The best way to describe Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is to say that it is a sleek, modern piece of porcelain, delivered without the medium ribeye you ordered.
The movie, like all of Nolan’s work, is a technical marvel and the first narrative film shot completely on IMAX 70mm film. Chock full of household names, both old-school (Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron) and newcomers (Tom Holland and Zendaya), the blockbuster is reminiscent of old Hollywood star-fests like Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express and John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger.
Excellent scenes are seeded throughout the movie. Odysseus’s encounter with Circe, for example, is genuinely horrifying, ditching mumbo-jumbo spells and Harry Potter-esque transformations for elements of classic body horror flicks like Cronenberg’s The Fly. The brief reunion between Argos, Odysseus’ faithful hunting dog, and his master is genuinely heart wrenching.
When Odysseus slaughters Robert Pattinson’s Antinous and the other men who perverted the laws of hospitality and squatted in his home to woo his wife Penelope, it is a cathartic experience to watch. While there are highlights in the two-hour, 52-minute runtime, the product still has serious flaws.
Nolan’s adaptation is not Homer’s Odyssey. Yes, the exterior details are there — we have the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, the Sirens, Calypso, the lotus flowers, Charybdis and Scylla — but none of them are right. It is as if Nolan took these elements of the epic, dropped them in front of a funhouse mirror, and shot their reflections. The reproduction is shallow, but not because the dialogue is modern or because there are more black and Indian people in the movie than Greeks. It is because Nolan completely drops the ball in delivering the theme of the poem.
Mythology can be a nebulous entity with several legitimate interpretations. Many people will say the theme of The Odyssey is about “homecoming” and the dangers and sacrifices a man must make to return to the people and places he loves. This is a legitimate take, but it only scratches the surface.
In his 2008 book, The Wisdom of the Myths, Luc Ferry argues Odysseus is a man overwhelmed by chaos. Some of this chaos, like the 10-year Trojan War, is out of his hands; duty forced him to follow King Agamemnon to war. Other chaos, however, like the hatred Odysseus earns from the sea god, Poseidon, comes from Odysseus’ own pride and vanity. This chaos is sparked by what the Greeks called hubris, acting in some way like something you were not, usually a god.
The gods threaten to kill Odysseus, not merely physically but by erasing his identity, making him as nameless as the dead. In the book, when Odysseus communes with the dead and speaks to Achilles, the great warrior says, “I would rather work the soil as a serf on hire to some landless impoverished peasant than be King of all these lifeless dead.”
The Odyssey is not just a story about a man trying to find his way home. It is the story of a man who must bring order out of chaos. He must hold fast to who he is — Odysseus of Ithaca, son of Laertes, the beloved of Athena — when gods themselves thwart him in this task. Reclaiming his identity, according to Ferry, is why so many of the dangers Odysseus encounters attack not just his body, but his memory and identity. Only by remaining Odysseus, “the man of nimble wits,” can he return home and re-establish order.
Nolan throws all this away and, instead, gives us a contemporary reflection on guilt. According to his movie, Bronze Age Greece collapsed because the guile of the Trojan Horse shattered “Zeus’ law” of hospitality, which rendered all morality moot. While it is true that Homer’s wise man, Nestor, tells Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, that Zeus wrecked the homecoming of the Greeks because “not all were wise and just,” the Trojan Horse itself was never the problem. The Greeks adored cleverness, and the Horse was sanctioned by the goddess Athena. Turning the trick into the moral failing ruins the entire retelling.
Take Odysseus. Matt Damon’s Odysseus cannot be the “man of nimble wits,” because while wits give you an edge over your enemies and keep a lock on your identity, they can do nothing in the face of overwhelming guilt. Cleverness is thus replaced by angst.
Damon is a PTSD sufferer who wants to forget. He pigs himself on the lotus flowers and, at the end of the movie, after freeing his house from the suitors, exiles himself with his wife to the west as if he were a scapegoat. Nolan intends for this to be a heroic, self-sacrificial action. But it comes across as the easy way out. If Odysseus is guilty, his exile should be more of a mission to re-establish Zeus’ law. And if he isn’t guilty, then this decision is asinine stupidity.
Guilt could have worked cinematically as Nolan’s theme if the Greek gods were actually present in the movie and had a say in things. But they do not. While monsters and seers and witches seem to thrive, the gods, the forces of order and justice, are MIA. Yes, Zendaya is credited as Athena, but the actress’s appearance as a Trojan girl killed in front of Odysseus suggests she is just a guilt-induced manifestation. Zeus is mentioned but never appears. The thunder supposedly heralding his presence might as well be a meteorological coincidence. Ignoring the pantheon, especially in one of the two main works that gave the Greek their gods (Herodotus names Homer and Hesiod) is not just an error, but borders on sabotage. And for what?
Here is where the true irony manifests. By trying to make The Odyssey relatable to the 21st century, Nolan made a flash in the pan, not an adaptation of one of the foundational texts of the Western world. Instead of a hero we all can relate to — because home and identity and stability are things we all crave and desire — we get another story about another soldier who feels guilty about fighting in a war. That might have been a unique spin in 1971, but it’s as old as mothballs today.
While the movie looks like it will make money, and the supermajority of critics cannot contain their joy (actress Samantha Morton wins the hyperbole Olympic gold for calling her experience on set a “religious experience”) it is, at the end of the day, a Pyrrhic victory. A white, porcelain plate cannot satisfy what we look for when we read Homer, no matter how smooth or flawless it is.
