Truth, or Beauty? Make your choice, Nolan
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The Odysseus we deserve - not the Odysseus we want
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All the emotional range of a Hollow Horse
Christoper Nolan has a problem. Stick to a faithful retelling of the epic poem, warts and all – a hero who commits deceit, murder, adultery and gross negligence, or fabricate a fantasy world, a weird, wonderful (and trippy) world of Gods and Monsters, a world where neither time nor space fly like an arrow, but bend and meld to the will of the Gods’?
As it turns out, Nolan’s Odyssey sits firmly on the fence – and it’s a whitewashed fence – sanitised to such a degree of blandness that it fails to please neither God nor man. A predictable and repetitive schlep (boat, island, bad thing, boat, island, bad thing, ad infinitum), of 2D heroes with perfect teeth and nice hair who appear to think little, feel less, and learn nothing. The truth, as is so often the case, is far less white, far less flat – and far more weird and wonderful than Nolan’s imitation would have us believe.
Long it may be. Epic, it ain’t.
The trouble with telling an almost 3000-year-old story in 2026 is that so few of the values and tenets of those peoples translate well into the modern age. Very few traits of our contemporary movie superheroes (honesty, integrity, fairness, justice, big pecs and good teeth) would have been relevant to a minor 8th century Greek king (except perhaps the pecs).
We get a sense of the man Odysseys was, not from his wife Penelope, but from the Goddess Athena, who was certainly a fan. Athena admired (perhaps loved) Odysseys for his intelligence and guile – his cunning and his shrewdness. He loved to play tricks on people – and to lie (to the Romans he was “cruel, deceitful Odysseus”). Indeed, the epic journey home that bears his name would not have occurred at all if one of his lies had been believed. When called up to war, Odysseus fakes madness (by tilling an empty field) – in order to be spared the draft. Only the threat of the murder of his infant son persuades him to drop the charade and to do his duty as a king. So far, so unheroic.
The most interesting struggle at the heart of the Odyssey is that of the great man, brought low by his own brilliance and hubris. The ingenious deception of the Trojan Horse results in the city of Troy falling and the war won – but also triggers the collapse of society – and the breaking of an unwritten moral code that had stood for millenia. It’s a pretty hefty price to pay for victory. We’ve seen this movie before – quite literally. Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) shows us what happens to a man when he breaks the rules, crosses the Rubicon. He barely need even say it – we see an entire world of pain, borne, Atlas-like, in the deep hollow eyes of Cillian Murphy. The world is changed forever by his genius – and so is he.
But, where’s this for Odysseus? To paraphrase Chekov, don’t break an unbreakable moral norm in scene one if it has absolutely no profound implications for the protagonist by film’s end. Where’s the payoff? Where’s the retribution?
When Odysseus ‘breaks the world’, what’s his suffering? Sure, he loses every single one of his men, but I’d argue that’s far worse for them (and their waiting families) than it is for him. He makes it home. He makes it home in time to say goodbye to his pet dog, he makes it home to see his son crowned King of Ithica, and he quite literally sails off into the sunset with his adoring wife.
What is this telling us about the man? What are we meant to feel about him? And here’s the crux – Nolan’s Odysseus isn’t really a man. He’s a cipher. The brilliant, cunning, lying, adulterous, flawed hero of the epic has been reduced down to a symbol. All his gnarly, crooked, uneven bits (aka, the bits that make him an interesting, 3-dimensional person) have been sanded away, to a smooth, inoffensive plane. Flat, clean and dull (I’m looking at you, Matt Damon).
It didn’t need to be this way. The source material pretty much has it all – love and loss, pain, suffering, regret. But also a Cyclops shepherd and cheesemaker, a song so exquisite it drives men mad, trees that move with free will, and edible flowers that make years slide away. Yes, even the very concept of time is up for grabs. Nolan isn’t (or hasn’t been) a director who is afraid to get a bit weird with it – the time-bending, mind-melting Inception and the excellent Memento are proof to that.
There’s none of that here. Where’s the weirdness? Where’s the trippiness? Where are the other-worldly characters, creatures and locales of fantasy? In the epic, Circe lives in a beautiful palace and feeds the sailors a sumptuous feast. In the movie, she lives in a hut and gives them broth. It’s all so…meh.
Ultimately, Nolan has created for us not the Odyssey we want, but the Odyssey we deserve - a palatable, surface story of attractive Hollywood stars going through the motions, an epic (by which I mean long) bar-brawlesque fight scene and a nice, happy ending for the couple. A film so plain, so formulaic, so easily digestible – the movie equivalent of a giant popcorn bucket – the only challenge is getting to the end of it. In our cosseted and cosy cinema seats, we’re not asked to ponder the consequences of our actions, how we atone for our mistakes, or how the terrible and wonderful events in our lives continually shape, mould and change who we are.
After all, if Odysseus didn’t learn anything on his voyage – then why the hell should we?
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