'The Odyssey': Christopher Nolan's Go-Big or Go-Homer

Christopher Nolan is becoming a period filmmaker. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker is known for his science-fiction epics, but between Dunkirk (2017), Oppenheimer (2023) and his newest effort, a sprawling and unwieldy adaptation of The Odyssey, the man seems to be looking backward to quiet his anxieties. In Dunkirk, Nolan condensed time as a way of exploring the immediate dangers of war under the microscope, a testament to our will to live. With Oppenheimer – his second dive into World War II – he asked if we might have ruined a glorious future by confronting the limits of scientific possibility. Its ending asks if we destroyed the world. 

To follow up his lauded drama about the most important moment in the 20th century, Nolan has swung past the fences: Why not adapt the most famous story ever written?

Image courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures.

Setting major religious texts aside, what else could even compete? Homer’s epic has become as mythic as any of the individualized stories about its classical cast of gods in the 3,000 years since its inception. The poem is as fundamental to our understanding of narrative as the languages in which it was told are fundamental to how we live. The story has been translated again and again for people across the world to read – or, more likely, pretend to read, if you’re 14 years old with access to SparkNotes.

While that’s perhaps dismissive to Homer and literature majors across the world, the truth is that an overwhelming percentage of people who will see Nolan’s film have not read its source. It’s a massive text whose shadow over the Western canon is difficult to sum up without diving through centuries of analysis, yet it’s never had a definitive Hollywood adaptation. Certainly, there have been a myriad of attempts, but it’s challenging to point to one that towers over them all in the same way that William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959) still does for the tale of the Christ. Have studios been too reticent to take Homer on? Have filmmakers cowered in the shadow of The Odyssey’s gargantuan stature? How is it that Nolan has taken the torch with nobody to pass it to him?

Image courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures.

Nolan is, arguably, the definitive director of his generation. Squabbles over descriptors like “best” or “smartest” are irrelevant, but it’s a tall task to find someone whose work nears eclipsing Steven Spielberg in having been so worshipped and recognizable for mass audiences. Through his Dark Knight trilogy, he won enough trust from audiences to push original science-fiction projects like Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014) to near-billion dollar grosses.

Despite these successes, his supposed lack of imagination as an artist has always been a target point for criticism. Although he grappled with time inversion in Tenet (2020) and dream heists in Inception, his films are often brutalistic in structure and style, labeled “sterile” and “cold” upon release. I would argue that every film he makes reveals more about his sentimentality than the last. This coldness isn’t practicality or a severance from emotion; rather, Nolan’s filmmaking is representative of the struggle between the objective and the subjective of cinema.

His heroes – like him – try to control the world around them and fit history neatly into the palm of their hand. It is often only after a great journey that they realize, in order to thrive and to overcome, they must take a leap of faith. Nolan’s attraction to the idea of adapting Homer thus makes sense: his blockbusters can feel larger-than-life and his soul-tied relationship with IMAX can provide the immense canvas that the story demands, but more than this, Odysseus is Nolan’s ideal hero. As a warrior, a father and a husband who is determined to find his way home in a world he no longer recognizes, Odysseus is making his way through the maze that every Nolan hero before him has also navigated. 

Image courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures.

The story plays out mostly traditionally as Odysseus (Matt Damon), King of Ithaca, sets out over an eight-year journey back to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), who awaits his return while staving off a pack of growling suitors, including the scheming Antinous (Robert Pattinson). Meanwhile, his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) sets out to find him before Ithaca grows impatient of an empty throne. It’s a bit silly to go over every beat of the story, but you can be sure that the cyclops and the giants and the sirens and Circe and Hades are all here. I don’t mean to yadda yadda the journey of The Odyssey, but the spectacle of these challenges are not the crux of the film.

