Nolan’s Odyssey, not Homer’s

That man of many twists and turns, Muse, tell of him, who far

went wandering when he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel,

who many cities saw, and many thoughts of men discerned,

and many agonies endured within his heart at sea…

So opens Homer’s Odyssey, with ‘many’ appearing four times in as many verses. The poem announces that its hero and its themes will be multiple, variegated, and even complicated. Homer will tell of frustrated journeys, terrifying creatures, and ingenious ruses, but also of music, love, longing, and homecoming. He will make much of the shifting identity of Odysseus himself, an eloquent teller of tales as well as a cunning, resilient adventurer.

While the epic’s multiplicity runs deep, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is an action film, replete with unabashed violence. It is essentially designed to entertain a modern audience familiar with movies such as Lord of the Rings. There are some passing moral reflections about the decline of ‘civilisation’ and about the guilty conscience of a ruthless military leader, but these are brief moments, unconvincingly tacked on to the storyline. With its monstrous creatures and robotic foes, and its scenes of fighting, death and destruction, the film is almost uniformly grim and gory, set at a pitch of intensity that scarcely varies for nearly three hours, during which the heroes never seem to change out of their armour and crested helmets. There are no moments of lightness, humour, or laughter, and little room for comradeship, intimacy, or character development, even though the film begins, faithful to Homer, with young Telemachus’s quest to find his missing father. Nor, disappointingly, does the story feature any music or musicians: absent are the bards whose performances give the Odyssey its most self-referential moments, such as when Penelope demands that Phemius stop his ‘distressing song’ about a hero’s return, and when Odysseus weeps to hear his own story sung by Demodocus. In their place, an orchestral score is in turns sweepingly heroic and thuddingly percussive, interspersed with a few quieter, more sentimental moments (including in the Siren’s Song and the reunion scene with Penelope the unmistakeable sound of the piper Callum Armstrong’s sinuous aulos, ancient double pipes).

The film incorporates multiple flashbacks, mainly those of Odysseus stranded on Calypso’s island as he is gradually induced to remember his earlier life; the amnesia-inducing lotus from the Lotus-Eaters episode is introduced into this scene, one of many harmless adaptations of the original material. The flashback itself is a Homeric device: over the course of several books of the Odyssey, the hero narrates his own adventures – the Cyclops, the visit to Hades, and Circe turning his men to pigs – to his Phaeacian hosts. In the film, however, the Phaeacians do not exist; where Homer has the sophistication to leave us wondering whether the hero’s stories are his genuine experiences or merely the fantastic elaborations of an unreliable narrator, the film’s flashbacks are presented as real events in his past.

The tension between realism and fantasy is equally evident in the film’s treatment of gods. Homer moves easily between Olympus and Ithaca, and Athena’s interventions, whether as herself or in disguise, are part of the plot. Nolan straddles the gap less comfortably. Odysseus’s Mentor (in the epic, Athena in disguise) is here a real man with ‘the eyes of Athena’. Zendaya’s Athena turns up in person as a watchful, rather put-upon flesh-and-blood figure, but it is not clear whether she is present or whether her interactions with Odysseus are just a projection of the hero’s mind. Calypso and Circe, who in the epic are evidently doubles (both are solitary immortal women who detain Odysseus, sleep with him, and are abandoned), are here made distinct: Circe is an ugly peasant sorceress, very different from the beautiful, loving Calypso played by Charlize Theron.

The most emotionally powerful scenes in Homer are those of recognition. These are far less central in the film (as is the connected, key theme of homecoming), though one may feel an undoubted frisson when Telemachus recognises his father, and when the maid Eurycleia sees the scar on Odysseus’s leg while washing his feet (viewers not familiar with the story will need to remember the earlier scene in the film in which Odysseus is gored as a youngster). In the descent to the dead in Odyssey Book Eleven, Odysseus recognises his mother’s ghost and gains the knowledge that she died of grief. This does not survive in Nolan, nor does his meeting with the shade of Achilles, who poignantly claims that he’d rather be a living serf than a king among the dead. Instead the ghosts of various dead heroes are represented as pale zombies, creatures more to be loathed and feared than apparitions who act as vital sources of knowledge.

The most heart-wrenching recognition scene in the Odyssey comes when the aged dog Argos recognises his master, disguised as a beggar, heading to the palace with the swineherd Eumaeus:

As they conversing to the city drew.

the faithful dog his ancient master knew: 

and recognising well his voice and tread, 

pricked up his ears and raised his heavy head. 

Seeing Odysseus, him he strove to meet,

and tried in vain to crawl and lick his feet; 

but strength alone he had to wag his tail

to greet his master, though to no avail…

Though twenty long and dismal years had passed,  

he’d lived to see his lord again at last. 

Now night descends upon his weary eyes: 

he wags his feeble tail for joy, and dies. 

(translation adapted from that of Alexander Pope)

Odysseus cannot reciprocate his dog’s greeting for fear of giving away his identity. He walks ahead, stifling his tears. Nolan has Odysseus stop and stroke the dog perfunctorily as it dies, thus reducing the stark pathos of the original.

The greatest of the poem’s recognition scenes, moreover, is absent. In the penultimate book of the Odyssey Penelope, still unsure of the hero’s identity, tests him by asking him to move their marriage bed. He falls for her ruse – finally, his cunning is overpowered by hers – and expostulates that it can’t be moved, as she well knows, because it was carved from a huge tree trunk rooted in the earth. With greater realism if less pathos, Nolan has Penelope recognise Odysseus after he – who else? – has destroyed the suitors with the bow he alone was able to string. The taut string emits a loud and ominous musical twang when he plucks it, rather than the evocative ‘sound of the swallow’ that Homer speaks about to affirm the idea of a return home.

Realism also dictates that the ‘Nobody’ pun in the Polyphemus episode does not survive – a pity, since it establishes Odysseus’s quality of mêtis, cunning intelligence on a verbal rather than physical plane. Matt Damon’s Odysseus has no such verbal cunning, and even in fight scenes is too often caught looking faintly quizzical, as if he doesn’t quite know what he is supposed to do. Where the poem’s Odysseus earns love and loyalty through wit, storytelling, and charm as much as through strength, here Odysseus is a buff, gruff leader whose repeated motto is that one must do whatever is required to survive.

The effects are, as one would expect from this director and this budget, impressive and often extraordinary: a ghastly and foul-looking Cyclops, beautiful boats with striking banks of oars, a marvellously engineered Wooden Horse, and a vivid and horrifying sack of Troy. Nolan’s Odyssey was always going to be a spectacle. His is an Odyssey made for audiences that adore Game of Thrones and Vikings, zombie apocalypses and monster movies. It has little that is Homeric, and nothing at all Hellenic in spirit. But it is Nolan’s Odyssey, not Homer’s.