The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026)

[Persona]

This is basically what you'd expect of a Nolan adaptation of The Oddysey -- with all the problems and clunkiness and overbearing aspects that implies -- and yet I found myself still quite appreciative of what it's attempting both viscerally and thematically, and how well it manages to get across the finish line with its narrative aims. There is so much in how this story is woven in Nolan's care that pays off immensely in its final hour or so.

He bent the myth to his own concerns, but I do think the work justifies that approach, and I think the process of how he did that bending ends up making this film feel more mythic than I would have thought any Nolan film ever would.

[mfunk9786]

Completely blown away by this one. Nolan's lesser qualities as a filmmaker (overbearing score/sound mixing, confusing plot machinations, on and on) are all smoothed out beautifully and the amount of practical/in-camera effects work is almost Gondry-esque in how imaginative and often beautiful it is, without ever once standing out as CGI (though I'm sure there was some smoothing out and finishing done with CGI, maybe?). The rest of why I loved it so much is a little bit difficult to explain. All I know is that I was tired and miserable and have a sore back and the moment the film began it seemed like I never blinked or looked away once. Despite this film seeming to have all the makings of an easy zone-out, it is engaging, stirring, and often thrilling. Despite how much I adore Interstellar, this is Nolan's best work [to date? can't imagine it gets topped].

[Mr Sausage]

I'm a huge fan of Christopher Nolan movies and The Odyssey has been one of my favourite books since I was a late teen. I was eagerly anticipating this movie, a marriage of one of the great stories with the best current practitioner of blockbuster cinema. I thought Oppenheimer was maybe Nolan's masterpiece. I was looking for The Odyssey to unseat it. It didn't. It's a basically enjoyable movie that filled me with no enthusiasm. The set-pieces telling Odysseus' journey and adventures were terrific, genuinely exciting pieces of cinema. The structural hubs of Ithaka and Calypso's island, tho', were flat, even boring at times. The cast, well chosen from top to bottom, give unexciting performances reciting functional dialogue. Oppenheimer and Dunkirk worked so well because of how exciting the storytelling was, showing history through complicated overlapping timelines to accentuate the themes and characters and vivify the plot. It was novel, flashy storytelling. The Odyssey's non-linear storytelling matches the source material, but brings no special excitement to the movie. It doesn't even make any demand on your attention. I'll be seeing this again in August when my wife is back from vacation, so we'll see if my opinion changes, but for now this is mid-tier Nolan.

I'll save any further evaluations for my second viewing. Instead I want to address the movie in context through a few interlocking topics. I want to give some necessary context, too, to some of the conversations happening around the movie. I won't bother spoiler tagging because this is not a movie you can spoil, but if you really want to go in blind, the following has very minor spoilers:


Zeus' Law

A central theme of the movie is how we treat one another in society. In the movie, the Greeks and a few others call it Zeus' Law, a commandment many find onerous and struggle to abide by, and which seems to be something like proper conduct towards guests, travelers, etc. This is an analogy for the ancient Greek concept of xenia, which can be roughly translated as 'guest friendship'. Guest friendship was a serious form of obligation between guest and host. If you hosted someone it was no small thing: it bound you to your guest, put genuine obligations between you two, and made you responsible for each other. To violate this institution was a serious breach of protocol that could augur disastrous consequences. In Greek myth, Paris' abduction of Helen from Sparta was a violation of his and the Trojan's xenia with Menelaus, hence the disaster at Troy. Nolan refigures this: Paris' abduction of Helen is elided, and the inciting incident is instead the Trojan Horse, which becomes a violation of Zeus' Law. In Homer and Greek myth more widely, the Trojan Horse is not a violation of xenia--the Trojans are obviously not hosting the Achaeans--and, moreover, is treated as piece of grand ingenuity, helping fulfill what's fated anyway.

