As a cinematic experience, Nolan’s Odyssey is bold, epic, visually stunning, driven by his use of natural lighting and practical effects and creatures that recall the legacy of Harryhausen, casting us fully into a mythological world of Mycenaean Greece that boasts a tactile quality that sets it above the green screen, CGI alternatives you’d likely find in a Marvel Studios production. Polyphemus, a towering mannequin in a pitch black cave lit only by a roaring fire, is a marvel of monster design while Circe’s animatronic heads Samantha Morton uses to mould from humans into pigs are an extraordinary feat of nightmare body horror, surely deserving of Oscar recognition. This is an experience Nolan insists you must experience in true IMAX, no less because it is the first film to be shot entirely in IMAX. And it must be said, it really is an audio-visual treat, complete with a soundtrack composed using traditional instruments.
A face… a fleet… a war… a man… a thought… a trick… a trick to break the walls of Troy… and burn it screaming to the ground!
There’s also no denying the absolute command it has had over the box office AND bookstores simultaneously! It’s often the case that when a major box office hit based on a book hits the screen, viewers rush to their nearest Waterstones and rack up record sales for the respective author; but it’s not every day readers from all academic backgrounds and age groups beyond Classicists rush in to decimate stacks of freshly delivered Odyssey and Iliad‘s. However it has also sparked furiously split reviews between filmgoers and Classicists – especially Homericists. Enter Emily Wilson, whose translation Nolan has claimed directly inspired his own on-screen interpretation, yet had harsh criticisms to make of this latest blockbuster.
With this in mind, going into this film, I knew it would be a difficult one to sit on. On the one hand, as a Classicist myself having studied the Homeric epics and having read seemingly a thousand translations and written Zeus knows how many essays and dissertations, there were always going to be personal biases that are hard to quiet; but equally, I tell myself it’s a cinematic adaptation of a story some 3,000 years old, having been adapted, changed and rewritten since its conception as is the nature of oral tradition, including one set in a psychedelic, gender-bent sci-fi setting where men were exploded across the universe by Zeus, with women taking on traditional male-centric literary roles – see Matt Fraction and Christian Ward’s insane ODY-C. So why, despite leaving the screen enthralled and excited by the visual spectacle Nolan delivered on, did I still feel somehow… disappointed?
Zeus’s law tells us to treat strangers as we be treated because they might be gods in disguise. I think we’ve established, Antinous, that you are not a god.
Well, for one thing it’s abundantly clear that Nolan’s Odyssey differs significantly from Homer’s, often at the expense of some of the more interesting aspects of the ancient epic, reframing the basic narrative of a lost soldier returning home into a thematically very different story. Nolan’s Odysseus can be summed up as a soldier returning home a broken man from a traumatising war, who over the course of his troubled journey, finds himself reflecting on the barbarity of war and the actions he and his men took part in. He ruminates on the consequences of the war as a soldier suffering trauma, only to be flung into a series of trials that test his mental fortitude. In this way, we are made to see him as a modern, atypical Nolan hero who is introspective and emphatic as he recognises his own flaws and mistakes and takes accountability – even if it’s too late to make a real change.
Homer’s Odysseus, meanwhile, is a perfectly Greek hero. He is the chosen of Athena; he’s a trickster, out manoeuvring his Trojan counterparts and employing ethically questionable tactics; and like all Greek heroes, he is driven by kleos – personal glory – often at the expense of making moral choices, certainly ones that carry great risk to himself and his crew. While this self-serving obsession with glory was all too characteristic of the warriors during the Iliad, it becomes deeply troublesome for Odysseus on his journey home, where his cunning often comes at odds with his ego and the need to make it clear that he is the superior tactician, that Odysseus is a name to be remembered: for this reason, for all the grandiose and epic scale of the scene with Polyphemous, it is disappointing that the iconic “I am Nobody” moment is completely absent. Odysseus is deeply flawed for following the atypical Greek hero model with an inflated ego that becomes his and his crews ultimate undoing – a trait Nolan doesn’t seem interested in, preferring to reframe Odysseus as an emphatic, introspective, tragic one in the modern Hollywood tradition. In contrast to the superheroes of 20th century pop culture, a Greek hero is not always a morally good one.
There are excellent performances here, however, even if the characters Matt Damon and Samantha Morton (Odysseus and Circe respectively) were cast to play had been significantly neutered. There is an unmistakable flatness to these characters that makes the overall feature feel more like a continuation to Oppenheimer, sadly withholding some of the more complex aspects of key characters that could have truly elevated the performances of an otherwise extraordinary cast with more to work with. Ironically, Matt Damon’s previous roles in The Martian (2015), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) lead one to worry whether the star actor will ever find his own way home, or if he is cinematically doomed to follow the fate of Odysseus…
Eurylochus: What was the song of the sirens like?
Odysseus: All the things you want it to be. Then, all the things you wished you never wished for.
Flat characters aside, by far one of the poorest aspects that plagued this film from start to finish, fittingly for a Nolan movie sadly, was that fact that the women felt completely coincidental despite supposed influence from the Emily Wilson translation which gives more agency to the women involved in the story. What’s more, in this age where we have writers such as Madeline Millar, Constanza Casati and Natalie Haynes to name but a few excellent writers who have written novels that give voice to the often overlooked women of the Greek literary cannon, it seems shocking that Nolan would not only reduce prominent women like Penelope or Circe to one dimensional, sometimes incidental roles, but actually actively reduce the number of women on screen: Queen Arete and Princess Nausicaa, anyone? This and iconic moments of Odysseus’ wily and often disastrous feats being cut or cliff noted make Nolan’s Odyssey feel hollow, much like Damon’s Odysseus; Wilson’s “complicated man” reduced to a conversely “un”complicated one.
