10 Movies Inspired by Greek Mythology To Watch After Nolan's The Odyssey
The Odyssey has already made good on its billing as one of the biggest movies of the year, if not the decade. Christopher Nolan's monumental epic has been selling out IMAX screens ever since its release in mid July, but if you've already managed to see it (or are still struggling to land a ticket) there are thankfully no shortage of Greek mythology-inspired movies out there to help with those Homeric comedowns.
Indeed, the ancient world—with all its potential for theatrical clout, heroic trials, elaborate beasts and scantily clad stars—has been inspiring filmmakers since as far back as the silent era. However, it wasn’t until the boom in ancient-world epics in the late '50s (think movies like Spartacus, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur) that the “swords-and-sandals” genre as we know it was born. Even then, the Greeks had to take a back seat to ancient Rome, at least until the arrival of digital effects in the early ‘00s—a game-changer that allowed filmmakers like Zack Snyder to finally bring some of the ancient world’s greatest battles and most elaborate creatures to the big screen in movies like 300.
Like any Nolan project, The Odyssey was made with as few digital effects as possible. However, the history of Greek mythology movies is actually kind of a history of digital effects themselves: all the way back to Harry Stockhausen’s stop-motion wizardry in Jason and the Argonauts—a movie that Nolan has unsurprisingly cited as a major inspiration.
In the list below, you’ll find a mix of all those things as well as a couple of more recently set movies that applied Greek myths to modern stories. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
There’s no need to get too experimental off the bat here: Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy is kind of a must-watch before seeing The Odyssey this summer. Released in 2004 (all the better to piggyback off the success and digital innovations of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator), it’s far from a perfect film, but it will familiarise you with many of the central characters while also offering one of the first big-scale attempts to show what the battle for that city might have looked like.
Peterson’s film boasts a very cool-looking wooden horse as well as some astonishing images—not least the film’s signature shot of an enormous fleet of Greek vessels biding their time in the Aegean Sea. It also, crucially, features Brad Pitt as Achilles.
If it wasn’t for the release of The Odyssey this year, this modest but rigorous adaptation of the later parts of Homer’s book would have likely found a much larger audience. For one, The Return boasts an incredible central performance by Ralph Fiennes—playing the aged hero who returns home only to find that a dangerous group of suitors have taken over the island of Ithaca—and a very decent supporting turn from Juliet Binoche as his long suffering wife Penelope.
This is one to check out if you want a Homeric tale that goes a little lighter on spectacle and a little heavier on dramatic flair, while boasting a more robust fealty to the text.
All that said, if fealty to the text is not exactly your prerogative, there are plenty of lightly informative things to enjoy about the world of Percy Jackson. As any fan of the YA books will tell you, the recent show on Disney+ is easily superior to both the movies that came out in 2010 and 2013 — but seeing as we’re talking cinema here, the most useful for an Odyssey followup watch is probably the most recent of them.
Titled Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, the story is a modern retelling of the search for the golden fleece involving multiple figures who also turn up in Nolan’s movie, including the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Scylla.
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After the success of Gladiator and Troy, Hollywood started to churn out movies based on ancient stories and myths at a rate that hadn’t been seen for half a century. Nothing did more to supercharge that process than the release of future Justice League director Zack Snyder’s 300 in 2006, a film based on a tale about a heroic group of Spartan warriors that managed to plunder almost half a billion USD at the global box office.
We should note that the film has received plenty of much-warranted criticism over the years for its depictions of the Persian antagonists. Still, it was nothing if not influential and will certainly help to get you in the mood for the kind of battle sequences we’re likely to see in Nolan’s movie. Come for Gerard Butler’s performance as Leonidas but keep an eye out for Michael Fassbender in one of his first ever big screen roles.
If you’re looking for something a little more light-hearted than all that, the Disney animated version of Hercules is still an unblemished delight. This is the one where Danny DeVito voiced a Satyr named Phil and James Woods voiced no less than the King of Hell—and, to his credit, did a deliciously villainous job of it.
Released in 1997, a couple of years before Gladiator, Disney can actually claim some credit for setting the ancient world genre revival in motion. Check it out if you’re a fan of that golden age in the studio’s history—when movies like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast pretty much became an annual given.
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The first big-budget movie to try to cash in on the 300 hype was Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans—a CGI-fueled, action-packed journey onto the literal lap of the gods. The plot will not offer much backstory for The Odyssey, per se, but it might help you to get a bit more acquainted with some of the Greeks’ main celestial players—certainly with a bit more accuracy than in Thor: Love and Thunder.
In this one, Hades appears in the form of Ralph Fiennes (him again), Draco in the form of Mads Mikkelsen, and Zeus in the form of Liam Neeson. The film also boasts the unlikely Skins reunion of Nicholas Hoult and Kaya Scodelario.
Arriving just downstream of Clash of the Titans was Immortals—an even better work of CGI-maximalism from The Fall director Tarsem Singh. Similar to Clash, you won’t come away with a richer understanding of what Nolan might be about to get up to with The Odyssey, but you will certainly come away with a better grasp on some of these iconic figures of antiquity—you might also have a pretty good time in the process.
Singh’s cast includes such luminaries as John Hurt, Mickey Rourke and Stephen Dorff, but the movie belongs to Henry Cavill. Just two years away from playing Superman for the first time in Man of Steel, the actor is characteristically slab-like as Theseus—a mortal man given the unenviable task of fighting Rourke’s King Hyperion.
If you’re looking for a movie that takes a more tactile approach to the ancient world, the 1963 classic Jason and the Argonauts is both a classic of that genre and a landmark in the history of special effects. The wider movie is typical of Hollywood epics from the time, but the sequences designed by Ray Harryhausen still have the capacity to amaze.
Watching Nolan’s film last month, and especially the sequence in the Cyclops' cave and in the underworld, I was immediately reminded of the uncanny way that the skeleton army comes to life in this movie. I was also not at all surprised to hear Nolan reference it as in influence.
We could have written an entire piece on modern movies that were loosely drawn from Greek mythology—Pygmalion alone has inspired its fair share, up to and including Weird Science, Poor Things and even The Bride!—but in the interest of staying close to Nolan’s epic, let’s stick to The Odyssey for now.
The most well-known alternative take on that story, at least in terms of cinema, is the Coen brothers’ comedy satire, O Brother, Where Art Thou?—which is a must-see if you like the siblings at their most goofy (think Burn After Reading and Hail, Caesar!). Transplanting the story to the American South in the 1930s, George Clooney plays a man on a quest to get home to his wife Penny (Holly Hunter). To do so, he will sing various songs and pass various trials — it’s a hoot.
We’ll end this list with one of the most adventurous takes on Greek mythology in the history of the medium. Released in 1959, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus transports the tragic love story of Orpheus and Eurydice to a contemporary favela in Rio de Janeiro — with wonderful if still complicated results.
The film won the 1959 Palme d’Or and went on to a Best International Feature prize at the Oscars, but it’s very much a story set in Brazil told through a European gaze. With that in mind, Camus' film isn’t beating the allegations of exoticism, but in terms of music and colour it remains a joyous spectacle.
