Throughout cinematic history, monsters have been a staple of a wide range of genres, franchises, and fandoms. If we were to look at James Whale’s shaping of Boris Karloff’s creature in his 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein, or even to the H.R. Giger-inspired design of the Xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film, Alien, the history of cinema is populated with the most fearsome, awe-inspiring, and unforgettable monstrous creations. Thankfully, the significance of monsters in cinema didn’t end in 1979. Arguably, cinema’s Mexican master of monsters, Guillermo Del Toro, helped revive their value. Whether it was the menagerie of chthonic, otherworldly beasts in 2006’s Pan's Labyrinth, or his sapient seaman in the 2017 Oscar-winning The Shape of Water, Del Toro is a wizard when it comes to making monsters real. More importantly, his monsters are never simply monsters. They are embodiments of trauma, prejudice, innocence, power, and desire, existing as symbolic extensions of the worlds they inhabit rather than as mere spectacles. And that’s why Christopher Nolan came to him with a question: how do I make monsters more human?
It is an important question. Especially when you begin to acknowledge how titanic Nolan’s task is. In adapting the Homeric epic, The Odyssey, Nolan’s ambitions might have proven to be Icarus-like. Not only is the epic poem’s scale so vast, but its very structure and contents aren’t exactly pinned down to one interpretation. Telling the story of the Ithacan king’s decade-long journey home after the end of the Trojan War is a gargantuan challenge for any director, even one of Nolan’s character and genius. As a boy, I fondly remember my reading of an illustrated, simplified version of Odysseus’s route back to Ithaca. At its core, it wasn’t just a myth of morals and men. It was a great tome of Gods and monsters. It illuminated my imagination, sketching out the Mediterranean adventure in caves, islands, and across wide-open seas where the mettle of man met the mysterious terror of unknown abominations. Essentially, if Nolan were to do Homer’s work any justice, he needed to make the mythical meaningful. The monsters, therefore, cannot merely function as beasts to be overcome, but as symbolic encounters that expose something fundamental about humanity, civilisation, and Odysseus himself. They are a colossal part of that.
What makes The Odyssey so enduring, however, is that its monsters are not all monstrous in the same way. Circe, Polyphemus, and Antonius each represent a fundamentally different kind of monstrosity. While Polyphemus is the epic's most recognisable physical monster, a figure of overwhelming violence and primal chaos, Circe complicates the very idea of the monstrous, functioning less as a beast than as a witch whose magic becomes a form of retribution against male arrogance and excess. Antonius, meanwhile, reveals that the greatest threat to civilisation may not be mythical at all, but human: a man whose entitlement, cruelty, and abuse of power make him every bit as monstrous as the creatures Odysseus encounters on his voyage.
By all means, the character of Polyphemus is the most traditional of monsters brought to life by Nolan’s technicality and practical effects. What originated as a huge puppet hung aloft in the dark of the historical Nestor’s Cave in Greece was later animated as a malformed, living-and-breathing one-eyed giant. However, like many others who might, like me, be critical of some of the more intelligent elements of Odysseus’ interaction with the mythical Cyclops being erased from Nolan’s narrative, the absence of the famous “Nobody” deception initially feels like a disappointing omission. In Homer, Odysseus’ triumph over Polyphemus is as much a victory of intellect as it is of survival, reinforcing the hero’s defining characteristic: his cunning. Nolan instead strips away this moment of verbal ingenuity, replacing it with a far more immediate and emotionally ambiguous encounter.
Polyphemus the Cyclops in his cave, Archivist
This is not to suggest that Nolan domesticates Polyphemus entirely. The Cyclops still tears apart and devours several of Odysseus’ men with horrifying physicality, preserving the visceral terror that has long defined him. Nolan has acknowledged that Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son served as a visual inspiration for these scenes, and the influence is unmistakable. Like Goya’s Saturn, Polyphemus’ cannibalism is rendered not as mindless savagery but as an expression of possessive, almost primordial violence: the desperate response of a being defending what is his from those who have trespassed upon it. His towering body, marbled with chalky white markings that resemble weathered limestone and sea salt, further binds him to the island itself, presenting him as an extension of the landscape rather than an alien presence within it. As the son of Poseidon, Polyphemus becomes inseparable from the sea and the ancient world it governs, a creature whose violence mirrors the unforgiving force of nature itself.
Yet Nolan refuses to leave the audience with the image of a ravenous beast alone. Before the bloodshed, Polyphemus is shown tending to his sheep, and after Odysseus blinds him, the film lingers not on the Greeks’ escape but on the Cyclops’ agonised screams echoing through the cave. Working against our own impulses to demonise the monster, sympathy briefly shifts away from the hero and towards the monster. The cries are less those of a defeated villain than of a wounded shepherd whose home has been invaded, whose flock has been threatened, and whose suffering becomes the catalyst for Poseidon’s relentless vengeance.
Read in this way, Polyphemus becomes a surprisingly modern figure. The cave is no longer merely the lair of a beast but the home of an indigenous inhabitant violated by armed outsiders who arrive uninvited, consume his resources, and answer resistance with overwhelming violence. Nolan does not excuse Polyphemus’ cannibalism, but he complicates it, encouraging us to question how readily the language of monstrosity has historically been deployed to justify conquest. In doing so, the Cyclops comes to embody a broader history of colonial encounter, where invasion is remembered as heroism while native resistance is condemned as barbarism. Rather than presenting Polyphemus as simply another obstacle in Odysseus’ voyage, Nolan transforms Homer’s most iconic monster into a symbolic figure whose humanity unsettles the moral certainty of the epic itself.
