The Odyssey, Nolan’s Film

What did I, a classicist and author of Greek myth retellings, think of Nolan’s film The Odyssey?

I loved it. Did Nolan’s Odysseus match my interpretation of the “many-turned” hero? Mostly no. But isn’t that a good thing? Great art invites reinterpretations. That’s what keeps both the art and the culture interpreting it alive and functioning. Homer has been heard, read, and filmed in countless different ways. For me, Nolan’s way was spellbinding and compelling, thought-provoking and entertaining.

An Altered, New Odyssey

Nolan made big plot and character changes. Some changes trim to fit the epic into a film, some bring focus to ideas Nolan chose to bring to the fore. If you want a reasonable overview of his alterations, try the L.A. Times’s article, “8 ways that Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ changes Homer’s epic.” But I don’t think you need to know what is the same or different to dive into the movie wholeheartedly. I’m arguing to let it stand on its own merits.

(At the top, Odysseus’s faithful dog greeting him was a detail in the film that stayed close to the original. I assume I can’t use photos from the film without copyright although I see them all over, so that’s a sweet old drawing within the public domain.)

Nolan’s Odysseus is a more consistently troubled and dark man than I find in the epic. The Homeric poem’s hero is driven by a desire for glory and enjoyment of life’s pleasures and intellectual puzzles.  Nolan’s Odysseus is driven by guilt and trauma. The question carrying the film is: Can Odysseus cope with his guilt sufficiently so that he can allow himself the homecoming that he theoretically wants?

Guilt-driven Hero

From repeated glimpses of a scene showing the massacre of Troy, we identify Odysseus’s key source of guilt. Through his culturally questionable deception (the Trojan horse), he destroyed this magnificent city and its people. Eventually, we understand that he views himself as responsible for the resulting collapse he sees around him of civilization. That’s a bit meta for Homeric epic: that the hero knows the larger historical processes going on around him. (Modern historians agree that the Bronze Age empires did indeed collapse during this period, although they don’t blame Odysseus. Nolan’s no doubt read this analysis. Homer is silent on the subject.)

The Odyssey: Relevant and Enlightening

While not strictly Homeric, this overall focus will feel painfully relevant and enlightening to today’s audiences—and therein lies its justification. The contemporary world suffers from similar collapses.

On the individual scale, we see soldiers and civilians overwhelmed by violence-induced PTSD (like Odysseus and his men, and Troy’s population). We have leaders who no longer observe the social and political norms that have maintained a minimum level of cultural harmony. (As Odysseus blames himself for breaking. What the film calls Zeus’s law, the Greek notion of xenia that allowed for the safe flow of peoples across the Bronze Age world because each traveler could claim a Zeus-enforced safe sanctuary when they arrived in a foreign land or household.) On the large scale, today’s war-traumatized migrations of people and the current breakdown of the international world order make Nolan’s Odysseus a fitting hero for our time. So, I don’t object that the film takes the Odyssey in new directions. The seeds of Nolan’s view came from the poem. Nolan grew them into something potentially inspirational in our modern context.

I don’t think “Homer” would object, not if we mean the centuries-long oral tradition that laid in new understandings with each passing generation. Oh, and it is also an action-packed superhero film that will keep you glued to your seat despite a nearly 3 hour run time. Pure fun.

So go see the film. Enjoy the adventure and excitement. Ponder the ideas. Talk about them with your friends. Sounds like a great evening out.

For Further Reading

If you are enjoying diving into creative retellings of Greek mythology, you might enjoy my novel based in the Trojan War but told from a woman’s point of view, Hand of Fire, or my novel that opens before the war, focusing on Deidamia, Achilles’s Wife.

If the “meta” approach to the Odyssey intrigues you, you may enjoy my review of a postmodernist redo of the poem, Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey.