Dr. David Butterfield

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616 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Dr. David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TRIGGERnometry · What The Odyssey Is Actually About · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

This is a thing Nolan has been very clear about in his interviews about the level of research that he, his wife, who actually is a trained classicist, and the team have gone into in order to recreate what we might think a pure tale of fantasy.

But for the Greeks, it was meaningfully real.

It was a depiction of their own world in the second millennium BC, in the late Bronze Age, their heroic ancestors, who, yes, were able to engage with the gods and with various monsters and so on, but they were seen as their forefathers.

So there's a serious attempt made in the film to depict what civilisation might have looked like at that moment just before it actually did collapse, the Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century.

So that, on the one hand, is really interesting.

But on the other, there are some real problems when it comes to historical realism.

If you're trying to tell a film about gods interacting with mortals, that probably has not happened that obviously in the realm of history.

So what we can gauge so far is that the film will indeed focus on the one man at its heart, Odysseus,

and will attempt, possibly following the structure of Homer's poem, possibly not, to chart his long 10-year struggle after the 10 years of the Trojan War to get home to his island, to the son he has never seen since his baby years, and to the wife who is currently beset by 108 men who want to be the man who will marry her and become the new king of his home island, Ithaca.

So that's the structure as far as we can tell.

But the main noise that has come out about the film to this point is not about its historical realism, but about its striking choices when it comes to casting.

And I presume you know something about this yourselves.

But the one that's really got people talking, which I think to some degree is interesting, but to some degree is not that interesting, is about the most beautiful woman in the history, not just of the world, but in the history of all world literature, Helen.

Helen, as you know, was the queen of Sparta, the wife of Menelaus, and she gets abducted by the Trojan prince, Paris.

Why?

It all goes back to a different female figure and FOMO, the fear of missing out.

Because way back when there was a woman called Thetis, a sea nymph, so lived under the sea, but had divine powers.

And there was a prophecy that she would have a child who would be so powerful that he would overthrow Zeus.

So Zeus tries to downgrade the power of Thetis and her future child by forcing this sea nymph to marry a mortal.

She's not going to marry a deity, and therefore the offspring will be half divine and no particular threat to Zeus himself.

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