In adapting Homer’s tome, Nolan has chopped and remixed the myth in ways that some will delight in and others (right-wing RETVRN bigots) will sneer at. Pay the latter no mind. As is his way, the filmmaker plays with time and linearity via a framing device that parts from the original tale, but he also recontextualizes much of the legend. The act of adapting this monumental story isn’t solely about ego or ambition taking someone over at the height of their power. Nolan is wistful about the space he occupies in his industry and he’s beginning to think about his legacy. 

Image courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures.

At the craft level, Ruth de Jong’s immaculate production design does a lot of heavy lifting to immerse viewers into 8th century B.C.E. and Hoyte van Hoytema’s historic achievement – the first DP to shoot a movie entirely with IMAX film cameras – is astonishing, but haphazard editing of parallel timelines doesn’t work as smoothly here as in Nolan’s other epics. 

There’s a jarring atonality between Nolan’s modern sensibilities as a director, his jilted dialogue, and a smattering of performances that feel collected from eight different movies or stage plays. As Hathaway and Pattinson are camping it up and chewing scenery, Samantha Morton, Elliot Page and James Remar each feel transported in from a more mythic horror piece and run away with their brief moments. Meanwhile, John Leguizamo thinks he’s on Broadway, while Damon and Holland seem adrift. Oppenheimer’s overwhelming ensemble was similarly packed with different performance styles, yet they slot into that movie’s breezy cattiness, whereas this supercharged epic gets bogged down by it. 

Similarly, the various episodes of Odysseus’s journey become tiresome and lumbering. It’s lovely to see a large fleet of extras running on real beaches toward real ships as a reminder that studio filmmaking doesn’t have to feel flat and textureless, but repeated tenfold, it grows old. Nolan’s mastery of large-scale spectacle occasionally does him in as well. Alongside Ludwig Goransson’s relentlessly pounding score, Nolan’s penchant for all-consuming scale can induce a migraine without the necessary pauses to recalibrate, unless you count brief asides with Holland asleep at the wheel for Telemachus’ own journey.

Image courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures.

This and the palace drama at Ithaca are weaved between Odysseus’ many trials, but these first two hours threaten to collapse if it weren’t for the sheer audaciousness of the whole thing. By the time Odysseus makes his return to Ithaca, Nolan shows his hand. While satisfying as payoff, this leaves the preceding two hours left shaking on wobbly foundations, particularly its disorientingly brisk opening twenty minutes, which feel more obligatory than passionate.

Again, Nolan feels wistful. There’s an impatience to his Odyssey, and his Odysseus is not weary from a journey against the will of the gods, but from his own actions. What if, after taking Troy and defying Zeus’ law and desecrating all that civilization held true and dear, a great hero couldn't even call himself that? Nolan renders a hero wary of the world around him and of heroism.

Always preoccupied with time, Nolan looks back further than he’s ever realized on film before, and wonders if the heroes of old were as distressed with the collapse of civilization as we are today. As Odysseus looks at Troy fall and wonders whether the world of man is built to last, so does J. Robert Oppenheimer look at a world on the brink of destruction. Just as the former ideated the Trojan horse, the ultimate deception, so did the latter the nuclear bomb, our great demise. The primary distinction ultimately comes down to outlook; in The Odyssey, Nolan seems to hold out hope. 

Image courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures.

Damon’s Odysseus speaks of “chasing the escaping sun” to his beloved Penelope. He presents this as a dream for them: an endless horizon, just out of grasp, lighting beyond what our eyes can perceive. Beyond that horizon, perhaps a brighter future awaits. Until then, Nolan uses mythos to question our reality. Are gods among us, disguised as mortal neighbors? Or are gods present within every person around us? Nolan doesn’t really depict any of the gods, but they appear throughout as guiding forces for love and war alike. He uses them to ask if our lives are to be weighed not by the judgment of an immortal council, but by the effects of our actions on those around us. These choices, distinct from nominal reputation, will ripple through immediate and distant history, more than the names Odysseus or Zeus. Nolan’s Odyssey imagines a future subsumed by light – not from fallout, but from an escaping sun. 

The Odyssey opens in theaters everywhere July 17.

-August