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Homer’s Odyssey – about 3,000 years old, but forever young – remains a must-read classic. In this age of dread and disruption, the human animal, a storytelling creature, possibly craves the consolation of the tall tale and the heroic protagonist more than ever. These 12,109 lines – the work of different hands, according to some scholars – form the DNA of our storytelling tradition.
But is this what Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed new version actually explores? The director has other ambitions, having already spoken (to The Independent) about his “long-held dreams” for this movie, which has finally come to pass after some 20 years of preparation. To capture Odysseus’s voyage, he filmed for months on a boat in open water, “shooting it like a documentary”, he says. “It was tough.” Nolan also speaks of “trying to directly affect the audience with sound and picture” and confesses that he’s “a big fan of horror, the most purely cinematic of genres”.
Beyond genre, The Odyssey was always a mind-blowing narrative, replete with breathtaking shock and horror, but its hold over our imagination came from somewhere more humane – the tale of a single man at a loss – offering, with subtle ambiguity, a mix of the spectacular and the everyday that attracted the attention of the greatest minds in the classical world.
Nolan is not the first interpreter of Homer to wrestle with this story. Some 400 years after The Odyssey began to penetrate Greek academies, the philosopher Aristotle devised this pitch. The storyline, he writes in The Poetics, is “not long. A man has been abroad for many years, and is all alone.” After a terrible sea-journey, “he returns home to attack his enemies. He survives, and they are destroyed.” Aristotle does not linger on sex, pathos, or humour. “Everything else”, he concludes, rather brutally, “is episodes.”
Nolan is the master of “episodes”. Say what you like about this director – it’s open season just now – but he has a head for heights, and loves a challenge, his modus operandi as a successful director. Since the millennium, when his rendezvous with Homer was a distant dream, Nolan has gravitated towards many other strange quests and the weirdness of the human mind.
Inception (2010) was a mind-bending sci-fi heist thriller. Interstellar (2014), set in 2067, concerned humanity’s quest for a new home. Dunkirk (2017) was inspired – on air, sea and land – by the cliff-hanger evacuation of Allied troops from France in 1940. Oppenheimer (2023) was a majestic World War Two biopic about the Manhattan Project, the drive to develop a bomb that might destroy the human race. In short, Nolan has become a big-screen auteur for our times. But – dare we suggest? – perhaps not for these ancient times.
In contemplation of The Iliad and The Odyssey, it is always a jolt to realise that these books, so laced with lust, blood, and terror, are also the work of a remote and brilliantly original imagination that far precedes, and still inspires, our own time. Homer has been described by Alexander Pope, one of his supreme translators, as “the greatest of poets”, implying a unique breadth of wit, humanity, wisdom, and intuition. While we know almost nothing of the writer, there are many competing theories about his life, which began, in anonymity, during the 8th century BC, and ended, according to folklore, on the island of Ios.
An obscure poet of fathomless myth – said to have been blind, and possibly part of a storytelling collective – whoever else he might have been, Homer is the godfather of that heavyweight tradition whose heirs include Virgil (The Aeneid), Dante (The Divine Comedy), Boccaccio (The Decameron) and Cervantes (Don Quixote).
From a contemporary perspective, in book and film, Homer is everywhere, from The Wizard of Oz to The Count of Monte Cristo and even Alice in Wonderland. His work touches kids and adults alike. Harry Potter and Game of Thrones would have been unthinkable without Homer, while film buffs delight in linking Star Trek, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain, and The Warriors to the tale of Odysseus.
The challenge that Homer presents in his combination of flesh-and-blood heroes, savage giants, and vicious slaughter is as daunting as its opaque and profound ambiguity
The blind poet of legend dominates our everyday minds in countless registers. It’s in Homer that we encounter the wooden horse, accompanied by some tantalising references to Helen of Troy, the wife of Paris. In Homer, gods and mortals meet on and off the battlefield as patrons and rivals. The inhabitants of Mount Olympus share our fascination with the carrying-on of Zeus, Athena, and Poseidon, the sea God who will drive the plot of The Odyssey.
