Minor spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the film yet.
“A face… a fleet… a war… a man… a thought… a trick… a trick to break the walls of Troy.” The bard sings of the Trojan War and the heroics of Odysseus, whose idea to deceive the Trojans by constructing a wooden horse granted the Greeks victory. A performance for the suitors who feast in Odysseus’ household in his absence, it’s the closest thing, in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, to an acknowledgement of the oral tradition to which Homer’s poems belonged. They would have been performed to an audience, recounting epic stories intended to entertain and inspire. Here, the bard’s song is more blunt and stripped back than the extravagant epithets of Homer’s poetry, but it’s indicative of the incisively direct effect Nolan is aiming for. Played by Travis Scott (yes, a strange casting choice), drawing an inescapable connection to rap, the bard embodies the clash between the ancient and the modern at the heart of Nolan’s Odyssey.
Nolan is a modern director, perhaps the quintessential modern director. He helped to usher in a new era for the superhero genre, for better or worse, with the Dark Knight trilogy. His wholly original concepts and knack for constructing elaborate, complex narratives ensure his films consistently find their audience. His commitment to big-screen filmmaking and championing of IMAX draw people to the cinema in hordes. It’s hard to imagine any other director turning a dense, dialogue-driven, 3-hour character examination that includes security clearances, black-and-white sequences and explanations of quantum physics, into a near $1 billion box office phenomenon. Off the back of the success of Oppenheimer, the creative freedom and vast supply of resources granted to Nolan have led him back to Homer. You could say it was predetermined by the gods that the two would eventually meet directly. Homer’s poem has clearly influenced Nolan’s previous work, such as his space odyssey, Interstellar. He makes films on an epic scale, and the Odyssey is the ultimate epic tale.
As one of our oldest surviving stories, a foundation of Western civilisation and culture of storytelling, the Odyssey has a sweeping scope and wealth of themes and ideas. Our perception of its key themes has inevitably changed in the 2700 years between us and Homer. The question that presents the adapter is how a modern audience will respond. How should fate and the divine be handled? Is it necessary to reevaluate the glory earned in war and what constitutes a hero? Is the central role of ancient Greek hospitality and the moral obligation to host a stranger an admirable ideal or naive optimism?
The opening title card informs us that we’re “in a time of apparent magic…” leaving room for doubt and disclosing from the outset Nolan’s unwillingness to commit fully to fantasy. While he has bent reality to his will in previous films, devising his own rules and mechanics for entering dreams in Inception and reversing time in Tenet, the world of Homer’s Odyssey exists within a rich, ancient mythology whose imagery is familiar to us through art and wider culture. Nolan navigates this by taking a grounded approach, aiming for immersion, as evident by his pioneering use of IMAX, a format designed to be as immersive as possible, and smooth editing that maintains the film’s swift pace. He imagines how the fantastical would realistically be experienced. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the gods act in the foreground, dictating the outcome of events, who lives and who dies. In the film, the supernatural is turned natural; Zeus speaks through peals of thunder, and Poseidon is the turbulent sea that waylays Odysseus and his men. Zendaya’s Athena appears to Odysseus, but could she be a figment of his (guilt-ridden) psyche? To the characters, the gods are all around them. Their visible presence is replaced by repeated reference to Zeus’ Law: treat strangers as you would want to be treated because they might be gods in disguise. It’s a refrain that works both as a simplification of Xenia, an ancient Greek value that demands the sacred upholding of hospitality, and a practical reminder of the divine.
Each pitstop along Odysseus’ journey presents a new mythological obstacle or magical being. Fantasy is unavoidable, but the film strains to lean towards realism. What would it actually be like to be stuck in a cave with a 20-foot cyclops? Probably pretty scary. What might Hades look like? A suitably ominous black sand beach in Iceland. How would the sorceress Circe go about transforming Odysseus’ men? Her method is grotesquely hands-on. Nolan’s reliance on practical effects is pivotal to achieving the sensation that what you’re seeing is tangible. The techniques used are fascinating, from creating a giant puppet for the cyclops, to bringing in 7-foot actors, 5-foot stunt doubles, and forced perspective for the Laestrygonians, to moldable prosthetics and animatronics for Circe to play with. Some of these sequences venture into the realm of horror and are impressively crafted, showing promise for Nolan’s confessed desire to direct a horror film. That being said, his style remains characteristically cold and direct and can feel at odds with the supernatural elements integral to the story. The representations of the monsters Scylla and Charybdis are especially underwhelming. I found myself most bewitched when magic was absent, for instance, in the convincing depiction of the precarious and degrading conditions inside the Trojan horse in a standout sequence that’s as pulsatingly suspenseful as Oppenheimer’s Trinity test or Interstellar’s docking scene.
Score can enhance immersion, and Nolan and composer Ludwig Göransson seek to capture the sound of ancient Greece. They didn’t want to use the Romantic-era concept of the orchestra, which has become the go-to sound for traditional film scores. Instead, Göransson reconstructed ancient Greek instruments, such as the aulos and the lyre, and figured out how to play them based on ancient records and archaeological sources. He doesn’t rely solely on these sounds, however; he also uses synths, sonically weaving the modern and the ancient for maximum effect. Göransson is in a league of his own, delivering yet another distinctive, musically inventive, and powerfully moving score that covers the intimate and the epic. That 4th Oscar seems inevitable.
