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| Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is an ambitious, inventive and often exhilarating take on one of Western civilisation’s most enduring stories. Photograph: Matt Damon as Odysseus (centre) by Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal. Cover picture of Celia Kritharioti Haute Couture AW26 by Brittany Scott for DAM. |
I first read The Odyssey during the summer holidays when I was 15 years old. Parked under the shade of the mulberry tree in our Brisbane backyard, I would read, grab a few mulberries, then read some more, my fingers sometimes staining the pages dark purple. It was a secondhand Penguin Classics edition, translated by E.V. Rieu, its yellowing paper and creased spine, to my teenage eyes, somehow as ancient as the work itself.
Every time I read the Homeric epithet “wine-dark sea” – one of the repeated formulas that bear the imprint of the epic’s oral beginnings, such as “dawn, fresh and rosy-fingered” and “Zeus the thunderer” – I’d feel as though my purple fingerprints had somehow become part of the poem.
Between falling half asleep in the stupefying Queensland heat, or running inside to escape a sudden summer storm, I immersed myself in the glittering Aegean and its rocky islands, the stage set on which the goddess Athena attempts to safely usher Odysseus, her favourite, home to Ithaka. The whole time I read, I watched out for Kythera, the island where my mother was born, or Kos, my father’s island, wondering if Odysseus would land there. There was no mention of Kos, but he was blown off course past Kythera, which sent me into a brief frenzy of excitement.
Back then, there was no way I could have known that, nearly half a century later, I would be sitting in an IMAX theatre in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, watching a film version directed by British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan and reportedly budgeted at US$250 million. I’m no longer in the family living room, peering into the tiny black-and-white TV screen, watching Kirk Douglas strut his stuff as Odysseus in Ulysses (1954), a favourite Saturday afternoon rerun.
This time, the screen surrounding me is so large I’m inside the frame, immersed in a hyperreal, Bronze Age universe where Matt Damon plays the wily Odysseus, King of Ithaca, the hero of Troy who has fallen foul of Poseidon. Douglas’ brash grin has been replaced by Damon’s restrained realism, and there’s not a papier-mâché temple to be seen. Nolan’s film is a very different kind of Odyssey indeed.
Mysterious beauty
I’ve always wanted to atone for my first, rather naive reading of The Odyssey, enjoyable as it was. So, as I prepared to write this essay, I resolved to try reading it, at least in part, in the original ancient Greek. I know some modern Greek – not as much as my parents would have liked – but armed with a dual-language text, how hard could it be? I bought a Loeb Classical Library edition and imagined I’d compare the Greek and English line by line. It would be slow going, but perfectly doable.
If any classicist is reading this, please stop laughing now. No, you can’t read The Odyssey this way. Some words are the same (well, sort of), but many are not, and the winding syntax is radically different, with barely a subject-verb-object sentence in sight.
Even so, what I could glean beguiled me. The pages of ancient Greek text that unfolded before me were like an ancient dry-stone wall, interlaced with vines and intricate decorative markings. They possessed a beauty I couldn’t quite penetrate, but couldn’t stop looking at either, making them all the more mysterious and uncanny.
Perhaps hearing it read aloud would help? Online, I found recitations of The Odyssey in ancient Greek. The sound of it was unlike anything I’d heard before. I could hear a music similar to modern Greek, but now harnessed to the driving rhythm of Homer’s dactylic hexameter. It belonged to a much more distant world, lost in time but still omnipresent, which only deepened my sense of curiosity and enchantment.
But, enchanting as it was, it was still largely incomprehensible. Reluctantly, I abandoned my experiment. This son of the Greek diaspora was not going to crack that particular code.
Over the years, I’ve read translations by Robert Fagles (1996) and Robert Fitzgerald (1961). While I found them enjoyable, Emily Wilson’s 2017 verse translation, which Christopher Nolan has cited as an inspiration for his film, immediately struck me as having a much greater directness.
