With three weeks on the big screen, director Christopher Nolan’s star-studded "The Odyssey" has made waves in both the Mediterranean Sea and the box office. The adaptation has drawn a massive audience — regardless of whether they have read Homer's original epic — spurring debate over authenticity when adapting classic literature. 

Jeremy Swist, a Michigan State University assistant classics professor, said that he and his colleagues “don’t evaluate the accuracy to the source literature,” saying it “is not inherently a bad thing” if an adaptation excludes or changes something from the original work.

“What matters to us is, if they are making these changes, how do those changes make a good story in itself?” Swist said. “Because this is essentially how art and literature evolves. It's always responding to earlier works of art and literature and making its own creative changes in order to make it meaningful to themselves.”

Philosophy associate professor Emily Katz, who has read ”The Odyssey” countless times, said it was “neat“ to see how “a big Hollywood director“ portrayed the Cyclops or the narrow strait between Charybdis and Scylla, the many-headed monster.

To be clear, there is “no such thing as historically accurate Homer,” Swist said, because any text is a transcript recited by poets around the eighth century and has been repeated for several thousand years. 

Homer's original ”The Odyssey” takes place over 2000 years ago during the Greek Bronze Age. The tale follows Trojan War hero Odysseus and his decade-long journey through the Mediterranean Sea back home to Ithaca. The story persists in modern times because it is a “very human one," said Brandon Conley, the CAMS Program Coordinator in MSU's Romance and Classical Studies department. 

”We all encounter a lot of those same feelings and struggles, so I think it's an easy story to connect to people,” Conley said. 

Katz teaches ”The Iliad,” a predecessor to ”The Odyssey,” which tells a small part of the Trojan War story. Katz said that the backstory ”The Iliad” provides is important to “understand what Odysseus has been through, how long this war was (and) how much Odysseus did not want to be a part of it.”

“The stories are good,” Katz said. “But because the stories are so good, people have been inspired by them for a very long time in different time periods and places and have created a lot of additional stories or retellings of these stories and episodes in Homer.”

Swist, Katz and Conley acknowledged the film as Nolan’s interpretation.