Nolan's Zeus' Law is a vague, generalized symbol for the old ways that kept us humane, and whose progressive violations bring civilization steadily towards chaos. You see this kind of narrative in a lot of Hong Kong gangster films, where the new guy in town refuses to honour the old ways of doing things, causing the narrative to erupt into chaos as the checks and balances fail. It's an essentially conservative notion. In Nolan's movie, social collapse is the result of abandoning traditional ideas of order, such as laws handed down, not a result of, say, the unjustness or internal flaws or rigidity of the institutions themselves, which would be a progressive idea. Nolan's film is fundamentally conservative (but, to be clear, not ideologically conservative, ie. it's not a matter of party politics).


War

This is an anti-war film, one of the most didactic and overdetermined anti-war films since Hayao Miyazaki. Homer's poem is not anti-war, but as my last post pointed out, it did tally the costs of war in a profound way. Nolan runs with that aspect. The fall of Troy becomes a kind of primal scene for the rest of the movie, a moment of bestialism, people casting off their humanity to unleash their pent-up energies in slaughter, that affects the whole of Greek society moving forward. The call to war is not exciting--Odysseus, unlike his Homeric counterpart, has no interest in going to Troy, following only out of obligation to his demonic-looking king. Agamemnon for his part is turned into an absolute ruler, commanding absolute obedience, in a way not true of the more chieftan-style rule of his Homeric counterpart. As in Wolfgang Petersen's movie, Helen's abduction becomes merely the excuse for Agamemnon's long-held colonialist desires. His death, treated as tragic and shocking in the poem, becomes a moralistic comeuppance for his own ruthlessness in sacrificing even his own daughter to get what he wants. We don't even see Agamemnon's face as he's killed, but get a ferocious closeup of Clytemnestra as she kills him. Agamemnon in the movie is the spirit of war, a frightening inhuman tank that towers over the cowed and unwilling. His need for conquest dooms everyone to a long narrative of sadness, despair, hardship, and a reckoning with death and inhumanity.

Other figures echo this: the Giants are heavily armoured, indeed resemble Agamemnon, and they are only agents of war, not speaking, not conspiring, just killing as tho' there is no other choice in the world; Circe does not turn soldiers into pigs but reveals soldiers to be pigs in human disguises; Calypso and the Lotus Eaters are combined, and the lotus becomes a drug through which Odysseus can forget the atrocities he committed during war. He is in effect self-medicating his PTSD. Odysseus returns from the war not a hero, but a broken man who despises what he's done, more eager to leave his kingdom than retain it lest he corrupt even it. The Trojan War has broken the world and all the heroes in it. The Iliad is the great war book of western culture; Nolan makes his adaptation of the sequel into a fierce, sad condemnation of the martial valour the The Iliad often stands for (tho' it should be pointed out that poem is ambivalent about the war it gives the barest glimpse of, even if it does glory in its heroes' valiant battles).


Sea Peoples

Most viewers will find the film's repeated reference to to "sea peoples" obscure, but it comes out of actual historical conjecture. The grand palatial culture of Bronze age Greece collapsed at some point in the 12th century BC, and we don't know why. The palaces were abandoned, literacy was lost, and Greece descended into what are called the Greek Dark Age. Homer wrote in the Archaic Age, which followed the Dark Age. While no one knows exactly why Mycenaean civilization fell, one of the most popular ideas is "marauding sea peoples", who were theorized to've continually attacked coastal cities on the Greek peninsula to the point that the palatial society destabilized and collapsed under the constant pressure. Nowadays historians are more likely to view these sea peoples as symptoms of a collapse already underway. The historical details aren't important to the movie. What's important is how Nolan uses these 'sea peoples' as a symbol.