The appeal of Wilson’s translation is hard to resist, not least for the way it addresses gender biases in some previous versions. The density of language that can make some translations such a battle for contemporary anglophone audiences has given way to something more natural. Overall, Wilson’s approach leans towards George Orwell’s famed windowpane, where language is made transparent so that it can foreground the larger meanings of the text. That transparency proves deeply immersive, like looking at a painting stripped of centuries of varnish.
But this approach isn’t without its risks. The Homeric style is meant to have a strong poetic dimension in its rhythm, musicality and patterns of sound. Would this come through as strongly as in some of her predecessors?
Well, yes, mostly, but in its own way. The scene that introduces the goddess Calypso in her cave is an example of where the simplicity of style and lyrical flight come together:
There sat Calypso with her braided curls.
Beneath the hearth a mighty fire was burning.
The scent of citrus and brittle pine
suffused the island. Inside, she was singing
and weaving with a shuttle made of gold.
Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave
a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar,
and scented cypress. It was full of wings.
Birds nested there but hunted out at sea:
the owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks.
A ripe and verdant vine, hung thick with grapes,
was stretched to coil around her cave.
Such images, so freshly rendered in the English verse meter of iambic pentameter, are light in touch yet richly sensuous, and more than succeed in opening up the Homeric universe to a new audience.
Cinematic odysseys
Nolan has taken a major gamble on a big-budget adaptation of The Odyssey. Its translation to the screen has a chequered history, producing decidedly mixed results.
Broadly speaking, in terms of English-language productions, there are two kinds of adaptation.
There are the relatively faithful versions that attempt to transpose the Homeric myth directly to the screen, complete with tunics, ships, gods and monsters. The most recent full attempt is the 1997 television miniseries. A freewheeling adaptation with soulful performances by Armand Assante as Odysseus and Greta Scacchi as his wife Penelope, its monsters – created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop – inflect its spirited, mythic sweep with a somewhat bizarre Muppets-gone-R-rated quality.
Then there are the broader reimaginings, such as the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), which, taking a major cue from James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses, transposes the story to the American South. Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) – only partially in English – is an even looser reimagining, built around the wanderings of a filmmaker.
Nolan’s version is very much the ultimate high-risk venture: a full-blown historical Odyssey, set in ancient Greece, that aspires to capture the spirit of Homer.
On the practical side, it would seem that the major barrier that thwarted previous attempts has finally been removed: an epic-sized budget. Never before has so much money been thrown at getting The Odyssey up on the big screen, a sum perhaps only someone with Nolan’s clout could command, allowing him to employ filmmaking techniques such as shooting the entire film in IMAX.
Such huge resources allow The Odyssey to be rendered convincingly without lapsing into the kind of artificial mise-en-scène that so undermined earlier attempts at comprehensive adaptations.
If only it had always been so. The sword-and-sandal film – an umbrella term encompassing everything from the often B-grade Italian films known as peplum to Hollywood prestige epics – has long struggled with uneven production values and limited special effects. Set in the Greco-Roman world, these historical spectacles have frequently drawn on the Trojan War cycle and other material from Greek mythology, though perhaps even more often from ancient Greece’s gargantuan, attention-hogging offspring: ancient Rome.
Mid-20th-century Greek examples of sword and sandal, like The 300 Spartans (1962) and Jason & the Argonuats (1963), usually had middling budgets, but Roman examples went fully imperial. Films like Quo Vadis (1951), Ben-Hur (1959) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) are all purple robes and gleaming breastplates, ranked armies marching beneath an eagle insignia, vast temple complexes with marble statuary and flagstones.
The Roman epic reached its giddy heights, both in thematic pretension and budgetary blowout, with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s gaudy Cleopatra (1963). Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s four-hour marathon of quasi-Shakespearean emoting cost US$44 million to produce, the equivalent of around US$450 million in today’s dollars. While the film did strong box office, its failure to recoup those costs nearly ruined 20th Century Fox.
Its failure marked a decisive turning point in the commercial viability of the genre. Since then, more recent Roman epics like Gladiator (2000) and Gladiator II (2024) have somewhat revived the genre’s fortunes. On the Greek side, so did Troy (2004), based on The Iliad and starring Brad Pitt, and the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans.