The process of bringing Homer down to earth is evident in the plainness of the dialogue. At times, it’s inelegant and unconvincing. It spells out what’s going on while sounding smarter than it is. Gone is the poetic language of Homer that translators have toiled to preserve across the centuries. But there are memorable lines, powerful lines befitting the weight of the story. Odysseus’ monologue, upon returning home, is immensely stirring.
Weaknesses in the writing extend to the narrative structure. Nolan’s framing of the story — with scenes of Odysseus stranded on Calypso’s island, as forgetful as Guy Pearce in Memento, recalling his journey as his memory slowly returns — is his most egregious case of overcomplicating the narrative for the sake of it. We get expositional flashbacks and multiple plot threads. Scenes feel hurried, a side effect of shooting entirely with IMAX cameras, which can only film for 3 minutes at a time, creating a limit before which a hard cut is required. Stitched in are scenes back at Ithaca, where the commanding presence of Anne Hathaway’s Penelope holds out for her husband’s return, refusing to give in to the suitors’ advances, while Telemachus (Tom Holland) resolutely sets out to locate his father. Robert Pattinson is deliciously devious as the slippery, conniving suitor Antinous.
The Odyssey is a reminder that history and fiction do interact. The largely nonsensical criticisms of a lack of historical accuracy before the film’s release reveal a perceived obligation to be faithful to the poem’s link to an identifiable point in history, even if the story of Odysseus returning home from the Trojan War, with all its gods and monsters, is clearly fiction. The archaeological site of Troy has been uncovered and, while the historicity of any war between Greeks and Trojans remains uncertain, it’s accepted that there’s some truth behind Homer’s depiction of the siege of Troy in the Iliad, which has been dated to around the 12th or 11th centuries BC. Nolan’s decision to construct his own aesthetic (my take is that as long as the production design and costumes are convincing enough and cinematic, keeping you immersed in the story, I don’t care) doesn’t signify a simple rejection of history. Fiction can be used to explore history in enlightening ways, especially where our knowledge is limited. History can be divided into cycles, and in the 400 years between the possible dating of the Trojan War and Homer, there was a complete societal collapse, known as the Late Bronze Age collapse, in which most cities and economies were destroyed, plunging the Mediterranean region into the Dark Ages. Its cause is unknown. Adaptation affords the liberty to speculate, and Nolan turns a $250 million blockbuster into a vehicle for historical speculation. What if the Trojan horse, the ultimate violation of Xenia, undid the moral fabric that held society together, leading to not only the fall of Troy but of civilisation itself? “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire.”
Consequently, how would the architect of such a definitively destructive act feel? Nolan applies a modern sense of morality and gives Odysseus a conscience. He’s responsible for desecrating Zeus’ Law and foresees the devastation he’s let loose. Matt Damon does well to portray an Odysseus weathered by war, years spent wandering, and trial after trial, which is all condensed into his regret for his actions and the time that was lost. He’s ashamed of his heroism to the point where we should question if he could be considered a hero. After returning to Ithaca, he sees the opportunity to deal with the suitors, who similarly abuse and take advantage of Xenia and Zeus’ Law, as a way to atone for his mistakes. This psychology of guilt is alien to Homer but relatable for a modern audience. Nolan isn’t interested in unpacking how Homer’s Odysseus might have felt, in a culture where sacking cities and enjoying the spoils brought glory, not shame. Classicist scholars wouldn’t be concerned with — nor impressed by, I suspect — this kind of modern reanalysis, but it brings a fresh angle to an ancient story that’s been adapted and retold countless times.
Ultimately, the film reads like a thesis in a similar way to Oppenheimer. Its examination of the inner turmoil of a brilliant man who designed a device that won the war but unleashed a destructive force beyond his control, setting off a chain reaction, feels like an all-too-familiar retreading, but whether the context is the threat of nuclear weapons in the 20th century or the Bronze Age collapse 3000 years ago, it resonates now, which is very telling of our perception of where we currently are in our own cycle of history. Nolan’s films seek to move the audience with the power of an idea (the very basis of Inception), a startling suggestion, or the consequences of an action. They normally build to a moment when the pieces fall into place and the revelation hits like a wave (not a mountain). That moment in this film is profoundly transformative, revealing Nolan’s intentions.
The Odyssey, intended to be seen on the biggest screen, is luring cinemagoers siren-style with the promise of epic spectacle, which it delivers. It conveys the weight of the journey — physical, mental, emotional, mythological. For what it lacks in elegance, it makes up for in visual and conceptual impact. It’s a fascinating exercise in adaptation, in its cinematic translation of an ancient text for a modern audience. I wouldn’t say it does Homer proud, but it is a reminder that the poem is timeless. There’s always scope for reinterpretation. Almost three millennia have passed and we’re still talking about it, now more than ever.
CineLiterate 