To fit the rubric of Teacher Movies, it’s almost too perfect. Essentially, I’m always thinking of two things: is it a movie that teachers will use to teach, and/or is it a movie that will inspire or comment on how teaching works?

It’s clear that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) is 100% an answer to the first question. From middle school units on Greek mythology to classics seminars in graduate school, an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey has versatility in, and for, the classrooms. Depending on ages and purpose, the movie is episodic after all, so a piece-meal, scene-by-scene application is handy. Plus, there’s genuine value to some laidback “Film Strip Friday”-style vibes for a post-assessment reward viewing of course. So I don’t know that there’s much more to say about the value of this as a flexible, multimedia content-enhancer tool for the teacher.

But it’s on the second question, that is the notion of how it comments on teaching, that drew my interest as I thought about it more. And I realized, as successful as Nolan’s adaptation is at making this story relevant for a cross-generational audience, teachers have been doing just that for centuries.

Teaching literature has always been an act of adaptation.

So as a teacher, the thing that stuck with me from this version of The Odyssey was its teacher-minded approach to adaptation. The movie itself seems to apply the exact same structure that a teacher would to make an Odyssey unit successful.

I’ll start where the movie starts—the opening bard’s song. And opening this version with a bard who sings of Odysseus’ success in Troy isn’t just window-dressing. It’s not only exposition. Nor is it only a reference to oral tradition. It is instead a statement that our attention is needed. This is an analog story that isn’t built for instant repeat or pause.

Attention is something Nolan’s always been obsessed with of course. For nearly twenty years, he’s been capturing action scenes on the largest cameras known to humanity. This time, he’s made a big point of highlighting the movie itself as the first all IMAX movie. Plus, like any good teacher these days, he’s also banned phones.

He wants us to pay attention. Because attention is the key to engagement. And every teacher knows this.

From that opening then, the episodes move forward to present new challenges for Odysseus and his crew, but they also build a cumulative theme. We lit teachers work pretty similarly.

We integrate and synthesize the various learning targets into a set of episodic challenges. Sometimes these are writing challenges, or they may be analytical, dramatic, artistic, or even just straight up group discussion. But they also all then aim to build momentum and cohere along a significant theme that can be traced through the reading of a text.

For example, language arts teachers, like Odysseus, don’t have a straightforward path to our learning goals. Most broadly, we want increased critical thinking and overall literacy. But we must also equip students with scaffolded preparation to confront the dense vocabulary, confusing syntax, and otherworldly context. So we design a series of practical assignments to grow the skills outward, building off of each other. We proceed from one monster to the next.

Likewise Nolan has to present an modern Odysseus that is both proud and sympathetic to the viewer at many times. So he must arrange and compose episodes that will showcase his flaws and yet not make him unrelatable to the viewer. Which is hard because he is a character who, among other things, spends years chilling on a beach with Calypso while his son is bullied and his wife is harassed. Nolan must think like a teacher and find a way to keep sympathy through many episodes of Odysseus’ brashness (like firing unnecessarily at the cyclops) and pride (like insisting he can get his crew home when he is explicitly told they will not).

So, like a teacher, he approaches The Odyssey with a designed intentional scheme that coordinates with a theme that he extracts from the text itself. But honestly, this is also where the movie gets bolder than I would have expected, even though this is precisely what a strong teacher would do.

There are a dozen ways to tie The Odyssey to an orienting theme. There’s heroism, there’s social structure and traditions, and there’s even notions of family, duty, and honor. All of that is there. But also, all of that has been done before.

A strong teacher doesn’t construct the theme out of the historical applications of the text. A strong teacher identifies the orienting themes that are necessary for the current moment. They would identify that theme through an analysis of the work in the context in which it is received, not just when it was produced.

Teachers think about what is needed from the story right now.

Cautiously, I want to avoid a soapbox digression, but I have to emphasize here that that is the vital importance of adaptation as teaching. And it is bigger than the classroom teacher too.