But has Nolan finally achieved what Mankiewicz – one of the great directors of Hollywood’s golden age – could not: a historical epic that is both artistically convincing and a popular success?
The narrative design of The Odyssey
Part of the magic of Homer’s Odyssey lies in the fact that it is set in an older, more modest world than ancient Rome, one that doesn’t lend itself to the spectacle of lavish sets and costumes. It is by turns visceral and bloody, lyrical and enchanted, bonded to the earth and the elements, to its people, plants and animals.
Here, the earthly sphere is ruled by Olympus. Countless oxen are sacrificed to the gods and then feasted on. The sea, controlled by Poseidon, pounds, inundates, splinters masts, and foils Odysseus’ journey at every turn.
The world of The Odyssey is also full of desire. Gods lie with mortals and produce offspring. Odysseus, handsome and charismatic, godlike but not a god, is a victim of his own manly bearing. Circe the witch finds him irresistible, seducing him into staying with her on the island of Aeaea for a year. Calypso is so smitten she holds him captive, offering him eternal life and love.
Tying all this together is a ten-year voyage whose main purpose is nostos, the return home. But to get home Odysseus must traverse a sea governed by a force hostile to him: Poseidon. This story frame, deceptively simple, is ingeniously conceived, balancing architectural clarity with an intricacy of narration that can easily go unnoticed.
The most powerful narrative gambit is to begin near the end with Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, trying to end the disorder that has overtaken his father’s house. For the first four books of the 24 that make up the epic poem, its hero, Odysseus, is absent.
Telemachus is unable to keep Penelope’s suitors at bay indefinitely. They constantly pressure her to accept that her husband is dead and to marry one of them, who would thus usurp Odysseus’ place as king. Unable to resolve the problem by force, Telemachus instead sets out in search of his father.
The story is thus framed by a son searching for the father he has scarcely seen, while, far across the sea, a father struggles to return to his family and homeland. Separating Odysseus and Telemachus is a series of obstacles, not least the constant meddling of the gods, who treat mere mortals as proxies through which they conduct their private feuds.
Lustful, capricious, pierced by the smallest slight, the gods occupy a narrative above the main narrative. Yet because they so often assume human guise in order to intervene directly in mortal affairs, they also exist within the story of Odysseus’ adventures.
Within the voyage itself there are further conflicts: between Odysseus and his men, and between them and the strange beings they encounter from island to island. In one episode, the crew urges Odysseus not to venture further into the cave of Polyphemus (the Cyclops), where some of them end up meeting a grisly fate. In another, just when they finally catch sight of Ithaka, crew members, believing that Odysseus is concealing treasure from them, open the bag of winds given to him by Aeolus, the king of a small island. Once released, the winds blow them all the way back to Aeolus’ island.
In this way, we can see how the mythological and thematic dimensions of The Odyssey derive much of their enduring power from the ingenuity of its narrative design, which binds the poem’s many elements into a coherent whole. That design has shaped storytelling for nearly three millennia, from 5th-century Greek tragedy to Aristotle’s Poetics and beyond.
Nolan’s Odyssey
There can be little doubt that it is this richly layered approach to storytelling that has so attracted Christopher Nolan.
Nolan’s Odyssey, which he not only directed, but also wrote and co-produced, is a deep dive into the Homeric universe that is respectful of the spirit of its source material, but not afraid to play fast and loose with it. Clocking in it at three hours, it is a serious attempt at recasting the prestige epic for a new generation.
It is also clearly a passion project. Nolan’s interest in Homeric epic is longstanding. Originally hired to direct Troy, he lost the project when Wolfgang Petersen, who had first developed it, wanted it back after Warner Bros. cancelled his Batman vs. Superman film. As compensation, the studio offered Nolan Batman Begins instead.
