Review: Yes, we're still arguing about Nolan's The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been a lightning rod for controversy ever since the first casting and design reveals, igniting afresh with each new trailer. The film has garnered plenty of well-deserved accolades (and earnings) since its release, and yet somehow the debates rage on between classicists and the general public alike—all this over an adaptation of an epic poem that’s been around since roughly the 8th century BCE. My take: the IMAX scale might be epic, but Nolan gives the story an intimate feel, weaving a captivating, nearly three-hour cinematic spell. While the magic slowly starts to dissipate once one leaves the theater, the powerful imagery will resonate for days. And the film gave me, personally, a fresh perspective on the central character of Odysseus. Most of us read some version of The Odyssey in high school, so we’re familiar with the story: Odysseus (Matt Damon), legendary Greek king of Ithaca, begins the long journey home after 10 years of fighting in the Trojan War. But the journey does not go smoothly, as Odysseus and his men encounter the cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin), the Sirens, and an enchantress named Circe (Samantha Morton), among other obstacles. Meanwhile, his long-suffering wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is warding off hundreds of suitors eager to usurp Odysseus’ throne back home. And the wandering king’s son and heir, Telemachus (Tom Holland), is convinced his father is still alive and sets off to find him. Nolan sets the tone by opening with a bard (Travis Scott) beginning to tell the tale of the fall of Troy—at least the idealized heroic version that the bard’s audiences are hungry to hear. It’s not meant to reproduce ancient Greek oratory tradition, just to evoke some sense of it, and the device is surprisingly effective. The director has also preserved Homer’s nonlinear narrative structure, with tales nesting within tales. His depiction of Odysseus is that of a seemingly broken man slowly regaining his fractured memories of the Trojan war and its aftermath in bits and pieces, after spending years under the intoxicating effects of the lotus fruit with Calypso (Charlize Theron) on the island of Ogygia. What has he tried so hard to forget, and why? What difficult truth must he finally face before he can find his way home at last? Nobody makes more of their limited screentime than Samantha Morton as the sorceress Circe in one of the film’s most powerful sequences. Once again, Nolan has reinvented the character to fit his themes. This is not the beautiful creature who seduces Odysseus in the poem. This Circe has suffered terribly at the hands of men; she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs because to her, they are swine wearing human masks. We don’t need to know all the gory details of what happened to Circe (and her sister), the trauma that fuels her rage and thirst for vengeance. We see the effects etched into every microexpression on her ravaged face. The Odyssey has garnered both critical and audience raves and has already topped $700 million at the box office—more than enough to cover its $250 million production budget and surpassing Oppenheimer‘s entire haul. It’s going to be nominated for tons of Oscars and will likely win several, both for technical achievement and for the many terrific performances—especially Morton, Damon, Hathaway, Holland, and Robert Pattinson’s deliciously villainous suitor, Antinous. So another backlash was inevitable. The manufactured online trolling/culture war campaign that preceded the film’s release isn’t even worth the electronic space to rebut. The Odyssey‘s dominance at the box office is rebuttal enough. But then classicist Emily Wilson—no stranger to controversy as the author of a much praised and also unjustly maligned translation of Homer’s epic poem—decided to stir the waters by penning her own harsh critique of the film for the London Review of Books. Nolan quoted the opening line of Wilson’s translation in a couple of interviews—“Tell me about a complicated man”—so I guess she felt compelled to weigh in. Consider her main critiques. She’s bothered by the fact that the film “centers” Odysseus’ point of view—it’s literally called The Odyssey—and dismisses the race-neutral casting not because it’s “woke” but because the non-white cast members are just playing variations on the “Black best friend.” (To her credit, Wilson did walk back that ill-advised line on BlueSky.) She both criticizes the film’s “implicit values” as being inconsistent with the mores of Homer’s original poem, and dings Nolan for not explicitly showing that war is bad, and for not giving us the perspective of the victims of the fall of Troy, which she deems essential for “any serious depiction of violence.” Wilson is further disappointed by the lack of sex scenes, given that Odysseus had affairs with both Circe and Calypso during his wanderings, and by the fact that many of the female roles are relegated to the sidelines. She’s unhappy that the gods don’t play a larger role, as they do in Homer’s original poem. This was a deliberate choice by Nolan; he has said that he wanted to humanize the gods and convey supernatural events primarily through natural phenomena that would once have been considered evidence of divine influence on human events. If one claims to be assessing the film in part on Nolan’s artistic intent, it’s strange not to acknowledge that intent. There’s more. Wilson hates the dialogue. (“I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”) And she criticizes Nolan’s “unethical” decision to film part of the movie in Western Sahara, an occupied territory where there has been much violence against the indigenous people. This may be a valid critique, but it has nothing to do with an objective assessment of the film. The best praise Wilson can muster is that the film is “not boring” and a “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle” that her teenagers really enjoyed. (Implication: only young or unsophisticated audiences could possibly like this film.) And for some reason she seems to think it’s an escapist action movie with exploding vehicles. Perhaps she wandered into a screening of Motor City by mistake. If Nolan’s Odyssey is so simplistic and shallow and fleetingly forgettable as Wilson claims, why are we still arguing so passionately about it? Why did she pen that entire essay? Wilson is among our foremost classical scholars and has likely forgotten more about Homer’s works than most of us ever knew. But Nolan is a creator, not a scholar. He did not set out to make a historically accurate, 100 percent faithful adaptation of The Odyssey. He created his own contemporary remix of a foundational text through the lens of his favorite personal themes. He succeeded brilliantly, even if the film falls shy of masterpiece status. It’s abundantly clear that Wilson simply doesn’t like Nolan’s style as a director, specifically calling out his “usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality.” That’s fair enough. At the end of the day, Nolan’s gonna be Nolan, and if you disliked Oppenheimer, Tenet, Inception, etc., this probably isn’t The Odyssey for you. There is no such thing as the One True Take on Homer’s Odyssey. The core myth transcends any specific place and time. So each incarnation finds its own imperfect truth in this enduring tale, yielding different insights into the characters, their choices, their motivations. One can appreciate one without diminishing the others—and ideally find something to savor in all. Nolan’s The Odyssey very much deserves to take its place among them. The Odyssey is now playing in theaters. It’s definitely worth seeing in IMAX if you can.