It is precisely why the teaching of history and literature isn’t the same today as it was several generations before. It is not because things are being “added” or restated to meet any contemporary agendas. It is because without revisiting knowledge (no matter how sacred) in light of the present circumstances then the knowledge will lose its value. If, for instance, the college professor, the tutor, or even the Smithsonian Institution do not bravely challenge themselves to ask how is this relevant, then who will? The knowledge cannot ask, apply, or adapt itself.

It is on the teacher. Knowledge survives because of the teacher.

Now, before any naysayers discard this as “pandering” or “coddling” or anything. No. It’s not.

We teachers aren’t just “making things up” to be appealing or changing interpretations to sell an agenda. We are doing the work of analyzing things and applying things. We break them down and we see how they work. That’s what learning is. And when we ask each generation to learn more knowledge that has become more and more irrelevant, well, they won’t. That’s what a “dark age” is.

And, like a brave teacher, that’s what Nolan brings out of Odyssesus’ story. He brings out the elements that were always there, but now make it relevant. And this time those themes are the themes of trauma and anxiety.

Odysseus’ lament to Penelope in the third act of the movie is the key to realizing these themes, and their relevance. His admission that the cruel subversive success of the Trojan Horse may have broken their entire civilization is what makes the story relevant. That is not in Homer. And it is not in previous translations. It is not in the tradition of the study of The Odyssey at all.

But it is this story. This odyssey is the origin story of a rising “dark age.” It is about what happens when songs lose their relevance. It is about the consequences of unnecessary war and the dismantling of established norms.

It is about what is happening now. There are many Trojan Horses along our path of self-destruction right now.

And Nolan’s thematic boldness isn’t just in the writing of the movie. It’s in the way he’s using his influence positively, including to denounce AI and discard toxic masculine criticisms, especially of his casting choices.

Like a courageous teacher’s adaptation, Odysseus and Nolan are thinking about how we prepare the next generation for an uncertain future.

A future made more complicated by the problems our generations created yet lack the ability, or the will, to solve. From climate change to AI, our most devastating failures are indistinguishable from our successes.

So the unanswered challenges for our students and our children are very real. But it’s their future, not ours. Something Nolan seems to agree with. Because, unlike Homer, his odyssey ends with Odysseus and Penelope departing into self-ascribed exile and leaving Telemachus to face the uncertain future alone.

Which is a microcosm of how the classroom works. One generation passes the story onto the next. It works to make it real and relevant for them. But it doesn’t know what the next will do with it. It guides and tries. But it’s really up to them.

All of this is why Nolan’s The Odyssey is a great adaptation. Because it is great teaching.

When I became a teacher, I had no idea what I was doing.

I didn’t come from a family with a lot of education, so I had to find role models in stories.

And while I didn’t notice at the time (because I was 12), Alan Grant’s journey as a “teacher” through Jurassic Park strikes me as one that may have been more influential than I realized.

You see, Dr. Grant’s grumpy, disenchanted professor is precisely how I thought all my teachers were back in 1993.

Back then, I didn’t see passion in my teachers. I saw only rules and order at best and judgement and assumptions at worst. Granted, I grew up in an elementary system in the south that still recited a morning prayer on the loudspeaker and also still used paddling as a regular form of discipline.

So when I remember school, I mostly remember being afraid.

I was afraid to raise my hand, I was afraid to ask a question, I was afraid to go out to recess, and I was even afraid to ask to go to the bathroom. So lunch was a waking nightmare and dismissal was a daring prison escape.

And when Alan Grant scares the literal piss out of an overweight kid with a poor-fitting cap (who looks just like me at 12!), I wasn’t surprised. Grant despised the kids’ defiant, know-it-all derision of something he loved. He couldn’t see any curiosity in the kids’ rude skepticism. He wanted, just as he says, for the kid “to try to show a little respect.”

Grant dislikes kids, dislikes technology, and dislikes most other people. Honestly, I think it’s kind of clear he’s not that interested in dinosaurs anymore either. I mean, as Jeff Goldblum’s charmingly cool Ian Malcolm suggests, “You dig up dinosaur bones?”, Grant’s wearily cool reply is “We try to.”

