A Review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

by Brett Rutherford

Christopher Nolan’s film is a triumph, a milestone in the history of ancient-world epics.

A translator of The Odyssey (Emily Wilson), whose work Nolan admired and claimed as an inspiration, has condemned the script and the acting in rather insulting terms, even as interest in the film is driving the sales of her translation up into Harry Potter land.

The slug-like creature known as Elon Mollusk has offered to make his own AI-generated version of The Odyssey, suggesting that Mel Gibson might direct it. All to correct the supposed DEI and “woke” components of the script and casting.

I am myself a captive creature of the classics, having adapted a number of classic Greek poets, and having authored a long poem that is a prequel to The Iliad. I have read various English translations of both epics, and I prefer Lattimore for The Iliad and Fitzgerald for The Odyssey. A peek at Wilson’s translation did not stir me. Therefore I offer the following disconnected comments about The Odyssey from a vantage of great familiarity with the literature and its tradition.

Surprise! I was thrilled and delighted with Nolan’s film.

It is not a linear or literal adaptation of Homer’s poem. Even compressed, that would take maybe 24 hours, or a mini-series running three seasons. What this film offers instead is the heart of The Odyssey’s plot and many of its characters, as re-purposed and re-imagined by a film-maker with a brain of his own, and many points to make about our present-day world, and our own nation’s obsession with war.

The swash-buckling hero of the sword-and-sandal films, this Odysseus is not. He is a war veteran with PTSD, memory loss, drug addiction, and a dread of going home where a line of widows and orphans would meet him on the dock and demand to know what happened to their sons and brothers. For that, he has no answer. He has lost every single man, some in battle at Troy, and the rest in calamities on the war home.

In several flashbacks to the fall of Troy, Odysseus is seen as becoming a passive observer of the carnage his clever invention of the Trojan Horse has brought upon the fallen city. He sees women and children cut down in the streets. The King of Kings of the Greeks, Agamemnon, passes through the gates of Troy in the guise of Darth Vader.

There are no gods in this film. The “Athena” who keeps appearing to counsel him is not the goddess, but one of his shell-shock hallucinations. She is, in fact, an apparition of a priestess of Athena he saw beheaded at Troy. You might have to see the film twice to realize this.

There are monsters in this film, oh yes. A terrific Cyclops who devours humans head first in a direct imitation of the Goya painting Saturn Devouring His Children. The witch Circe is a man-hater, turning house-guests into pigs until she is persuaded by Odysseus to change her ways (the year of sex between witch and warrior are omitted). The whirlpool and hydra-like monster, and the giants, are the stuff of nightmares, and Nolan, not employing AI in any way, uses full size models and various tricks of photography to pull of the remarkable episodes.

Now here I want to digress about these monster stories. The Odyssey begins in “Homer’s” voice, as an omniscient narrator, but all the stories of the mishaps involving enchantresses and monsters, are related by Odysseus himself while he is a guest at dinner. They are table talk bardic episodes. The places and creatures did not exist, and no Greek had ever seen a Cyclops. Odysseus is a cunning man, a trickster, and perhaps a desperate liar because he cannot in any other way account for the loss of his men. None of them, not one, returned from Troy.

The reason I dwell on this is that Nolan gives us Odysseus’s most outlandish tall tale, that of his and his crew’s journey to Hades, through a mysterious “back door” far to the North (Iceland, it seems.) This scene reduced me to rubble. It is unsettling and terrifying, especially to a poet.

Nolan has Odysseus and his men make a hasty retreat from Hades, pursued by the shades of the unburied dead of Ithica. In Homer’s original tall-tale, Odysseus meets more and more famous Greeks going back to the earliest times. He never explains how he recognizes all these ghosts as they approach him to talk, and he stops himself and apologizes to his host. He has overstepped the human and is on over his depth.

What I believe Nolan has perceived, correctly, is that Odysseus has lied his way home, a broken man, and that, once in Ithaca he would have only his tall tales to justify his long absence. Nolan has the hero relate each of these “tales” to Calypso as recovered memories. Which cannot be trusted.

Odysseus’s flashback to Troy is his Oppenheimer moment. Nolan has worked the whole story to bring us here. It is not about ancient Greeks. It is about us. It is about every broken-down veteran in a doorway. It is about the soldier asked to go through the gates of a strange city and kill on sight. It is about the invention of monsters where none exist.

This is a masterpiece of cinema. A masterpiece of story-telling. An experience that will linger for years in the minds of viewers.

I am sorry that classicists are offended. I am sorry that Greeks are offended, claiming that a universal classic belonging to all humankind can be "culturally appropriated" – rubbish!

I am sorry that the film did not have a more high-toned script with more literary language. I did not like Telemachus call his father his “Dad.” That was the director’s choice.

I am sorry that most audiences will not have the context to understand why the Trojan War started, what preceded the fall of Troy, and, hence its effect on those who sacked it. The Odyssey is a sequel, the greatest sequel ever. The violation of hospitality when a prince of Troy stole Helen, the wife of Menelaus, triggered the ten-year siege.

Hades, soon enough, will be full of critics quarreling over Nolan’s Odyssey. The food down there consists mostly of sour cherries, which should suit them.