10 great Greek myth adaptations

Fascinated by time and memory, Christopher Nolan’s cinema feels like a natural home for Homer’s epic The Odyssey. Following the legendary hero Odysseus on his decade-long struggle to return to his family after the fall of Troy, Nolan’s latest joins a long tradition of films inspired by the tales of Greek mythology – one of cinema’s deepest creative wells. From modern retellings to the loosest adaptations, these timeless stories of fated heroes, capricious gods and the destructive pull of hubris have endured for millennia because they speak so readily to our core fears and desires.

Many adaptations like Nolan’s, however, resist the urge to update their setting and instead stay firmly rooted in the landscapes of Ancient Greece, where divine intervention walks hand in hand with human vengeance and ambition. These films show how myths can be reinterpreted without relinquishing their original time and place, whether drawing directly from surviving Greek tragedies and epic poems or weaving together multiple stories to fantastical effect.

Nolan’s film brings Ancient Greece to life on a breathtaking scale. Though the world he creates feels as vast and unforgiving as the ocean, Odysseus’s journey home is defined as much by the burden of the Trojan legacy he carries with him as the distance he must travel. With The Odyssey preparing to set sail on 17 July, here we highlight 10 other adaptations that remain in antiquity while reminding us why these timeless stories have continued to resonate across generations.

Director: Mario Camerini

A square-jawed Kirk Douglas stars as Ulysses, the Roman name for Odysseus, in this swaggering early adaptation of the Odyssey. Filmed on location across the Mediterranean, using practical effects that give even the most mythical sequence a convincing physicality, this abridged version of the legend is rich with the pleasures of Golden Age spectacle. 

Though uncredited, future horror maestro Mario Bava was instrumental in bringing the cyclops Polyphemus to life in one of the most memorable scenes, using an imaginative forced perspective. Douglas plays Ulysses less as the cunning tactician of legend than a fearless adventurer, embodying the same physical intensity that defined much of his career, while Silvana Mangano is superb in the dual role of patient wife Penelope and seductive sorceress Circe, who appears in a haze of green lighting. Arriving before the sword and sandals ‘peplum’ craze took hold of Italian cinema, Ulysses had the confidence to tell a story well and set the modern blueprint for bringing Greek myths to the screen.

Director: Robert Wise

Inspired by Homer’s Iliad, Robert Wise’s sweeping melodrama reimagines the doomed romance that sparked the Trojan War as a meet-cute between Prince Paris and Helen on a Spartan beach. Their subsequent affair and escape sets in motion a conflict driven by political greed, the betrayal providing the perfect excuse for the Greek’s long-desired assault on Troy. 

Filming in CinemaScope at Rome’s Cinecittà and on location in Tuscany, Wise embraces the full spectacle of the Hollywood historical epic by filling the frame with monumental sets and a vast army of extras, though this came at a high price. Hundreds of local Italians took part in the battle sequences, during which more than 200 people were injured and, according to reports, three were killed. Though its romantic sensibilities depart from the source, Helen of Troy is an elegant and influential mid-century vision of the Trojan legend whose influence on later adaptations is clear, not least on Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), which echoes several major scenes.

Director: Don Chaffey

Few films on this list have cast a longer shadow than Don Chaffey’s retelling of the Jason myth, which sends an Avengers-level cast of Greek heroes in search of the Golden Fleece. Guided by Hera, queen of the gods, they face off with mythical beasts and the deadly Clashing Rocks on their epic voyage. It is impossible to separate this classic of the genre from Ray Harryhausen’s charming stop-motion animations, from the towering bronze Talos to the many-headed Hydra. His creatures hold a sense of weight and presence that still seems remarkable more than 60 years later. 

The climactic battle with seven skeletal warriors, sprung from the slain Hydra’s teeth, is among the most celebrated sequences in fantasy cinema, but the film’s infectious sense of adventure rarely lets up across its entire runtime. Decades before franchise filmmaking became Hollywood’s dominant mode, Jason and the Argonauts proved that ancient myth could thrive as popular cinema and it remains a defining screen interpretation of Greek mythology.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

A more sober take on the Jason myth, as well as the Euripides play that continues Medea’s tale, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s adaptation casts opera star Maria Callas in her only film role, as the eponymous sorceress. After helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece from her own people, Medea abandons the spiritual land of Colchis for the role of a Greek wife. But when Jason pursues a politically favourable new marriage, he sets in motion one of Greek myth’s most infamous acts of revenge. 

Callas is remarkable, portraying Medea as a woman severed from the culture that once defined her. Against the rituals and landscapes of her lost world, Jason’s Greece is cold and pragmatic, leaving her increasingly alienated from everything she knows. By the time Medea turns to unthinkable vengeance, it is born as much from exile and isolation as betrayal. Demanding but richly rewarding, this is one of cinema’s most distinctive interpretations of Greek tragedy.

Director: Michalis Cacoyannis

Following the austere Electra (1962) and furious anti-war lament The Trojan Women (1971), Iphigenia is the final film in Michalis Cacoyannis’s reverse-chronological triptych of Euripidean tragedies. After offending Artemis, goddess of the hunt, the armies of Greece are stranded at Aulis on their journey to war in Troy. To make the much-needed wind finally blow, the gods demand a terrible sacrifice: King Agamemnon’s first-born daughter. 

