc Homer describes. It is a much stranger, more unsettling design than the classic one-eyed giant most people picture. Nolan is clearly going for something closer to body horror than the classic image. One more thing the movie keeps, Homer's Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, and that matters a lot for the rest of the story. After Odysseus escapes, he cannot resist bragging and shouts his real name back at the giant. Polyphemus then prays to his father Poseidon to curse Odysseus' journey home. That single moment of pride is the reason the god of the sea spends the rest of the poem making Odysseus' voyage a nightmare. The Laestrygonians The Laestrygonians show up on screen as giant warriors in silver armor who attack and kill Odysseus' men. This is actually the biggest change Nolan has made to any monster in the movie. In Homer's poem, the Laestrygonians are described simply as giants. Cannibal giants. Much bigger than normal men, who live in a land where the nights are almost as short as the days. When Odysseus' fleet sails into their harbor, the Laestrygonians throw huge boulders down from the cliffs, smashing the ships before the men can even escape. Then they spear the sailors like fish and eat them. Odysseus loses 11 of his 12 ships in this one attack. It is the single worst loss of the entire voyage. Right after the storms already thinned out his fleet, the movie reimagines them completely. Instead of giants throwing rocks, Nolan shows large men in heavy plate armor, closer to medieval knights, using huge swords that can knock down trees and men in a single swing. It is a totally different visual idea from the original myth, but the outcome is the same. This is where Odysseus loses almost his entire fleet in one attack. Cersei The witch who turns men into pigs Samantha Morton plays Cersei, and her scenes are widely considered some of the best in the movie. In the myth, Cersei is a goddess and a powerful witch who lives alone on the island of Eaeaea. When Odysseus' men land there, Cersei invites them in, feeds them a meal laced with a magic drug, and then taps them with her wand, turning every one of them into pigs. Only one man, who stayed behind out of suspicion, escapes to warn Odysseus. Odysseus goes to save his men himself. On the way, the god Hermes gives him a magical herb called moly that protects him from Cersei's spell. When Cersei's drug doesn't work on him and he threatens her with his sword, she realizes he is no ordinary man. She turns his crew back into humans, and Odysseus ends up staying on her island for a full year before she finally tells him how to continue his journey home. Cersei is also the one who gives Odysseus his next set of directions, including a warning about two of the deadliest threats still ahead of him, which we'll get to shortly. The Journey to the Underworld Before Odysseus can leave Cersei's island, she tells him he has to do something no living man wants to do, sail to the edge of the world and enter the underworld to speak with the dead. There, Odysseus meets the ghost of the blind prophet Tiresias, who tells him what dangers still lie ahead and warns him about a very specific mistake he must not make later in the journey. One involving the cattle of the sun god, which we'll get to at the end. Odysseus also meets the ghosts of his own mother, who died of grief while he was away, and several of the Greek warriors from Troy, including Agamemnon, who tells Odysseus the story of his own murder back home. This sequence is part of the film's darker, more horror-influenced imagery. It is one of the more unusual choices for a modern blockbuster, since it is not an action scene. It's Odysseus walking among the dead. But it's also one of the most important sequences in the actual poem, since it's where Odysseus learns almost everything he needs to survive the rest of the trip. The Sirens The sirens appear in the film too. In the myth, the sirens are creatures, usually described as part woman, part bird, who sing so beautifully that any sailor who hears their song steers straight toward them, wrecking his ship on the rocks. The beach around their island is covered in the bones of everyone who came before. Circe warns Odysseus about them in advance, so he comes prepared. He orders his men to plug their ears with wax so they can't hear anything. But Odysseus himself wants to hear the song and live to tell about it, so he has his men tie him tightly to the ship's mast and orders them not to untie him no matter what he says or does, even if he begs. Sure enough, once he hears the sirens singing, he desperately screams at his men to let him go. They just row harder, exactly as he told them to beforehand. It's one of the only moments in the whole poem where Odysseus' own cleverness is used against himself on purpose to save his life. Scylla and Charybdis On screen, this shows up as a massive whirlpool, along with a tentacle dragging a sailor off a In the myth, Circe warns Odysseus about this pair specifically, because right after the sirens, his ship has to pass through a narrow strait with a monster on each side. On one side is Charybdis, a monster who swallows the entire sea three times a day and spits it back out, creating a massive whirlpool that can pull down a whole ship. On the other side is Scylla, a six-headed monster who lives in a cave on a cliff. She can't sink a ship, but each of her six heads can snatch and eat one sailor as the ship passes close enough. Circe tells Odysseus flat out, you cannot avoid both. If you sail too close to Charybdis, you lose the entire ship and everyone on it. If you sail past Scylla instead, you will lose exactly six men, one for each of her heads. But the ship survives. Odysseus chooses Scylla on purpose, and watches six of his men get grabbed and eaten as the ship passes by, unable to do anything to stop it. This moment is actually where the old saying caught between Scylla and Charybdis comes from, meaning a choice between two terrible options. Calypso. Charlize Theron plays Calypso, a nymph who lives alone on the island of Ogygia. In the myth, Calypso is actually where Homer's story begins. The poem opens with Odysseus already trapped on her island, seven years into his captivity. Calypso rescues him after his ship is destroyed and falls in love with him. She wants to marry him and even offers to make him immortal if he stays with her forever. Odysseus refuses. Every day he sits on the beach and cries, staring out at the sea, wanting nothing but to go home to his wife. It takes the gods themselves stepping in, Athena pleading his case, and Zeus finally ordering Calypso to let him go, before she finally releases him, seven years after she first found him. She isn't a monster in the traditional sense, she never tries to hurt him, but she is one of the biggest obstacles in the entire story, because her whole power is keeping him exactly where he doesn't want to be. The cattle of the sun. Both Circe and the ghost of Tiresias warn Odysseus about this before it happens. Whatever he does, his men must never touch the sacred cattle that belong to Helios, the sun god, on the island of Thranacia. Odysseus tries to sail past the island entirely, but his men beg to land and rest. While Odysseus is asleep, his starving crew, trapped by bad winds for weeks, with no food left, kills and eats some of the sacred cattle anyway. It is the single decision that seals their fate. Zeus destroys their ship with a lightning bolt as punishment, and every single one of Odysseus' men dies. He is the only survivor, and he washes up alone on Calypso's island, exactly where the poem's version of Odysseus' story actually starts. This part isn't confirmed to be in the movie yet. This is how it plays out in Homer's original poem. Line up everything we just covered, and one thing becomes clear. This is not really a monster movie. Every creature Odysseus faces takes something from him. Men, ships, time, and eventually his entire crew. By the time he reaches home, he is completely alone. Nolan changed some of the designs. The Lestrigonians as armored knights instead of giants. Polyphemus' twisted single eye instead of the classic round one. But the actual structure of the journey, and the cost of it, stays intact. That matters because it means the version of Odysseus who finally reaches Ithaca isn't a triumphant hero. He's a man who lost everyone he sailed with, and still has to deal with the suitors waiting in his own house. That homecoming, Penelope, Telemachus, and the suitors led by Antinous, is a whole story on its own. And it's exactly what we're covering next. If this helped you understand what Odysseus actually went through, subscribe. We've got the suitor's story coming next, and it's an even bigger betrayal than anything you just watched.