Apocalypse

This is an apocalyptic movie. The above sea peoples are a symbol for widespread societal collapse, and Nolan milks that symbol with characteristic heavy-handedness. The movie takes place right at the beginning of the collapse of Mycenaean culture, with the sea peoples, who've become a rumour passed among the various islands to the fear and anxiety of its inhabitants, being revealed as the Achaeans themselves, their journey homeward from war bringing the savagery they unleashed in Troy to every people they meet on the way home. Odysseus's return does not restore civilization to its rightful order, but presages and carries out its eventual fall. Mycenaean civilization is about to collapse from within, the rot stemming from warmongering and abandoning our humanity as reflected in traditional social rules. A grim, dismal view of everything winding down, indicting us for follies so perpetual that several more examples sprung up even after filming must've stopped (the war in Iran for instance). The movie has a lot in common with Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, actually. Gibson's movie was more historically located, but it was also using the collapse of an historical society as an analogy for current day socio-political crises (post 9/11 America in Gibson's case). Gibson's movie was uncharitably interpreted as being in favour of the Spanish colonization because contemporary audiences didn't see that the Mesoamerican society was a stand-in for America itself. But I digress. No one is going to misunderstand the object of Nolan's criticisms.


Accuracy

Very online right wing idiots aside, you're probably going to get a number of academics and historians coming out to tell you what the movie got right, got wrong, what's historical, what's not--whatever. I'm not going to make a polemic here, just add some crucial context for those discussions.

First, the Homeric poems are not history. They're myth. These are very different modes of thinking and writing, including to the Greeks, who invented what we consider modern history (Herodotus and Thucydides). To borrow terms from Northrop Frye, a great theorist of myth and literature, history uses discursive language while myth uses the language of the imagination. In talking about why John Milton used the geocentric model of the universe in Paradise Lost even tho' he was writing well after the Copernican revolution, Frye argued that, while the heliocentric universe is scientifically correct, the traditional geocentric theory is more appropriate for poetry and for myth. Its symbolism and order, its meaning-making capacity, is expressive and transformative in a way simple empirical description is not. This is the mindset in which Homer wrote his poems. The Homeric poems are not descriptions of what is, not in the sense that, say, a historian might think.

Second, Homer is myth, not scripture. There is no dogma in his poems, no official stories. Homer's versions of Greek myth are just that, versions. Subsequent ages, even in Greek history, may've taken them to be that, but they're not. Many of the events are recorded in different versions elsewhere. For instance, in The Odyssey Agamemnon is killed by Aegisthus, Clytemnestra's lover, while in Aeschylus' play Agamemnon he's killed by Clytemnestra herself (Nolan follows Aeschylus here). The Greeks also disagreed about Homer's metaphysics. Homer's depiction of the gods came in for criticism, such as from Xenophanes, a wandering rhapsode from the sixth century BC who no doubt wanted people to follow his versions instead. Plato is Homer's most famous critic: he has Socrates ban poets from the ideal Republic because they, ie. Homer, show the gods behaving immorally. It's easy to imagine there were quite a lot of bards and singers in the archaic age who had their own versions of the stories. And even the writers of Classical Age Greece felt no compunction about diverging from Homer in their plays and poems. Unless there's a later attempt by an institution like a church to form a canon, mythology is best described as a body of myths rather than a uniform story. Greek mythology is no different.

As for history, again, Homer is not historically accurate. Many of the rituals and practises he describes are true of the Archaic age he was writing in, but not the Bronze Age hundreds of years earlier. For example, the dead are famously burned in the Homeric poems, but the Mycenaeans buried their dead in something called shaft graves. Homer also shows chariots being used in combat, but the evidence points to chariots being used to ferry fighters to and from combat rather than as a weapon of war. There're a host of other things I've forgotten. The point is: Homeric society is not a historical record, but a kind of imagining of a past society made out historical memory, invention, oral tradition, and then-current practises layered over top each other. M. I. Finley has an amazing book, The World of Odysseus, where he lays out the social and political world of the Homeric poems, treating them as a world unto themselves rather than a record of history or ethnography.