Add to this the epic voyage and adventures of crafty Odysseus; his dalliances with Circe (whose sorcery turns men into swine), the nymph Calypso (who promises immortality), and the treacherous singing women known as sirens. Then there is his faithful, long-suffering wife Penelope, their loyal son Telemachus, and finally, after a narrow squeak with Scylla and Charybdis, the grizzled, home-bound veteran himself, that rogue survivor, the king of “sea-girt Ithaca”.
These characters, and their enthralling adventures (aka “episodes”), animate a literary masterpiece – the first ever – designed to thrill an audience, stirring the Aristotelian responses of pity and fear (eleos and phobos). In this context, one cannot stress too strongly that The Odyssey is a work of the imagination, as much intro- as extrovert. The challenge that Homer presents in his combination of flesh-and-blood heroes, savage giants, and vicious slaughter is as daunting as its opaque and profound ambiguity. Fact or fiction? Real or made-up?
This is where Homer, as literature, takes wing, but where Nolan, the master of film, gets into difficult water. Troy is a famous archaeological site. The Iliad depicts an actual nine-year war. Nolan’s sequel – a film script, not a poem – aspires to the condition of history. Now, more than ever, for instance, the Ithaca of Homeric legend is a would-be tourist destination. Long before a frame of footage was shot, Nolan’s Odyssey became beset with controversies that forged a distracting link between the movie and its historical setting.
Homer through 30 centuries has been a lightning rod for cultural and political antagonisms. With Nolan, there was some sexual politics, which did not cut much ice. Why shouldn’t Elliot Page act as Demodocus the poet, in a walk-on role? Does it matter that “white-armed Helen”, another cameo, is played by Lupita Nyong’o from Kenya? Inevitably, there were quasi-historical squabbles about Odysseus’s ship. Trireme, or Viking raider?
There was also a translation duel: the hoary incumbent Robert Fagels vs the voice-of-our-time Emily Wilson, a brilliant classicist who has transformed Homer studies with contemporary renderings of both poems. Whatever one’s misgivings about Nolan’s mise-en-scene, the choice of Wilson will have helped to anchor, even liberate, every line of the script.
In the end, this sublime poem is simultaneously epic and intimate. In the text, these two qualities co-exist and nurture each other. That’s where it becomes a masterpiece. In this film, the challenge of “episodes” is answered by some spectacular locations and sensational camera-work. In Homer, we have the interplay of character and emotions; in Nolan, it’s special effects.
Hollywood’s big screen and Imax cameras privilege the image over the idea. Strangely, one could argue that this reflects a tension intrinsic to the relationship between The Iliad and The Odyssey. The former is set in the context of an historical event, but the latter becomes a work of imagination that places a fictional character in Hellenic landscapes. So is it about Odysseus or his voyage?
Homer himself seems to answer this conundrum. Odysseus is tested by the adventures of his return home, but his motivation as a hero (to return to his old life in Ithaca) has already been established in books I and II. Furthermore, out of The Odyssey’s 24 books, only four (IX-XII) are about his “adventures” on that voyage home. The clue is in the title: it’s all about him.
Nolan’s bold decision to keep faith with Hollywood and challenge Odysseus with some thrilling “episodes” has been vindicated by the reviews. This paper called it a “massive, fearless adaptation” and Nolan’s “best film to date”. To The Times, this Odyssey is “a masterpiece ... disturbingly savage ... an artwork”. In the same edition, Mary Beard, of course, regrets Nolan’s lack of sex – and jokes.
Elsewhere, The New Yorker was “disappointed” by a “modern, relatable” film, but the British press, in general, has rowed in behind Nolan’s quest for “a challenge”: “film of the year” (The Telegraph); “a colossal piece of cinema” (The Standard); and “a grand gutsy vision” (Variety). The consensus? A remarkable 21st-century movie, starring Matt Damon as Every-sseus and Anne Hathaway as a woman of our age. You pays your money and you makes your choice.
But Homer is always susceptible to reinterpretation. The Return (2024), starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche, and directed by Uberto Pasolini, is an astringent miniature about revenge in Ithaca. From the moment Odysseus rises from the waves on that beach, he’s a man on a mission: it’s his inner quest that will make this an uncomfortable work of art.
That’s the thing about stories. It’s how you tell them.
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