This article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey.’

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has sparked renewed interest in one of the world’s oldest and most enduring stories — and it has sparked controversy about whether or not the film tells the story in the right way.

But what if we step back and think about how the adaptable nature of myth makes questions of right and wrong interpretations more complex?

As a professor of Greek and Roman studies, I think of myth as clay. As classics scholar Lorna Hardwick has termed it, there is a “malleability” of mythological narratives. If we can learn to embrace this, we can be open to new presentations of familiar material that allow for new interpretive avenues.

One of the big changes Nolan brings to the story of Odysseus is that, when we meet him on Calypso’s island, he has been eating the lotus flower and so has forgotten all of the events that came before his shipwrecked arrival there. Odysseus, as a result, appears to the audience far less as a masterful and crafty narrator than as a vulnerable man reckoning with his past.

Different versions of the same myth

Mythological storytelling tells us much about the interests of the storyteller.

This is most evident when you look at different versions of the same myth, told in different genres. For example, there are versions of the fall of Troy in an ancient Athenian tragedy by Euripides (The Trojan Women)........

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