Confronting the ethical horrors of Euripides’ play, this Academy Award-nominated adaptation from Greece exposes the religious fatalism, patriarchal violence and corrupt leadership that condemns the innocent Iphigenia. Tatiana Papamoschou is deeply affecting in the title role while Irene Papas is a devastating Clytemnestra, the grieving mother whose guttural anguish hardens into a thirst for revenge. A defining face of Greek tragedy on film, Papas also played Clytemnestra’s sister Helen for frequent collaborator Cacoyannis in The Trojan Women, bringing remarkable complexity to one of mythology’s most elusive players.

Director: Desmond Davis

One of the few film adaptations of Greek myth to truly embrace the petty rivalries and constant meddling of the gods, Clash of the Titans and its 2010 remake are both loose retellings that stitch together several myths. In the 1981 original, demigod Perseus must battle legendary monsters, including the gorgon Medusa and the colossal Kraken, to save the city of Joppa and its princess Andromeda – each caught in the crossfire of a divine battle of wills. 

Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith bring theatrical grandeur to Zeus and vengeful sea nymph Thetis, whose rivalry gives the film much of its momentum, while Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animations remain a pleasure. His snake-haired Medusa, winged-horse Pegasus and fearsome Kraken are extraordinary examples of fantasy craftsmanship. But more than its monsters, the divine intervention in mortal matters brings Clash of the Titans closer to capturing the unpredictable nature of Greek mythology than many more faithful attempts.

Director: Franco Piavoli

Though Christopher Nolan’s take on the Odyssey is blockbuster filmmaking on the grandest scale imaginable, it shares more DNA with this reflective adaptation than some might expect. Franco Piavoli presents Odysseus as a traumatised man, drifting through the familiar beats of Homer’s poem like someone only half-waking from a dream. 

From the near constant soundscape of birdsong and water to the invented European language used in its sparse dialogue, every detail of Nostos: The Return feels carefully considered. With little narrative clarity, the camera lingers on faces and landscapes as memories from Odysseus’s childhood blur with haunting visions of the underworld and flashbacks to the regretful role he played in winning the Trojan War. Less concerned with recounting a hero’s journey than with the memories he carries home, here the passage of time is made just as impactful as the events that keep Odysseus away from his family for two decades.

Directors: Ron Clements and John Musker

Although it plays fast and loose with mythological accuracy, Disney’s joyous adaptation of Hercules introduced a generation to the figures of the ancient world. The fabled champion, reimagined with 90s gusto as the Michael Jordan of his time, is tasked with proving himself a hero worthy of the gods in order to restore his divinity and retake his place on Mount Olympus. But the son of Zeus and Hera (characterised as loving parents, perhaps for the first time) must learn that true strength lies not in physical prowess alone but in courage and compassion. 

Drawing inspiration from Greek sculpture and vase painting for its animation, Hercules is one of the most visually distinct films of the Disney Renaissance. Meanwhile, Alan Menken and David Zippel’s exuberant soundtrack is brought to life by a showstopping gospel-singing chorus of Muses. It may bear little resemblance to the decidedly age-inappropriate tales on which it draws, but few films have done more to make Greek mythology so accessible.

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Polarising but impeccably crafted, Troy remains one of the most ambitious attempts to translate Greek myth into grounded historical epic. Stripping Homer’s Iliad of its gods, Wolfgang Petersen presents a Trojan War shaped by human ambition rather than divine will. Aphrodite no longer spirits Paris from the battlefield to safety, nor does Apollo guide the arrow that finds Achilles’ infamous heel. With no gods to pull the strings, victory and defeat rest entirely on human shoulders and every clash feels brutal. 

Swords carry weight, spears splinter and shields buckle beneath devastating blows. Whatever its departure from Homer, Troy helped reignite cinema’s fascination with Greek mythology and, paving the way for a wave of ancient epics in the following decade, it endures as one of Hollywood’s defining interpretations of myth. Curiously, Christopher Nolan was briefly attached to direct Troy before Petersen returned to the project when his planned Batman reboot collapsed. Nolan was left free to answer the Bat-Signal himself, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Director: Uberto Pasolini

Choosing to focus on the final moments of Homer’s poem, The Return portrays the Odyssey’s homecoming as a raw study of post-war trauma. Ralph Fiennes’ Odysseus is a shell, physically and psychologically scarred by the horrors of the Trojan War and consumed by guilt over the men who died under his command. Washing up on the shores of a broken Ithaca to find his family worn down by years of uncertainty and grief, his greatest challenge yet is to confront the emotional wreckage of his absence. 

One of the defining episodes of Homer’s Odyssey, the climactic contest of the bow is a highlight in Pasolini’s film as well as Nolan’s new adaptation. But here, rather than a cathartic restoration of order, the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors becomes the disturbing act of a man whose capacity for violence has outlasted the war itself. In this depiction of one of Greek myth’s most memorable codas, Pasolini’s film asks whether a hero can truly come home once war has reshaped him.

The Odyssey is in cinemas from 17 July. An IMAX 70mm print is screening from 17 July at BFI IMAX.