Homer wrote The Odyssey back when Togas were still a fashion statement, but it seems the people at Tinseltown still can’t help but incorporate elements of the story into their productions. The difference is that the people in these movies don’t always wear Togas or walk around with harps singing to their fellow men. Sometimes the director knows exactly what they’re doing, and sometimes they stumble into it, completely oblivious of the fact that Homer’s poem is influencing them.
Fans and critics have noticed this for years, and it’s pretty hard to unsee once you catch on. While Christopher Nolan has made a massive stomp with his near-direct adaptation in 2026, these five movies were a little more subtle, so much so that you may have missed it altogether. The film in the number one spot is going to hit you like a wave, pun intended.
5. Cold Mountain (2003)
Swap the salty seas for muddy Appalachian trails, and it’s The Odyssey all over again. Charles Frazier has said outright that he built the novel on Homer’s structure on purpose. Jude Law’s Inman deserts the Confederate Army and starts limping home to a woman he’s barely spent any real time with. Every step of the way, some weirdo or close call tries to stop him. It’s like the universe kept throwing darts at him for fun.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, Ada (Nicole Kidman) isn’t fending off a crowd of suitors like Penelope. She’s fending off Teague (Ray Winstone), the one man circling her land and her, and the movie gives him the same menace Penelope’s suitors carried. She may not be weaving and un-weaving a funeral shroud, but she’s definitely holding her ground and waiting while the man she loves fights his way back to her one brutal mile at a time.
4. Interstellar (2014)
By now, it’s clear that Christopher Nolan has a specific story trope he likes to explore, and it’s devoted dads who can’t stay home. It basically started with Inception in 2010, a movie which is basically about a father who fights impossible odds just to get back to his kids. Just four years later, he dropped Interstellar, which sends Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) across a space-ocean that’s just as nasty as the one Odysseus crossed, except this one’s got wormholes and black holes instead of whirlpools and sea monsters. And that part isn’t fan theory either.
Nolan has said it himself, noting that even in Interstellar, the presence of Homer is there. Take away all the fancy Astrophysics lingo and what remains is a movie that runs on nostos, that ancient Greek itch to get back home to your people no matter what obstacles the universe places in your path. The main villain here is time, doing the dirty work the gods specialized in by stretching Cooper’s trip out so his daughter Murph (Jessica Chastain) ages into an old woman while he’s barely grown a beard. When he finally sees her, it’s more heartbreaking than heartwarming.
3. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004)
This one seems like a stretch until all the facts are laid out. SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) leave the safety of Bikini Bottom to go on a quest. They cross a genuinely scary trench full of sea monsters and wander into the Thug Tug, a bar that’s basically the Lotus Eaters’ hangout, but with bass drops. Just like Odysseus’s crew wandering into trouble they didn’t go looking for, the boys have to fight their way through a room full of thugs just to get their stolen car key back. Then they snag King Neptune’s (Jeffrey Tambor) crown (that’s their magic item) and drag it all the way back to save the day. The creators at Nickelodeon probably weren’t reading Homer’s poem in the writers’ room, but the skeleton is unmistakably there.
2. Ulysses (1967)
This is probably the most obvious option in this list because the title alone gives away the secret. Ulysses is just Latin for Odysseus, and James Joyce wasn’t being low-key when he wrote his 1922 novel as a play-by-play of Homer’s poem, squeezed into one seriously long day in Dublin. Leopold Bloom (Milo O’Shea) wanders around town dodging his own personal Cyclops and sirens, while his wife Molly (Barbara Jefford) is doing anything but the faithful wife routine; she’s spending time with another man while Leopold quietly knows it.
That’s Joyce’s joke: take the most loyal wife in literature and rewrite her as anything but. The only difference is that instead of dealing with meddling gods, Leopold was dealing with the mundane chaos of an ordinary day and a whole lot of inner monologue. And honestly? That’s more relatable.
1. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
The most interesting thing about this movie, which nails this concept best, is that it was made by two brothers who claim they never actually read the poem. Joel and Ethan Coen built the whole film around The Odyssey on purpose, right down to naming their hero Ulysses Everett McGill, played by George Clooney. But they’ve straight-up admitted, more than once, that they only knew the story through pop culture and other people’s summaries, not Homer’s actual text. Well, mostly.
Joel later let it slip that he had actually read it, which means that whole “we never touched the book” line might be less about fact and more about creating a myth around the movie. Somehow, it barely matters. Everett’s escaping a chain gang instead of a war, but he’s just as obsessed with getting home to a wife who’s already moved on. The movie throws in river sirens, a one-eyed Bible salesman, in clear reference to Cyclops, and a homecoming that takes way more effort than it should.
Read Next: 10 Actors of Greek Heritage Who Deserved a Role in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
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