In a more complex take on the idea of monsters, Nolan leans into the interpretation of the character of Circe (Samantha Morton) as something more than a witch who has the ability to transform man into beast. Instead, the nymph-turned-sorceress is animated as an isolated figure who rivals the gods themselves, seeing the power of gods and the violence of man as something to be rejected and overcome. Her island is not simply a place of enchantment but a sanctuary removed from the patriarchal structures that dominate both Olympus and the mortal world, allowing her to exist as one of the few figures in The Odyssey who answers to no man. In this sense, Nolan agrees with the notion that positions Circe as a distinctly feminist figure. Her magic is not wielded for conquest or domination but as a means of reclaiming agency in a world where women are repeatedly treated as prizes, possessions, or casualties of male ambition.
This is reflected most clearly in her transformation of Odysseus' crew into pigs. While Homer presents the metamorphosis as another supernatural trial for the hero, Nolan imbues it with a sharper symbolic edge. When Odysseus accuses her of turning his companions into swine, Circe replies: "I didn't turn your men into anything! Look at them. This is what they are. Look at them! Beasts!" The line reframes the entire encounter. Rather than creating monstrosity, Circe merely reveals it. The pig becomes an outward manifestation of the men's greed, violence, and unchecked appetites, exposing the animality that already exists beneath the veneer of civilisation. In this reading, Circe functions less as a villain than as a moral arbiter, forcing both Odysseus and the audience to confront the uncomfortable truth that the greatest monsters in The Odyssey are often men themselves.
Circe Makes Pigs, Archivist
Ironically, it is this very act of revelation that Nolan renders as monstrous. The transformation sequence, achieved largely through practical effects, is deliberately grotesque: bones crack, skin stretches and tears, limbs distort, and terrified screams dissolve into panicked squeals. The horror lies not simply in bodies changing shape but in humanity being violently stripped away before our eyes. Nolan understands that monsters emerge at the point where the familiar becomes grotesquely unfamiliar, and so he uses body horror to make Circe's judgement feel terrifying despite its underlying justice. The audience recoils from the spectacle even as the film insists that the true monstrosity lies not in her magic, but in what that magic exposes. In doing so, Nolan transforms one of Greek mythology's most infamous witches into perhaps its most incisive critic of masculine violence, revealing monstrosity not as a supernatural condition, but as an ethical one.
Nolan's decision to foreground Antinous (Robert Pattinson) also reflects a broader shift in how he understands monstrosity. Throughout The Odyssey, the mythical monsters occupy the geographical margins of the world: islands, caves, and seas beyond civilisation. Antinous, however, inhabits its very centre. By making him such a dominant presence, Nolan suggests that the greatest horrors are rarely external. Like Karl Liebknecht's declaration that "the main enemy is at home," the film argues that societies are more often undone by internal corruption than foreign invasion. Ithaca survives the Cyclops, Circe, and the Sirens, but it almost falls to one of its own aristocrats.
This is why Antinous is such an effective foil to Odysseus. Both men possess the qualities of leadership, charisma, and authority, yet where Odysseus uses these attributes to preserve his home, Antinous deploys them to consume it. Nolan repeatedly frames him as a political organiser rather than a conventional villain, corralling the suitors into a unified movement instead of a collection of opportunistic rivals. In doing so, Antinous ceases to be merely an individual antagonist and becomes the embodiment of collective moral decay. He is the figure through whom entitlement becomes ideology, convincing otherwise respectable nobles that usurpation is both inevitable and justified.
Robert Pattinson's performance is crucial to this interpretation. He avoids overt displays of cruelty, instead allowing Antinous' menace to emerge through quiet confidence and calculated restraint. His calmness is unsettling because it reflects absolute certainty; he behaves as though Odysseus' absence has already rewritten the political order. Rather than shouting his authority, Pattinson performs it as something assumed, inherited, and unquestionable. This restraint makes Antinous feel disturbingly contemporary. He resembles less the theatrical tyrants of epic cinema than the modern demagogue or populist politician, someone who consolidates power not through supernatural strength but through persuasion, spectacle, and the manipulation of public consensus.
In this respect, Nolan completes the symbolic trajectory established by Polyphemus and Circe. If Polyphemus represents the monster we misunderstand and Circe the monster who exposes uncomfortable truths, Antinous embodies the monster we willingly empower. His monstrosity lies not in physical deformity or magical ability but in his capacity to corrupt institutions from within, demonstrating that the most dangerous monsters are often those who look, speak, and govern exactly like everyone else.
Odyssey - Suitors, Archivist
Nolan's adaptation remains faithful to Homer not because it recreates every episode of the epic, but because it preserves its central insight: monsters have always reflected humanity's deepest anxieties. It is a lesson he appears to have borrowed from Guillermo del Toro. Across Del Toro's cinema, the supernatural creature is rarely the true evil. In Hellboy, the monstrous is weaponised by Nazism; in Pan's Labyrinth, the Francoist regime of Captain Vidal proves far crueller than the fantastical creatures Ofelia encounters; and in The Shape of Water, the amphibian man is contrasted with the dehumanising violence of the American military-industrial state during the Cold War. Del Toro's monsters therefore function less as antagonists than as symbolic prisms through which fascism, militarism, and authoritarian power are exposed.
Nolan adopts this same philosophy in The Odyssey. Polyphemus, Circe, and Antinous are not merely obstacles standing between Odysseus and Ithaca, but embodiments of competing moral and political anxieties. The Cyclops reflects the violence of conquest and the ambiguity of who deserves to be called a monster. Circe reveals the beastliness concealed beneath masculine civility. Antinous exposes the corruption that flourishes within institutions themselves. Looking back, I realise that the monsters who fascinated me in that illustrated version of The Odyssey were never simply creatures lurking in distant caves or enchanted islands. They were mirrors. Nolan's greatest achievement is recognising that the journey home is never just a battle against mythical beasts, but against the monstrous impulses that civilisation, power, and humanity continually produce within themselves.