Our introduction to Grant is clear: he is a passionless and unfeeling person.

But the moment Grant’s tired and disinterested eyes fumble his Ray-Bans off his Spielberg face to see the brachiosaurus for the first time he, like us, has his childish imagination re-inspired.

And for the next thirty minutes, he’s a changed man. He’s more like he probably once was as a student. He’s so excited and eager to learn that he even twice jumps off a moving attraction.The high watermark of this re-invigorated passion comes when he gets to hug a triceratops. As he says, she was “his favorite as a kid” and now “the most beautiful thing” he’s ever saw.

This kind of devoted enthusiasm for knowledge wasn’t something I was familiar with. This was new. Grant was a nerd, who was energized by questions and joyous at discovery. This was exactly how I wanted to be.

And that’s the much discussed real achievement of Jurassic Park the movie of course. It’s a reflexive, meta experience of a movie, where the character’s love of seeing dinosaurs within the story mirrors our own love of seeing dinosaurs on the screen. We are just as overwhelmed with inspiration and joy at the sign of the brachiosaurus as Grant.

But the reflexivity wasn’t just about dinosaurs for me, or Grant. It was also about finding a place where you could fully express your passion. Jurassic Park starts to be that place for him, and my own classroom became that place for me. He could nerd out chatting about “cellular mitosis” and I could help kids dissect the Hero’s Journey in The Hobbit.

Of course, that’s not all it takes to be a teacher though. Grant’s fascination with his specialized content—no matter how acclaimed he may be as a paleontologist—doesn’t make him a world-class teacher by any means. At minimum, he has to stop threatening kids with fossilized raptor talons. But he also needs to accept their own wide-eyed displays of enthusiasm.

So the movie puts in his way the perfect avatar of how I wanted to be. If “six-foot-turkey” kid was how I feared I was seen by teachers, Tim “I-read-your-book” was how I wanted to be.

Grant’s rejection and avoidance of him early on plays for laughs. But it’s still conflict that sets up his fuller redemption. When he must, Grant will use his knowledge of these creatures to save Tim and Lex. And then he will celebrate that knowledge with them afterwards. A moment that sees Grant becoming a genuine teacher.

Following the devastating T-Rex attack and car/tree escape, Grant and the kids find a moment of peace high among the tree canopy. There, he effortlessly engages with dinosaurs and the kids.

He praises Tim’s knowledge: “Very good, Tim.”

He corrects Lex’s ignorance and comforts her fear: “They’re not monsters, Lex. They’re dinosaurs. And these are herbivores.”

And he even performs a dino-call to bring the creatures closer, giving the kids a safe, scaffolded, and significant experience with the object of their curiosity.

Really, it’s an impressively compressed lesson plan. (All of which is scored to John Williams at twilight in a Steven Spielberg movie!)

To drive this all home further, as the kids nestle close to Grant for comfort, he is stabbed in the bottom by the raptor talon he used to terrorize a child earlier. But as he falls asleep, his fingers discard it, indicating his change from the disaffected grump to a dedicated care-giver.

From there, his interactions with them become more patient, encouraging them to “take their time” when climbing electric fences. And he answers their questions about how the dinosaurs may be reproducing. He even indulges in playful pop quizzes: “Tim, can you tell me what they are?” (Followed by some phys-ed jogging even.)

Grant has merges his passion and his persona to become his fullest teacher self.

And that’s what I needed when I was 12, that’s what I try to be as a teacher.

When it’s been hard, whether early in my career when I didn’t know anything or even this past decade when political turmoil and pandemics plague us, I have felt the compulsion to become hardened like Grant. I could see the lesson I teach as something dusty and artificial. And I could definitely be tempted to view students as “noisy, messy, expensive, and [yes!] smelly.”

But I’ve resisted it. And while I didn’t realize it, I think Sam Neill’s portrayal of Grant might have been a reason why.

So in tribute to Sam Neill, thank you, Alan Grant, the first teacher role-model in the first story I ever loved.