Three millennia of relevance

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey proves the timelessness of Homer’s tale

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

There’s no point in rehashing the specific plot points of The Odyssey. To the immortal credit of Homer (or whoever actually set down the original story), the basics of the tale have been told in various translations, interpretations and forms of media for about 3,000 years. 

Underscoring its timelessness, the saga of Odysseus — ruler of the ancient Greek kingdom of Ithaca — following his bloody, cunning victory at Troy to his 20-year journey home beset by the whims and foibles of gods and men alike, has received its most recent retooling in the hands of director Christopher Nolan. And suddenly The Odyssey is again at the peak of cultural relevance.

Premiering in theaters, including IMAX, on July 17 and starring Matt Damon as the titular wanderer, Nolan’s Odyssey cost $250 million to make and, as of press time, has grossed more than $720 million globally. Asking someone if they’ve seen it has become a feature of casual conversation, and those who haven’t are experiencing what The Atlantic headlined “The Fear of Missing The Odyssey” in a piece published July 23.

With five stars from rogerebert.com; a 94% and 97% rating from critics and audiences, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes; and 8.5/10 on imdb.com, it’s fair to say that acclaim has been nearly universal.

However, the word “nearly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

As has become the norm in recent years, no film is safe from the winds of the culture wars; and, the bigger the movie and more stacked the cast, the harder those breezes blow.

And Nolan’s version of the ancient yarn is especially star-studded. Alongside Damon is Anne Hathaway as Penelope, the queen Odysseus left behind, and Tom Holland as their son, Telemachus. Then there’s Robert Pattinson as the slimy Antinous, who leads the swarm of suitors vying for Penelope’s hand during Odysseus’ long absence, and Elliot Page as Sinon — the young boy who Antinous manipulated into taking his place on the expedition to Troy.

John Leguizamo is Eumaeus, the blind pig keeper, loyal servant and friend of Odysseus; Lupita Nyong’o does double duty as Helen (whose abduction sparked the Trojan War) and her sister Clytemnestra; Charlize Theron portrays the nymph Calypso, who drugs Odysseus into long years of forgetfulness with lotus flowers and love; and Samantha Morton turns in the overall most compelling, complex and terrifying performance of the film as the “witch” Circe.

Finally, Zendaya represents the only direct interaction with the ancient Greek pantheon as the goddess Athena.

With that kind of box office power and diversity, it was guaranteed that the film would be buffeted by the Charybdis and Scylla of internet trolldom, and called down no less than the world’s richest edgelord Elon Musk from his seat atop the Olympian mental dungheap of X.

The weeping and gnashing of teeth came down to the same basic beef as always: The presence of anyone other than white, heteronormative actors playing characters in an ostensibly “historical” story is “woke,” and therefore illegitimate.

The reasons why this is laughable, especially in the famously diverse world of the ancient Greeks, are too numerous, ill-conceived and frankly boring to list, so the less said about that the better.

But this version of The Odyssey has also drawn the ire of famed classicist Emily Wilson, which must have stung Nolan considering that he credited her 2017 translation of the Homeric original as the inspiration for his film.

Writing in the London Review of Books, Wilson unloaded on the director’s “usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality,” adding that the blockbuster “lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors.”

What’s more, according to Wilson, “The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

While anything Musk and his ilk has to say is by definition without merit, Wilson’s critiques — though harsh — do land much closer to legitimate judgments about the overall tone and presentation of the current Odyssey.

Watching it in the theater with my 14-year-old son at Sandpoint Cinemas, we were both struck by the grandeur of the cinematography and tactile presentation of an epic world (Nolan famously eschewed most CGI for practical effects, including the awe-inspiring cyclops Polyphemus). The dialogue was purposefully modernized and no one spoke in a faux British accent, which didn’t particularly bother my son and me.

Odysseus’ encounters with the various beasts and enemies along his path were riveting — again, with special notice due to Morton’s Circe, whose sequence was like a film within a film — and flashbacks to the war were visceral to behold (every scene involving the Trojan Horse will become a classic).

However, a strong case can be made that Nolan’s vision of the Greek world is almost entirely lacking in color — literally. In this film, the Aegean looks cold and cruel, which is a far cry from its famous electric blue. The skies are often bruised with lowering clouds and the craggy hillsides and forests evoke Game of Thrones (which makes sense, because filming locations included Iceland and Scotland).

The Mediterranean world of the late-Bronze Age in which The Odyssey is set was actually exploding with vibrant hues — almost every inch of every temple and statue was slathered with the brightest, shiniest adornments available, and it’s only because of the passing of millennia that we conceive of them as glowering white marble monoliths.

Yet that austerity is what Nolan delivered (even extending to the costumes), and in so doing he injected a self-serious gloom to a story that has owed much of its longevity to a melding of tragedy, comedy, satire, wit, passion and humanity.

But here’s the thing: None of that matters. My son and I left the theater enthused about what we’d just watched, and marveled at how quickly its almost three-hour runtime flew by. More importantly, it got us talking about the universality of storytelling, and how a 3,000-year-old poem has been and should continue to be reinterpreted in as many ways and in as many forms for as many people and for as long a time as we find it meaningful.

That’s the ultimate triumph of The Odyssey, and one that Nolan has earned: He’s got us talking about it, and in so doing, we’re now part of that ancient tradition.

In theaters now.