Nolan’s fascination with Homer and his desire to put his own stamp on The Odyssey are evident from the prologue. In Odysseus’ feasting hall on Ithaka, a bard beats his staff on the floor and, in rhythmic cadence, begins to tell his story. A moment later, we cut to the Trojan Horse, half buried at the shoreline. Rearing from the beach like the half-buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes (1968), the fabled horse already looks like the relic of a ruined civilisation.
This sequence – beautiful, unsettling, elemental – sets the tone for the entire film. Visually, Nolan’s Odyssey adheres to a pristine naturalism that alternates with moodier textures. The Aegean is by turns a sparkling blue and a muted purple (the wine dark sea) and war scenes are rendered in vivid washes of burnt red and orange that evoke the nuclear blast of Nolan’s critical and commercial triumph, Oppenheimer (2023). Settings are credibly ancient, and costumes attempt to be true to period, with tweaks made for current tastes or stylistic effects.
In terms of genre, the film avoids the temptation to turn Homer into either contemporary fantasy or a succession of action set-pieces, devoid of moral or emotional complexity. Its performances – led by a core cast of Matt Damon as Odysseus, Ann Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus – display little of the staginess of the classic epics of yesteryear.
I couldn’t help but wince, however, when Telemachus calls his parents “Mom” and “Dad”. Here, and elsewhere, the tonal dissonance caused by contemporary idioms isn’t worth the attempt at relatability. Otherwise, the acting seems well pitched for a contemporary epic.
Homecoming and story layers
The theme of homecoming lies at the heart of another Nolan film, the space epic Interstellar (2014). There, an astronaut must overcome the barriers of space-time so that he can be reunited with his family. As in The Odyssey, the emotional journey is every bit as important as the physical one.
Here, too, Nolan understands that nostos is not simply a voyage across the sea, but the emotional thread that binds the story’s many strands together. Odysseus – husband, father, king, a warrior scarred by war – carries many burdens as he tries to get home after the ten-year siege of Troy.
At first I was worried that Damon’s quiet authority might not carry the emotional range the character requires: bravado as well as level-headedness, moments of weakness (or hubris, when he taunts the Cyclops) as well as resilience and resourcefulness.
There may be an argument for an Odysseus that lights up the screen, but it can’t be denied that Damon’s performance – with the rougher edges of Odysseus’ character smoothed off for modern sensibilities – draws you in. His love for Penelope, the wife he longs to return to, is never in doubt, and it is this longing that gives emotional coherence to the film’s episodic journey.
With Odysseus forced to carry the full weight of the movie’s spectacle across the open seas, it falls to Penelope to sustain the mirror storyline of palace intrigue. Often obscured by a lattice screen, she sits weaving in a room that looks directly into the feasting hall. She is aware of the suitors’ every move, and they of hers. This choice of setting creates an extraordinary dramatic tension, reminding us that while Odysseus struggles to return home, home itself remains under siege; his wife is trapped in a cage.
Regal and resourceful, this Odyssey’s Penelope can also be unashamedly emotional. Her anxiety at her husband’s disappearance, the pressures of a potential forced marriage and the threats to her son’s life, are all expressed by Hathaway in scenes of raw feeling that give her character psychological realism. If Damon embodies the journey home, Hathaway embodies what home means.
Assembling the story
Juggling the multiple storylines of The Odyssey is no easy task, and few directors are better equipped to do it than Nolan. From his first film, the no-budget feature Following (1998), he has shown an interest in complex temporal plot structures. Such complexity marks a major break with standard sword-and-sandal epics, which can suffer from a plodding linearity that stifles innovative storytelling.
Instead, Nolan has deftly assembled, if not always smoothly, The Odyssey’s main story elements into the kind of layered narrative that the Homeric epic demands. The overarching frame of Odysseus’ return to Ithaka remains firmly in place, together with the parallel stories of Telemachus and Penelope, all these elements bookended by the siege of Troy.
As if this weren’t enough, Nolan adds a subplot that does not appear in Homer: a conflict between the leader of the suitors, Antinous (played with gleeful slipperiness by Robert Pattinson), and Sinon (Elliot Page), a character borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid.