Christopher Nolan turns The Odyssey into a very non-Homeric thing, an apocalyptic anti-war story. His movie is a commentary on our own times in mythological dress. A lot of people will tell you this is heresy. But we've been doing this to myth since the moment we could. The Aeneid, Rome's epic poem, adapts the Homeric poems for a Roman audience. It alters characters to fit Roman sensibilities, eg. the duty-loving, straight-dealing Romans hated Odysseus, the trickster, so Virgil turns Odysseus into a villain in his poem where Homer had him a hero (Dante, who'd never read Homer, follows Virgil and includes Ulysses among the damned). Virgil then refigured Aeneas, a Trojan prince, into the founder of Rome and turned the end of the Trojan war into propaganda for the Roman empire under Augustus. In terms of altering myth to fit an anachronistic political purpose, The Aeneid is the ne plus ultra of that very thing...and it's an unassailable monument of Western civilization, the kind of classic certain groups will cling to as a symbol of stability and order tho' they've probably not read it. So Nolan isn't doing anything different. It has always the case that later writers have reinterpreted older stories for their own times. Christopher Nolan has adapted The Odyssey into a pointed rejection of the warmongering, tradition-abandoning, uncivilized times we find ourselves in. The criticism is general enough that it could fit any regime, Putin's or Trump's. But none are excluded. A lot of people will have a lot of opinions on this. Before they sway you with calls to tradition or history or rectitude: just remember Virgil. If someone's argument implicitly includes The Aeneid and they don't mention that Virgil does the exact thing Nolan's doing, you can ignore their argument.

[Brian C]

Thanks for that post, Mr. Sausage. Especially given the ridiculousness of so much of the discourse around this movie, it was a pleasure to read.

A couple of asides, and continuing Mr. S's warning about spoilers:

First, about the Sea Peoples. I was in Istanbul a few years ago and went to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. As one would expect, the museum traces the history of the region, and they lean in completely to the notion of the Sea Peoples being the cause of the region's collapse during that time of history. Again and again, they are referred to as basically uncivilized marauders: no arts, no language, uncultured brutes destroying all knowledge and setting civilizations back by centuries. At one point, they discuss the origin of the Sea Peoples, and how no one actually knows where they came from, but then offhandedly said that they probably came down from the Balkans and left it at that. "Balkans" can mean different things with varying degrees of specificity, but given the context, it struck me as a pretty straightforward reflection of local stereotypes and somewhat embarrassingly ahistorical for such a prominent institution. It's a beautiful museum, though!

No particular reason to bring that up, except as an example of how the "Sea Peoples" is largely a historical black box, to an extent that such an entity existed in the first place, which Nolan makes use of in a very thoughtful way. His films have frequently warned that we are the agents of our own destruction, and turning a historical bogeyman into a story about how a high civilization was brought down by their own loss of civility, without anyone realizing that the enemy was themselves, the real story doomed not even to be known in the passage of time, is a very meaningful thing to do in my view. And though he couldn't have anticipated the particular controversies about the film that have sprung up online, Nolan must be grimly amused at how willing so many people (along with, surely, their armies of bots) are to prove his point.

Secondly, about the nature of adaptation. I've been thinking about how Shakespeare adaptations seem to come in for criticism of their accuracy with relative rarity. No one really seems to expect absolute fidelity to the text, bold choices are respected, changing settings almost expected, etc. Generally speaking, it seems like a lot of Shakespeare enthusiasts actually enjoy analyzing the choices that go into adaptations.

But that far less often seems to be the case with any other texts, from the classics to more recent novels to remakes of other movies. I know that a lot of the criticisms of this particular film are made in the worst possible faith, but nonetheless, it seems like a lot of people who should know better still expect a large degree of "accuracy" in a movie version, as if it's a new translation instead of an adaptation. And I'm not sure why almost everyone seems to understand the concept of an adaptation when it comes to Shakespeare but almost no one seems to understand it when it comes to adapting anything else.