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You don’t usually have to issue a spoiler warning for an adaptation of a 2,700-year-old text, but this article really does contain spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. We all know that Matt Damon’s Odysseus eventually makes it home to Ithaca, and that along the way he will encounter a one-eyed monster, a group of women with irresistible voices, and a lady who turns men into pigs. But Nolan’s Odysseus isn’t just a conquering hero fighting to reclaim his kingdom and rejoin his family; he’s also a traumatized veteran of a bloody and ignoble war, burdened by a particular and personal form of guilt. And he may not want to go home at all.
Nolan opens his version of history’s most oft-told tale with a snatch of onscreen text that feels oddly precious, and even a little defensive: “In a Time of Apparent Magic … ” We’re already expecting sorceresses and sea monsters—why hedge your bets now?
“Apparent” might be Nolan’s nod to Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that magic is sometimes just a way of characterizing phenomena we lack the ability to understand; without the knowledge of how static electricity builds up in the clouds, lightning might as well be hurled from a mountain by an angry deity. But it also establishes that we’re seeing this world as the characters saw it, and that Odysseus’ fantastic voyage is as much an emotional journey as a physical one. To paraphrase Tenet, Nolan doesn’t want us to understand Odysseus’ wrenching ordeal. He wants us to feel it.
Like Homer’s text, Nolan’s takes on several different points of view, including those of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), whose only updates on Ithaca’s long-absent king come in the form of stories that have already been passed down so many times that their relationship to the truth is impossible to determine. At one point, the suitors who have greedily clustered around Penelope in hopes of taking Odysseus’ place are regaled by a bard’s tales of the Trojan War, as if The Iliad has broken out in the middle of The Odyssey. But for at least a substantial chunk of the movie, we’re inside a story Odysseus is telling about himself. If the movie has a present tense, it begins with Odysseus on the island of Calypso (Charlize Theron), the sea nymph who’s been caring for him for the past seven years. In Homer’s text, Odysseus is her prisoner, but in Nolan’s, she’s more like an enabler, feeding him lotus blossoms so he can remain in a state of perpetual forgetfulness. One might question how much will he retains in his drugged-up stupor, but even once Calypso starts urging him to remember who he is and what he’s been through, he’s reluctant to do so.
Telemachus’ quest to find out what’s become of his father plays out from an objective point of view. But Odysseus’ journey, which is to say, the odyssey part of The Odyssey, is staged as a psychodrama, with each stop along the way bringing him closer to a realization that the war that made him a legend was not a just or honorable one. Retrieving the captured Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) was merely a pretext for a conflict over trade routes, and when we finally get a glimpse of her storied beauty, the face that launched a thousand ships has been disfigured by scars. Homer exalts his hero for his cleverness, including the idea to breach the walls of Troy by giving them the gift of a massive wooden horse filled with enemy soldiers. (When, in Emily Wilson’s translation, he calls his hero the “lord of lies,” it’s meant as a compliment.) But in Nolan’s telling, Odysseus’ ruse is eventually revealed as a profound betrayal, an “offering of peace” that exploits the Trojans’ trust and violates Zeus’ most sacred edict.
The ancient Greek concept of xenia, or hospitality, plays an important role in Homer’s epic, but Nolan makes it the cornerstone of his version, a principle without which no civilization can survive. As Odysseus and his steadily dwindling group of soldiers make their way from one stop to the next, we’re constantly reminded that they’re relying on “Zeus’ law.” (The words are repeated so often that if you do a shot every time it’s used, you’re unlikely to survive all 172 minutes.) The responsibility to welcome strangers has its downsides: Penelope’s suitors have been exploiting it to make themselves unwanted guests for years on end, and Circe, a woman living alone on an otherwise unoccupied island, would clearly rather not allow a group of armed men into her home. But going against Zeus’ will could have severe consequences, because any stranger, no matter how threadbare or penniless they might seem, might be a god in disguise.
Odysseus only survives his journey because of others’ adherence to Zeus’ law—without it, he’d have starved to death long before anyone had a chance to sing his praises. But he breaks it himself, in what emerges, in Nolan’s telling, as the story’s decisive moment. The Trojan Horse may have won the war, but it loses something more important, using a gesture of reconciliation as the pretext for a barbaric slaughter. The movie underlines that Odysseus is famous for giving his adversaries a fair shot; even when he hunts for food, he twangs his bowstring to let his quarry know he’s coming. But the Trojans don’t have a chance, and when the soldiers climb out of the horse and make their way through the city, it’s not a victory but a massacre. Women and children are killed with the same bloodlust as armed men, and some are dragged offscreen in a way that strongly suggests that they’re about to be raped. These aren’t heroes. They’re war criminals.