To this plot architecture, Nolan adds his signature storytelling style: the manipulation of time for dramatic effect. Already present in Homer, Nolan takes it to the next level. The narrative acquires a kind of Rubik’s Cube quality, inviting the spectator to rearrange fragments of the story in the mind as it unfolds.
Running through the film are abrupt flashbacks, recurring images and narrative fragments that gradually acquire new meaning as the film progresses. A sword slices through the neck of a stone god, setting off sparks as the head severs. We see the image several times, always wondering where it belongs. When its dramatic place in the story is finally revealed, the effect is a satisfying moment of recognition.
Genres and mash-ups
There is also a mash-up dimension to Nolan’s Odyssey, or what we used to call postmodern pastiche, a practice now so prevalent that we take it for granted. For example, Nolan’s treatment of the Circe episode veers into psychological horror. Circe’s isolated, dilapidated hut, and the sinister way she entices Odysseus and his men to eat the food laced with herbs that transforms them into pigs, bear the unmistakable imprint of the horror genre.
The transformation itself is grotesque, and a good example of Nolan’s refusal to rely heavily on CGI, if at all. Instead, prosthetics, staging and judicious editing are used to skin-crawling effect.
The episode of the Laestrygonians, where Odysseus and his men encounter a race of giants, at times looks like something out of John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981). Nolan’s giants wear heavy silver-coloured armour, whose forms evoke a much later medieval world. Elsewhere, Nolan’s treatment of the bleak, rugged shorelines, shot in muted tones, recalls the windswept beaches of his World War II film, Dunkirk (2017).
There was one moment, however, where this stylistic hybridity went a little too far. Nolan has insisted that the costume of Agamemnon – leader of the Greek forces besieging Troy – is grounded in historical accuracy. Yet the curved helmet, sweeping cape and overall silhouette have invited comparisons with Batman.
The first appearance of the costume struck me as a clever juxtaposition of antiquity and popular culture. But when Agamemnon reappears in the same costume striding through the gates of Troy, the allusion becomes distracting. For a moment, it looks as though Batman has sacked Troy, with Odysseus reduced to Robin, the boy wonder who helped make it all happen with his wooden horse.
A definitive screen Odyssey?
Much can be forgiven, however, for the poignant episode that is Odysseus’ visit to Hades. As I watched the film, my teenage reading of The Odyssey came flooding back to me. I realised that this memory of Hades had always been somehow lurking in the back of my mind: a land of the dead that was infinitely sad, yet somehow more humane than the punitive Christian hell.
It is Circe who tells Odysseus how to reach Hades and how to perform the necromantic rites that will summon the dead. The Greek term for a journey into the underworld is katabasis, though in Homer, Odysseus does not literally descend into Hades. He crosses Oceanus, beaches his ship near the land of the Cimmerians, and proceeds to the meeting place of the underworld rivers.
The place where Odysseus summons the dead is a deserted riverbank, and in Nolan’s version it is exquisitely rendered: wreathed in cloud and mist, its mystical, primeval essence is fully captured. After Odysseus has slaughtered the sheep and held them over the pit so that their blood runs into it, the dead appear. It is only once they have drunk the black blood that they are permitted to speak.
The desolate shore, the gaunt silhouettes of the dead, hungry to lament, provide more than a counterpoint to the dramas of the earthly world and the realm of the gods above. They complete the Homeric universe, placing human existence within its larger context of suffering and mortality.
Nolan’s Odyssey is an ambitious, inventive and often exhilarating take on one of Western civilisation’s most enduring stories. He has managed better than most to negotiate the limitations facing any Hollywood director attempting to balance financial risk, audience expectations and his own artistic vision, without which the film would have no beating heart.
Is it a definitive film version of Homer’s Odyssey? No, it isn’t; nor should it be. In fact, it can’t be.
Like all its predecessors, it is the latest attempt to do justice to an ancient story that will always remain just beyond our reach, and whose infinite interpretability tells us as much about ourselves as the mythologised Bronze Age from which it springs.