Nolan keeps Odysseus as a witness to these crimes rather than an active participant in them, but his hands are hardly clean. It doesn’t take an oracle to predict what will happen when an army that’s been trying to breach Troy’s walls for 10 years finally makes its way inside. But like the hero of Nolan’s previous movie, Odysseus is so carried away with his own innovation that he doesn’t bother to think through its consequences. And like J. Robert Oppenheimer’s breakthrough, Odysseus’ sets off a chain reaction that threatens to destroy the world. (It’s not incidental that nearly all the characters—in a movie about how no society that turns its back on strangers can survive for long—all speak with American accents.) The Odyssey’s characters are aware they’re living through the end of an empire. “Those stories are true,” Penelope says, “our civilization is collapsing.” But Odysseus only realizes too late that he’s responsible for that collapse, that the feared foreigners, the “sea people” who’ve been laying waste to the land, are him and his men. “To burn the walls of Troy,” he finally admits, “was to burn the world entire.” But by then, all he can do is watch it burn.
Because Christopher Nolan never met a timeline he couldn’t scramble, Odysseus’ remorse floods The Odyssey long before we understand what he’s feeling sorry for. Practically the first thing we see is the slight, frightened-looking soldier Sinon (Elliot Page)—a character imported from Virgil’s account of the Trojan War—being run through with a spear that pierces the side of Odysseus’ wooden horse, narrowly missing its architect as he hides inside it. (We later discover that Odysseus is doubly responsible for Sinon’s death, as he allowed him to swap lots with Robert Pattinson’s Antinous, who stays in Ithaca and becomes the most persistent and repellent of Penelope’s suitors, a wealthy, womanizing draft dodger.) As Odysseus makes his way back from Troy, each destination brings him closer to an understanding of how empty and inglorious the war has been. The Cyclops is terrifying, scooping up Odysseus’ men and biting off their heads like lollipops, but, as played by the great Bill Irwin, he’s a sad and lumbering beast, writhing in pain when Odysseus blinds him with a stake to the eye. Circe turns his soldiers into pigs, roughly reshaping their flesh with her hands in a scene that, like Oppenheimer’s vision of the people incinerated by his invention, shows that Nolan could be a great horror director if he put his mind to it. But the pile of armor behind her house shows that this isn’t her first encounter with wandering soldiers, and though this particular group lusts only for food, it’s easy to imagine that those who came before indulged more violent appetites. If the gluttony of Odysseus’ soldiers makes them fit to be pigs, the lions and tigers they glimpse on their way to Circe’s shack must once have been more fearsome human predator
Then there’s the encounter with the Laestrygonians, a tribe of giant cannibals who make quick work of Odysseus’ men and sink all but one of his ships. In Homer’s text, the encounter occupies only a few lines, and unlike Circe or the Cyclops, it’s not one of the Odyssey’s greatest hits. But Nolan makes it into one of the movie’s most unshakable interludes. Odysseus and his crew are wandering through a fog-shrouded forest when they’re suddenly beset by something out of a nightmare: a flood of assassins so ruthless and powerful that they can pick up his men and toss them like twigs. They seem to be men, more or less, but their faces are so deeply buried in the shadows that their armor might as well be moving on its own. It’s as if Odysseus’ band of battle-hardened soldiers have come face to face with the most warlike version of themselves, stripped of any human quality that might hold them back. And it’s the same way the movie depicts Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon, whose jet-black armor and wordless presence makes him seem more like an angel of death than the high commander of the Greek army.
Myke Cole
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If there’s one thing that haunts Odysseus, though, it’s the face of Athena. The goddess, played by Zendaya, appears to him throughout the movie—the only divine presence, in Nolan’s telling, that manifests in human form, although Homer’s tale is full of instances where the gods circulate among mortals. In the original, Athena is Odysseus’ champion, but here she’s more like his conscience, appearing in moments of doubt to keep him pointed in the right direction. But it’s not until the end of The Odyssey that we understand why she keeps turning up. As he comes to the end of his journey, Odysseus finally allows himself to remember the sack of Troy, placing images that have periodically interrupted the film in a context where they finally make sense. One is a shot of a statue being beheaded by the Greek invaders. And another is of a young woman being readied for a similar fate—a woman who has Athena’s face. Is Odysseus conflating the desecration of a sacred artifact with the death of his own divine patron? Or has the figure we’ve taken for a goddess just been a casualty of war, one whose memory won’t leave Odysseus alone?
Like the “apparent magic” disclaimer, the movie’s framing of Athena gives Nolan enough wiggle room to allow for a rational explanation. But it also establishes that the scenes we’ve been watching aren’t just stories or even memories: They’re the intrusive thoughts of a time he’d rather forget, shaped by his mind into something he can just barely live with. If Odysseus, as this Odyssey heretically suggests, doesn’t entirely want to go home, it’s because returning to peacetime means confronting who he became in war. In Nolan’s movies, love is what allows us to make sense of time: It’s how Interstellar’s Coop reaches across the universe to contact his long-lost daughter, and how Memento’s Leonard makes sense of a reality in which cause and effect have traded places. But his Odysseus is trapped in an eternal present, reliving the worst moment of his life as if it’s never stopped happening. No voyage is long enough to put it behind him.
